Though I love the festive nature of the holiday season, I’ve come to lament the never-ending frenzy of consumerism that begins the day after Thanksgiving and ends on New Year’s Day. In years past, we’ve given gifts that were made locally or obtained through fair trade practices (at least, to the best of our knowledge). Not surprisingly, these were typically hand-made gifts, rather than the mass-produced melts of plastic available in stores geared toward the masses. This year, rather than get caught up in the consumerism/consumption game, Mr Pickle and I have decided that all of our gifts – given and received – will be charitable donations.
Senate Democrats appear ready to omit Iraq withdrawal timelines from a supplemental spending bill in hopes of clearing in December funds for the troops — but House leaders have no intentions of following suit.
Good for Speaker Pelosi and good for House Democrats. Now who do we have to worry about? The eternal capitulation leaders, Hoyer and Rahmbo. Watch out for them.
Up to 15,000 people were killed and seven million lives left devastated by the cyclone in Bangladesh last week, aid agencies have said as the full extent of the disaster became clear.
The Bangladeshi Red Crescent Society, the country’s main humanitarian group, said that more than 3,000 bodies had already been recovered from villages shattered by Cyclone Sidr’s 150mph winds.
While the official death toll remains low, Save the Children last night said that it feared that 15,000 people could have died while the Red Crescent estimated around 10,000.
BushCo has been Robbing the Cradle of Civilization for more than four years. His government of the war criminals, by the war criminals, and for the war criminals has the blood of half a million Iraqi men, women, and children on its hands. They have been robbed of their very existence, and the land that was the first to experience the dawn of human civilization has been plunged into the darkness of barbarity.
Iraq is known as the cradle of civilization, with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and above all, developed the skill of writing.
Fourteen-thousand Friedman Units after human civilization emerged in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, a tribe of Neo-cons also managed to develop the skill of writing, and scribbled this.
The consequences have been horrific. The human suffering inflicted by that blasphemy of democracy they call Neoconservatism has horrified a world that once looked upon America with admiration and respect. Iraq is not free, it was never meant to be. Endless war is the Neo-con agenda, oil is their Holy Grail, and Iran is their next target. They wage their wars from TV studios, so they haven’t experienced the human suffering they are responsible for, they haven’t been subjected to the dehumanizing brutality of this war of conquest they have unleashed.
But many others have. Many others have walked down that dark road, and have paid the price. The cost of that journey can be seen in their eyes, and in the eyes of everyone who still has a conscience and tears to shed for the innocent:
I saw this over the weekend and filed it in my “dead issue” mental file.
But, today, it is still there!
My question is: why would anyone believe anything that Novak writes anymore? The man should not even be allowed to write a column, even from a jail cell.
He traitorously outed a CIA spy and experienced no charges or reprimand. Now he publishes a little gossip rag and someone actually believes it!!!!! He should put up and shut up. If he has proof, surrender it. If he knows who is planting this trash, expose them or else cease and desist.
On Friday at 4:43 pm this report, regarding conflicting accounts from a State Department official and his own brother, hit the news wires. The most interesting part of this article is that Krongard, the official in jeopardy, “had begun the hearing by denying the “ugly rumors” that his brother was associated with the company, which is under scrutiny for a September 16 shooting incident in Baghdad in which 17 Iraqis were killed.” According to the article he then took a break and came back into the same exact room and recused himself from the probes into Blackwater.
This is a clear example of a Public Official so used to doing things the Bush/GOP way that he didn’t even bother to check his facts before taking part in a hearing of this magnitude. I’ll say that again, this is a clear example of a Public Official so used to doing things the Bush/GOP way that he didn’t even bother to check his facts before taking part in a hearing of this magnitude.
Dennis, who won the Democratic Underground Fun Run fundraiser, is coming off a striking performance at the Las Vegas Democratic debate. What else is Dennis up to?
For more than three months, as turmoil in the credit market has swept wildly through Wall Street, one mighty investment bank after another has been brought to its knees, leveled by multibillion-dollar blows to their bottom lines.
And then there is Goldman Sachs.
Rarely on Wall Street, where money travels in herds, has one firm gotten it so right when nearly everyone else was getting it so wrong. So far, three banking chief executives have been forced to resign after the debacle, and the pay for nearly all the survivors is expected to be cut deeply.
The muses are ancient. The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them. Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward. In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.
It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse. Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets. Others have been suggested throughout the centuries. I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts. And maybe there should be many more.
Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…
