July 13, 2008 archive

Jul 13 2008

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Updated!  Now with 85 stories!

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Officials: 9 US troops killed in Afghanistan

By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer

11 minutes ago

KABUL, Afghanistan – A multi-pronged militant assault on a small, remote U.S. base killed nine American soldiers and wounded 15 Sunday in the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in three years, officials said.

The attack on the U.S. outpost came the same day a suicide bomber targeting a police patrol killed 24 people, while U.S. coalition and Afghan soldiers killed 40 militants elsewhere in the south.

The militant assault on the American troops began around 4:30 a.m. in a dangerous region close to the Pakistan border and lasted throughout the day.

Jul 13 2008

How many Farmworkers must die before someone cares??

I just got back from vacation and saw an email from the United Farm Workers, part of which I quote below:

Ramiro Carillo was the fourth farm worker in the last two weeks to die of heat stroke and the second this week alone!

Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, 48, father of two, died in Selma, CA on Thursday afternoon after working all day for Sun Valley Packing in Reedley thru a farm labor contractor.  

snip

42 year-old farm worker Abdon Felix Garcia, father of three, died on Wednesday after spending the morning and early afternoon working for Sunview Vineyards in Arvin. The coroner says Felix’s body core temperature was measured at 108 degrees just 13 minutes before his death.

64 year-old Jose Macarena Hernandez died during a record-breaking heat wave on June 20 while harvesting butternut squash in Santa Maria on land owned by Sunrise Growers.

People keep dying and few give a shit.  I’m pissed off and you should be also.  

What we can do, and more, after the fold.

(also on Daily Kos)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Jul 13 2008

Music for an Empire in Decline

NOTE:  All but the last two videos in this diary are YouTube finds.  The final two are compilations of my own (please forgive the poor quality – I’m still learning), and the last one features some prominent kossacks from last year’s Yearly Kos in Chicago.

It is all too easy to idealize an age, especially if sufficient time has passed to blunt the pain and obscure the harsh realities of the day.  It is too tempting to look back in longing for a past that never really existed.  We all seem to have a tendency to do this – ah the good old days we say.

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

Franklin Pierce Adams

“Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.”

Will Rogers

“The good old days. I was there. Where was they?”

Moms Mabley

John-walks-w-Yoko-w-TEXT_500px

Jul 13 2008

After the Obama Betrayal

By Gregory Kafoury, subheaded as Will Progressives Go Gently Into Another Political Night? via counterpunch.com.

Jul 13 2008

Café Discovery: Hope and Despair

While I was writing last Friday’s piece, I decided to do a bit of follow up today.  I’m always interested in words and thought I would drag some along behind me.

    Please note: These words are about the subject of that other essay, Despondency. They have nothing to do with my present state of mind. Suggestions that I need anti-depressants just might be inconsistent with what that essay said and with my current state of mind, although people commenting in my essays without seeming to have actually read them is a bit depressing in and of itself.

Hope and Despair

The closest word at the Online Etymological Dictionary (quoted liberally here) to despondency is despondence, a word dating from 1676.  It derives from the Latin despondere:

“to give up, lose, lose heart, resign” (especially in the phrase animam despondere, literally “to give up one’s soul”), from the sense of a promise to give something away, from de- “away” + spondere “to promise” (see spondee [we shall return to this]).  A step above despair.

So, okay.  How about despair?

Jul 13 2008

The Drum Major Instinct

I would suppose that most of us have heard the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.

But I wonder how many of you, like me, did not know that this quote came from a sermon with the same title as this essay? Yes, MLK was talking about The Drum Major Instinct when he said that.

Yesterday I read the sermon, and I’d like to share some of it with all of you. He gave the sermon on February 4, 1968 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, exactly 2 months before he was assassinated.

Jul 13 2008

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Richard and Mimi Fariña (with help from Pete Seeger)



Bold Marauder

Jul 13 2008

Obama Supporters, ACTION NEEDED

I’ve come alot closer to my full support of Obama, I just don’t ever make total decisions when elections are months away, I also don’t just look at the single person trying to give their resume, I look at how they present themselves, smear and slam are big no no’s, and I look at who they bring close to them in their campaigns and try and figure out, if they win, who will they surround themselves with while in office ( and I hit the nail on the head, which I do for a living, as to the bush crowd, not exactly reading the future but seeing alot of what was to come do so! ), especially as to Federal Representation and the Presidential Office, more towards my Representation on who I would Hire.

