December 30, 2007 archive

Washington – To understand the importance Dennis Kucinich places on spirituality, scan his generally spare Capitol Hill office: a white cloth from the Dalai Lama, a bust of Gandhi, and a picture representing “conscious light” – a gift from Brahma Kumaris nuns.

There’s a Tibetan dragon washbowl and, on his desk, two heavy crucifixes once worn by Catholic nuns who taught him and who, he says, “saved my life.”

By Amanda Paulson via csmonitor.com

We get older.  As we do, it sometimes seems regrettable that we may be running out of time to say what we have to say…need to say…and do what we have to do.  So much effort in life is spent trying to support having the time to do what we deem important, that it often seems that the important stuff doesn’t get done.

There isn’t enough time.

Then, of course, there is the fact that what we may deem important to do to improve the world around us is not something others will see the importance of.  We are each doomed to practice our own brand of insanity.  Or not.

My life has been full of Or not moments.  I may have chosen Or not too many times.  Or not.

In the last quarter of my life there were times when I did not choose Or not.  The Observer in me recorded the words.  I spent much of the past year sharing some of them.

Now available in Orange

Loving Spoonful

What a day for a Daydream

This is a diary by AndyT, cross posted from Big Orange and the Pretty Bird Woman House blog.

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the coming ascension of Bill Kristol to the august pages of The New York Times.  I’m afraid to say that I mostly agree with Andy Rosenthal (as reported by Editor and Publisher, h/t Atrios), I don’t understand what the fuss is all about.  After all, “We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill”.

If you expect The New York Times  to be a progressive voice championing the values of the “community” they supposedly serve, the citizens of the Metropolitan New York area, they do; but that “community” may not have exactly the demographics you think.  The Gray Lady stands for the truth of the informed insider, the justice of the powerful and connected, and the Wall Street Way.

They are mired in the media madness that traps most of the dead tree dying dinosaurs.  Confronted with their own inevitable extinction as organs of influence they are in denial of the retreat of the ice age, doomed to suffocate under the tangled fur of the web of deceit and lies they have peddled over the last 20 years.

There was a time I’d read 4 or more newspapers a day, The Courant, The Times, The News, and The Stars Hollow Shopper, and consider myself informed.  More than that I’d read the supermarket glossies- Time, Newsweek, and U.S News and World Report.  WCBS Newsradio 88 with traffic and weather together at 8, 18, 28, 38, 48, and 58 minutes past the hour (WINS was first in the format, but not clear channel).

The only ones who survive are WCBS (did I mention traffic and weather together?) and The Stars Hollow Shopper (♥ me some coupons).

The disconnect in the plain reality that my own two eyes show me every single day and the dusty dirty gray tissues stained with blood and other less identifiable and honorable fluids that pile up in our landfills as pristine and unread as the day it was delivered on your doorstep, useful as a stop or for wrapping fish or lining litter boxes and bird cages; has led me to more productive pursuits.

Earlier (but not in the new media of record thank goodness) I mourned the passing of these shambling shadows of former greatness, these future fossils of folly and hubris; now I ignore them as irrelevant when I don’t hunt them for sport.

Curved Air

Melinda (More or Less)

This is an Open Thread: Cheese Burgers

Headlines For Sunday December 30: Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image: Sorting Truth From Campaign Fiction: Surge in Off-Roading Stirs Dust and Debate in West: Far from case closed in Pakistan

Teenage son to take on Benazir Bhutto’s legacy

BENAZIR BHUTTO’S 19-year-old son Bilawal will be thrust into a dangerous spotlight today as Pakistan’s most powerful political dynasty prepares to pass the baton to the next generation.

Bilawal, a first-year undergraduate at Oxford University, is the heir to a blood-soaked legacy. He lost his mother to an assassin on Thursday; his uncles both died in suspicious circumstances; and his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 after being deposed from power.

Last night Britain’s foreign office confirmed that Benazir Bhutto met David Miliband, the foreign secretary, shortly before she returned to Pakistan from exile in October and warned him of a plot against her life. Bhutto and Miliband had spoken regularly on the telephone since that meeting and her concerns about her safety were passed on to the Pakistani authorities.

USA

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image

WASHINGTON – If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived – by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.