UPDATE: I actually think this may be the first announcement that Barack Obama has confirmed that the Michigan and Florida delegations will be seated at the convention in a fair way. After all, "...when I'm the Democratic nominee, I want them on my side." (paraphrased, accuracy later)
Are we excited that our vote is going to count--it may even count Hilary out! YES!!
Today, Barack Obama is holding a Town Hall meeting right here in our little city on the High Desert, in the shadow of the Cascades. It's being carried live by our local KTVZ TV station, both online and on air.
Tune in at around 11 AM Pacific Time for your Barack Fix!
I'll be there with my trusty Press Pass, and will bring back pictures and notes. A bit more over the hump...
Last night was ridiculous. We all agree, along with many other Americans.
We are pissed and we are not going to take it anymore.
I have one simple answer to ABC, to CNN, to Fox, to whomever continues to try to feed us BS about Rev. Wright, "bitter", Ayers, and whatever the hell else they are going to come up with between now and November 11th.
This is my first of a series of diaries about prisoners murdered by US forces. It will tell the story of an Iraqi man who died hanging by his cuffed wrists from a door frame, gagged, and beaten to death by his US interrogators. As the Final Autopsy Report noted:
The remains are received clad in a white shirt, white pajama type pants, and white
undershorts. Feces covers the clothing from the waist down....There is gauze dressing on the left wrist. No other evidence of medical intervention is noted.... The right chest wall has fractures of ribs three through seven anteriorly and ribs six through twelve posteriorly. The left chest wall has fractures of ribs two through nine anteriorly and ribs seven through twelve posteriorly. There are fractures of the lateral aspect of ribs nine and ten on the left side. There is a horizontal fracture through the mid-portion of the body of the sternum."
Yes, our tax dollars are paying for this. Hung up by the wrists and beaten so badly that he not only had over 25 separate rib fractures, many slicing into his lungs, he also had a fractured sternum. The thick, solid bone protecting your heart.
It gets uglier over the fold. It's time to face reality.
(NOTE: I wrote this yesterday afternoon, but couldn't post it as I had posted the speech one and deleted it. It's important to frame this issue in our terms, so here it is.)
I put up Obama's latest speech on ending our war in Iraq and rebuilding America's standing in the world, and then realized that it was copyrighted. So if you want to read it you will have to go Obama's web site.
So I will write up a related diary, one that demonstrates a way we can take back the phrase "Support Our Troops" when it is hurled at us by chickenhawks. It comes from a great panel I listened to on LinkTV over the weekend, from a Professor of Psychology named Drew Westen.
I write this as I listen to Cheney's August, 2002 speech on why we should go to war with Iraq on CSPAN playing in the background. Words of deceit from someone who never had the courage to go to war himself. Let me tell you how we can take his words and use them against him and his ilk over the fold.
From the Oregonian this week we learned that the Republican Party in Oregon is even worse off than nationally. To quote:
The Oregon Republican Party has hit the financial skids, facing more than a quarter-million dollars in debt and an IRS lien for failing to pay payroll taxes.
Yes, things are so bad they can't even make their payroll taxes! While,officially, it is because an "irresponsible" person no longer with them did not send in the forms. The money was instead spent on party activities. That's their story and they are sticking to it!
Gordon Smith, our erstwhile pseudo-moderate Republican senator must have felt a little quiver of trepidation upon seeing this information made public. An already hard re-election campaign has just been made even more difficult! More over the fold...
This is going to be a hit and run diary of necessity. But I simply must put forth the news that a new, current "Winter Soldier" event is happening in DC in March.
We can support our brave and sensible soldiers by simply listening and passing along their message. To fill out this silly little diary out I will post their words over the fold.
This began as a comment on Larry O'Donnell appearing on Olbermann's show last night and defending Obama's remarks on Reagan. O'Donnell, he of the "John Edwards Is A Loser" hit piece on HuffPo.
I was searching for the link to O'Donnell's hit piece, and came across something that causes one of those "aha!" moments. It was this quote:
And then Al From, the D.L.C. founder, said he was "very happy about the two candidates" Americans are considering.
