August 30, 2009 archive

Since Obama was willing to have a beer with a professor and an officer of the law over racial issues, why then shouldn’t he meet with Ben Carnes to discuss freeing Leonard Peltier?

Source

As a result of Leonard Peltier’s recent PAROLE DENIAL, Sundance Chief Ben Carnes, a member of the Choctaw Nation, will go to Washington, D.C.to stand & Fast in front of the White House between September 5 – 12, 2009, in hopes of securing a meeting with President Obama.

I’ve been thinking about how and when Obama could pull it off, and use it as a distraction to pass the Public Option in Health Care.

Gazeta Wyborcza is reporting the Obama administration will not implement the Bush administration’s plan for a missile “shield” in Eastern Europe.  “The missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic are virtually certain to be abandoned“.

The Polish newspaper names Washington lobbyist Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance, as its source. “The signals that the generals in the Pentagon are sending are absolutely clear: as far as missile defence is concerned, the current US administration is searching for other solutions than the previously bases in Poland and the Czech Republic,” Ellison said.

“The administration has been sounding out for a couple of weeks now how the Congress will react when the plans for building the missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic are dumped,” Ellison said a Congressional source has told him.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence , crossposted from The Hillbilly Report

It is widely remarked that the US Department of Transport map of High Speed Rail Corridors leaves a lot of obvious holes.

Often, this reflects a misunderstanding of what the DoT is mapping. This is not a “Master Plan”. There is no HSRail planner division inside the Federal Rail Administration inside the Department of Transport that is working away at deciding which corridor should be added to the corridor.

Instead, what they have mapped are the corridors that are eligible for HSRail funding. The way that things are set up is that a state or group of states do some planning, petition Congress be designated as a HSRail corridor, or added to a corridor, or for less sweeping changes petition the Department of Transport to revise an existing corridor, and {*voila*}, that’s a designated corridor.

(I don’t usually share my open threads form The Wild Wild Left, but the music needed sharing!)

In the strange non-linear line of my brain, Teddy Kennedy provided the songs for today, without ever to my knowledge having heard this songwriter. You see, as the darkness swallowed and lent privacy to his final repose, the very last thing read by Archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, per Ted’s request, is to read the letter he sent to the Pope with Obama, and the Pope’s reply.

Talk about getting The Last Word in, and the Cardinal accentuated with intent the Universal Health Care mentioned twice. It was a consummate, deliberate act of a knowing player. (just wish he had left the conscience protection out, but then again, thats only one of a gazillion I reasons I left Catholicism, if not all organized religion long ago)

I want you to know, Your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office, I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States senator.

I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I’m committed to doing everything I can to achieve access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I’ll continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone.

The press & the haters only went for the imperfect being trying to right my path part, but everyone listening KNEW exactly why it was read, exactly why he accentuated the Health Care part. The people heard it.

But I didn’t come here to talk about that, I’m really here for the music. Hope you’ll listen.  

‘We Loved This Kind And Tender Hero’

A Day of Mourning, Celebration

By Dan Balz, Keith B. Richburg and Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, August 30, 2009

On the day he was carried to his final resting place,  Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was remembered Saturday as a legislator of almost unequalled prowess, a political force who left a lasting imprint on the country and a husband, father and patriarch whose private acts of love and devotion helped his star-crossed family endure tragedy and misfortune.President Obama led the mourners at a solemn Roman Catholic Mass attended by 1,500 people, including three former presidents, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, where the Kennedy family dynasty was born. A steady rain fell, adding an elegiac touch to a day already drenched in sorrow.

Millions facing famine in Ethiopia as rains fail

International aid agencies fear that the levels of death and starvation last seen 24 years ago, are set to return to the Horn of Africa. Paul Rodgers reports

Sunday, 30 August 2009

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

Open Thread