March 3, 2011 archive

from firefly-dreaming 3.3.11

Regular Daily Features:

Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers start the day off right in Late Night Karaoke, mishima DJs

Six Brilliant Articles! from Six Different Places!! on Six Different Topics!!!

                Six Days a Week!!!    at Six in the Morning!!!!

Essays Featured Thursday, March 3rd:

From  Translator : My Friend Is A Slob

Thursday Open Thoughts from mplo are about the movie “The Town”

Cornucopia Thursday, a weekly feature from Ed Tracey brings a delightful collection of items and ….well, just plain whimsy…..

Kathleen wonders Hope……. where is the hope???

from fake consultant more news about Social Security: If You Can’ Kill The Program, Screw The People

join the conversation! come firefly-dreaming with me….

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these articles-

The Stars Hollow Gazette

A Where’s Waldo? Presidency

President Waldo
Where’s Obama?

Ruth Marcus has recently posted an essay on Truthdig.com with the strangely evocative title “A Where’s Waldo? Presidency.”

For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president. There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action-unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment.

On health care, for instance, he took on a big fight without being able to articulate a clear message or being willing to set out any but the broadest policy prescriptions.

That was not an isolated case. Where, for example, is the president on the verge of a potential government shutdown-if not this week, then a few weeks from now?

Obama has said he agrees with some of his fiscal commission’s recommendations and disagrees with others. Which ones does he disagree with?

Where’s Obama? No matter how hard you look, sometimes he’s impossible to find.

Where’s Obama? One place you don’t have to look is Wisconsin, even though some people interpret Obama’s inspiring “walk the line” 2008 campaign speech as if it was a promise that Wisconsin right now is exactly where he would be.

“If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I’m in the White House I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself – I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

 

Social Security: If You Can’t Kill The Program, Screw The People

There’s a lot of ways to be petty and cheap and stupid, and a lot of ways to stick it to a program you don’t like, and by extension, the clients of that program…and this week the House Republicans have embarked on an effort to combine the two into one petty, cheap, and stupid way to stick it to the clients of Social Security and the workers who administer the program.

They’re going to sell it to you, if they can, as a way to “lower the deficit”, or words similar…but what this is really about is making the actual Social Security program work less well-because, after all, if a program is popular today, the best way to make it less so is to apply a bit of “treat ’em like their cars were impounded” to every interaction customers have with the system.

And what better way to make sure that happens…then to aggressively demoralize everyone who works down at the ol’ Social Security office?

DESTROY EVERYTHING: Nihilism on the “Right”

So, like many of you, I’m a politics dork . . . like a really, really big politics dork. I can hear your jaw hitting the keyboard is stricken disbelief.

A whuh?!? Can it possibly be true?

Yes, I hear you asking that, and I can see your drop-jawed, dumbfounded look of woozy shock right through this monitor. Pick your jaw off your keyboard, and brace yourself, because it really is true.

I’m a politics dork, and I’m okay with that.

Anyway, one of the functions of a politics dork is that I moderate an old-fashioned Motet forum or “world wide web chat room” (remember those?) – called the New Cafe Politics Forum.  The forum is old and only has around 20 or so participants who “chat” with any regularity, but I still go back to it because it’s one of the few places I get to interact on-line with real, honest-to-God right wing nutjobs. And no one can ban me . . . because I’m the moderator.

At any rate, during a discussion not long ago in our “Is the Reagan Reich on the Verge of Collapse?” thread, we got off-topic, as we often do, and came to a discussion about public education. We were discussing the advisability of private school vouchers paid for by taxpayers . . . an idea so stupid that even the Wrong Wingers in Indiana seem to have understood that it can’t work. But don’t get me started, this diary isn’t about vouchers.

“We know daveinchi,” you’re saying, “so far it doesn’t seem to be about much of anything.”

Follow me over the jump for the meat and/or gluten free quinoa and potatoes of this diary.  

Six In The Morning

Searchers give up hope of earthquake survivors





Karen Kissane March 3, 2011  

Authorities in New Zealand have announced that they are now making the transition from a rescue operation to a recovery operation.

Civil Defence Emergency Management National Controller John Hamilton said the focus of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team working in the Christchurch central business district following the Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 will now be on recovering bodies.

“As time has gone on, the chance of finding someone alive has diminished and, sadly, there becomes a point where the response effort shifts in focus from rescue to body recovery,” said Mr Hamilton.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me.

–Philip Ó Ceallaigh



Links 2

Six In The Morning

Searchers give up hope of earthquake survivors Karen Kissane March 3, 2011   Authorities in New Zealand have announced that they are now making the transition from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. Civil Defence Emergency Management National Controller John Hamilton said the focus of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team working in …

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Late Night Karaoke

From Translator: My Friend is a Slob! 20110302

Like many of you, I have been keeping up with the activity at the Madison, Wisconsin capitol.  Whilst I have been sympathetic to the folks bivouacking there, it got very personal to me a little while ago.

A Kossack, her name to be not reported here, sent me a Happy Birthday email complete with a picture of her in the rotunda!  This person and I go back several years, only online and always platonic, but I love her very much in a political way this evening.

She is a fine example of what this community represents.  I almost always back off from political posts, because others do it much better than I could hope to try.

Death Penalty Charges Against Bradley Manning (Nauseating Update!)

Bradley-Manning2

From CBS News…

The Army said Wednesday it has filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier suspected of providing classified government documents published by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the new charges for the first time formally accuse Manning of aiding the enemy.

And from the Guardian…

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, said that the most serious of the new charges was the Article 104 offence of “aiding the enemy”. The charge carries a potential death sentence.

And of course the bankers who destroyed the American economy are still raking in record profits and salaries with no fear of prosecution, including the weasels at Wachovia Bank who laundered $378 billion for drug cartels, and the war-criminals Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are still at large.

And would somebody please tell the ignorant sons-of-bitches who wrote the charge about “aiding the enemy” that…

WE HAVE NO “ENEMY” because…

WE ARE NOT AT WAR!

Or did I miss a Congressional Declaration of War in the last few minutes?

Update: From New York Magazine…

This is one for your Wikileaks fan fic: A lawyer for Private Bradley Manning says his client was stripped naked and left in his prison cell in the the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, without clothes for seven hours on Wednesday. And if that wasn’t bad enough, before Manning allowed to get dressed, he was forced to stand naked outside his cell while guards inspected the space. “This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification,” said Manning’s lawyer David E. Coombs. “It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. Pfc. Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.” First Lt. Brian Villiard, a Marine spokesman, said that the action wasn’t punitive but declined to comment on what motivated the naked episode.

God damn those lying perverts!

22 New Charges Against Bradley Manning, Including Possible Death Penalty

Bradley-Manning2

From CBS News…

The Army said Wednesday it has filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier suspected of providing classified government documents published by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the new charges for the first time formally accuse Manning of aiding the enemy.

And from the Guardian…

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, said that the most serious of the new charges was the Article 104 offence of “aiding the enemy”. The charge carries a potential death sentence.

And of course the bankers who destroyed the American economy are still raking in record profits and salaries with no fear of prosecution, including the weasels at Wachovia Bank who laundered $378 billion for drug cartels, and the war-criminals Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are still at large.

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