The DLC simply doesn't consider Edwards a candidate. Which may be leading the media and poll shunning of Edwards. To me, that is rather stunning. To say nothing about maddening--absolutely f***ing maddening. I now realize why Obama has been getting so many high level endorsements from the status quo. Edwards is seen as a rock thrower. And personally, I think that is what would bring real change that I could believe in. More over the fold...
I am an Edwards supporter who thinks he has the best chance of beating McCain or whomever ends up being the Republican nominee. And I, too, am sick of the ongoing suppression of JRE's populist, anti-corporate, pro-people message.
And it was with some interest that I read the this recced diary about CNN leaving JRE out of a poll concerning potential presidential nominees. And, yes, it made me angry yet again, so angry I wrote a comment about saying F*** politics, if it's just more of the same folks pulling up chairs to the policy table, I'm not even going to bother voting this time around. From Voter ID efforts in the Supreme Court to the supression of a viable candidate, it seems obvious that their are powerful interests that would rather have a Republican win, and if that doesn't work out, then a "friendly" Democrat. And that those interests control the mainstream media.
So I went to find that poll, and imagine my surprise when I found a summary of the same poll, with 1,033 adult Americans conducted by telephone by Opinion Research Corporation on January 9-10, 2008. And this one had Edwards name in it, at least to start...
I have been behind Edwards for awhile now, after a flirtation with Obama. I'm almost 50 years old, my first vote was for Carter, and I grew up in the JFK-MLK-RFK-Nixon era.
Edwards fought these forces for years in the courtroom, and now wants to fight them in the public sphere. Obama's biggest accomplishment using his methods is covering 150,000 more people in Illinois with health insurance. While a accomplishment, 1.75M out of a total of 12.5M remain uninsured. Why?
I have one simple reason for preferring Edwards: he knows it is going to be a real fight, as powerful, entrenched interests don't like their money or power taken away. To me, Obama's method of negotiation results in what an Illinois insurance lobbyist stated:
"Barack is a very reasonable person who clearly recognized the various roles involved in the healthcare system, [he] understood our concern that we didn't want a predetermined outcome."
Which led to less than 10% of the uninsured being covered. And that's not good enough for me.
It's the last day of the quarter, and I want to hear more, much, much more, about "America Rising".
So, even though we are in worse financial shape then ever after the holidays because our vehicle needed both an alternator and a brake wheel cylinder in December, I squeezed out $10. And hopefully maybe a little more by the end of the day. It's the end of the quarter, as David Bonior reminded me this morning in an email I will share over the fold.
So a personal promise: If I sell any DVD fitness stuff off my website http://www.exerscape.com today, all profits will go to JRE, directly to his campaign so it gets matched. Give'em hell, John! We're not going to take it anymore!
A U.S. military judge has ordered attorneys for a Guantanamo detainee accused of killing a U.S. soldier not to reveal the identities of trial witnesses to anybody, including their Canadian-born client, according to recently released documents.
Kind of makes it hard to defend yourself.
Is this a new low for America? More on the flip side.
I have about five minutes before I go teach some kids to read, write, and count, but Morton Kondracke's comments as posted on the front page just really pissed me off. Especially as I read them just after seeing this, leading to the original story.
Like the guy who actually knows what he is talking about says,
Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
Emphasis mine. More excerpts over the fold. And then I'm off to help train our future.
A secret mission reportedly used eight fighter planes to destroy a nuclear cache:
"Israel has enforced a news blackout on what may be its air force's most audacious raid since its jets destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981."Source: Guardian
That secrecy unraveled in the last 24 hours and John Bolton was quoted in Haaretz as stating that:
"I think this is a clear message not only to Syria, I think it's a clear message to Iran as well, that its continued efforts to acquire nuclear weapons are not going to go unanswered."
Bolton would love to see more war in the Middle East. Most of the rest of us don't. More over the flip....
Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.
Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.
Is W fucking serious?!? I really don't have anything to add, but this needs to be brought to our attention.
This is Part XII of the Live Blog on the Senate hearing on the Dismissal of the US Attorneys.
This is liveblogging. No pictures out of respect for dial-up users, please!
Please unrec previous liveblog diaries and rec this one. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Continue to phone and email the committee members as described in Scout Finch's diary. We have a week for written questions to be submitted, and want to make sure any other email accounts Sampson used are unearthed.
And it's always a good thing to let our congress-critters know we are watching them!