Jul 13 2008

Oh My God, Oh My God, OH MY GOD!!!

It’s finally happened:  the two most perfect babies in human history have been born.  Angelina Jolie, with Brad Pitt by her side, gave birth to twins Saturday night, a boy named Knox Leon and a girl named Vivienne Marcheline.  

Jul 13 2008

Obama to Meet with Energy Smart Debbie

Amid skyrocketing oil, gasoline, coal, and electricity (coming to a neighborhood near you) prices, 2008 offers Americans quite serious and stark choices between knowledgeable, impassioned, and thoughtful candidates when it comes to finding paths toward a prosperous 21st century economy, on the one side, and Fossil-Fool candidates focused on tightening our shackles to the ever-more costly (pollution, financial, otherwise) and archaic oil-coal based energy system.

One of these stark choices comes in California’s 46th district, where Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook is running against ten-term Congressman Dana Rohrbacher.

Debbie was one of the first on the  Energy Smart Act Blue page.  Join me after the fold for some indications as to why.

UPDATE: Energy Smart Debbie Cook will be meeting with Barack Obama tomorrow morning, 13 July …  

Jul 13 2008

Hey Congress? You could do this TOO you know

Standing up to President Bush and his administration, the Iraqi Government did not give into pressure to sign the Security Agreement that BushCo had been trying to force upon them.  This “Status-Of-Forces” agreement was being pushed hard by the Bush Administraion before they left office next January, as Bush and his cronies wanted to make absolutely sure they had tied the hands of the next Administration when it came to the troops in Iraq question.  

Unlike our Congress, Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki has learned to say “NO” to President Bush and has bucked the whole Bush Regime just recently when al-Malaki stated that it was getting close to time for all Foreign troops to leave his country.  

Of course, as soon as he stated this, the Bush Administration bumper sticker motto of “When they stand up, we will stand down” became “We aren’t standing down, thar’s OIL in them thar sands,” or something to that effect.

From The Washington Post:

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency, according to senior U.S. officials, effectively leaving talks over an extended U.S. military presence there to the next administration.

In place of the formal status-of-forces agreement negotiators had hoped to complete by July 31, the two governments are now working on a “bridge” document, more limited in both time and scope, that would allow basic U.S. military operations to continue beyond the expiration of a U.N. mandate at the end of the year.

The failure of months of negotiations over the more detailed accord — blamed on both the Iraqi refusal to accept U.S. terms and the complexity of the task — deals a blow to the Bush administration’s plans to leave in place a formal military architecture in Iraq that could last for years.

My emphasis

Jul 13 2008

Docudharma Times Sunday July 13



Its Tough Being The Decider

That’s Why

I Do Nothing




Sunday’s Headlines:

Obama, McCain agree on many once-divisive issues

Scramble to save deal on Mugabe sanctions

Heir takes on ‘Flash’ in Kenya murder trial

Olympic crackdown: China’s secret plot to tame Tibet

N Korea rejects Seoul talks offer  

New Saudi Arabia university will have a Western feel

Iran confirms missile tests

A new fashion catches on in Paris: Cheap bicycle rentals

Lourdes fears priestly scandal will make profits dry up

U.S., Iraq scale down negotiations over forces

Any long-term deal on extended presence will wait for next administration

By Karen DeYoung

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency, according to senior U.S. officials, effectively leaving talks over an extended U.S. military presence there to the next administration.

In place of the formal status-of-forces agreement negotiators had hoped to complete by July 31, the two governments are now working on a “bridge” document, more limited in both time and scope, that would allow basic U.S. military operations to continue beyond the expiration of a U.N. mandate at the end of the year.

President George W Bush lobbyist in ‘cash for access’ row



From The Sunday Times

July 13, 2008

Daniel Foggo

A lobbyist with close ties to the White House is offering access to key figures in George W Bush’s administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.

Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.

Payne, who has accompanied Bush and Cheney on several foreign trips, also said he would try to secure a meeting with the president himself.

USA

Editorial

Posturing and Abdication



Published: July 13, 2008

The Bush administration made clear on Friday that it will do virtually nothing to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. With no shame and no apology, it stuck a thumb in the eye of the Supreme Court, repudiated its own scientists and exposed the hollowness of Mr. Bush’s claims to have seen the light on climate change.

That is the import of an announcement by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the E.P.A. will continue to delay a decision on whether global warming threatens human health and welfare and requires regulations to address it. Mr. Johnson said his agency would seek further public comment on the matter, a process that will almost certainly stretch beyond the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

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