If we perceived Life with reverence, we would stand in awe at the experience of physical Life and walk the Earth in a very deep sense of gratitude.
-- Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul
Foley is claiming to have been under the influence of alcohol when he wrote those instant messages. You know, I've been drunk before and it never made me have the slightest attraction to underage young people. It never caused me to prey on people it was my professional obligation to protect. Just like it never made me hate Jews. (Are you listening, Mel Gibson?)Foley checked himself into rehab. But according to the New York Times, many people question his alcoholism claim. That's when you know things are bad in Washington: when a congressman can't even be trusted to be a drunk.
--Jay Leno
Failure to produce tribute to the Spanish brought swift and terrible punishment. Those that did not comply were given an "attitude adjustment" that consisted of removal of their nose, ear, hand or foot. Those that actively resisted were burned alive. The Taino People were even forced to carry their oppressors, to spare the Spanish the drudgery of walking.
...
The Spanish under Columbus hunted the Taino People for sport and for dog-food for their attack hounds.
So great were the cruelties and horrible the degradations that the Taino People suffered at the hands of Columbus and his men, that entire villages would bolt in panic at the sight of a single Spaniard. The whole populations of some villages would, upon the approach of Spanish soldiers, hurl themselves from cliffs, hang themselves, shoot one another with arrows, or take poison to avoid life under the boot of Spanish oppression. Others abandoned their cultivated fields and homes to hide in the forested hills where many thousands starved to death.
Pedro de Cordoba in a letter to King Ferdinand wrote in 1517, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide.....Many when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."
How much damage, how many calamities, disruptions and devastations of kingdoms have there been? How many souls have perished in the West Indies over the years and how unjustly? How many unforgivable sins have been committed? ...... What we committed in the West Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind....
NEW ALBANY, Ind. - After winning over moms in back-to-back elections, Republicans have lost their advantage among married women with children this year.
The Republican Party has seen the support of people like Jeannette Hopkins evaporate.A 30-year-old married mother of two and a Republican, Hopkins voted for President Bush in 2004. But she says she probably will support the Democrat in her congressional district this fall "because of the way that everything's been handled" with the GOP in charge of Congress and Bush in the White House.
"We're in a really scary place right now," Hopkins said recently. She vented about what she called the gone-on-too-long Iraq war, a sluggish economy, the bungled Hurricane Katrina response and a continuing terrorism threat.
She blamed Republicans as she hustled down an alley to the office she manages in this Louisville, Ky., suburb.
Votes like hers could decide which party controls the House and Senate after the Nov. 7 vote.
( Photo by Cynthia Burgess)
GEORGETOWN, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Dozens of Amish neighbors gathered Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage.
Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, was buried in his wife's family plot behind a small Methodist church, a few miles from the one-room schoolhouse he stormed Monday.
His wife, Marie, and their three small children looked on as Roberts was buried beside the pink, heart-shaped grave of the infant daughter whose death nine years ago apparently haunted him, said Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Colorado who attended the service.
About half of perhaps 75 mourners on hand were Amish.
"It's the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed," said Porter, who had come to Pennsylvania to offer what help he could.
This past Thursday I was invited by the group World Can't Wait to talk about impeachment and Bush's preparations for war against Iran at a Philadelphia rally--part of the group's Oct. 5 "Drive Out the Bush Regime" campaign of 170 such rallies around the country. Assembled on the mall in front of the Rizzo Municipal Offices building in central Philadelphia in front of me were some 300 people, mostly young, and all well-behaved, if high spirited.
While I was talking about the Bush administration's impeachable crimes against the American people and the Constitution--in particularly the ramming through Congress of a bill that, for the first time since American patriots drove the British out of the 13 colonies, authorizes indefinite detainment without charge and imprisonment of American citizens without the right to a trial--I noticed two men in sunglasses with a high-quality video camera and a high-quality still camera with telephoto lense filming the assembled crowd.
Inspector Robert Tucker, who heads the counter-terrorism task force of the Philadelphia Police Department, confirmed in a phone conversation the next day that the two men with the cameras were working for him. He apologized for their lack of identification, and for their unwillingness to identify themselves, promising that at future public events, they and others doing that kind of work would wear prominent identification showing they were with the police. But he insisted that their work was appropriate.
What makes this whole thing feel particularly creepy is the anti-terrorism bill just passed by a Congress of supine Republicans and cowardly Democrats, which gives the president the authority, on his own, to call anyone an "unlawful combatant," or a supporter of terrorism, and to lock them away in a military brig with no right to a trial or even a lawyer. When you put this police surveillance in that context, it becomes intimidating indeed.
It is the terror and the guilt within your own heart, Mr. Bush, that you re-direct at others who simply wish for you to temper your certainty with counsel.
If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas.
No truth can make another truth untrue.
All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
Once you have seen the larger pattern,
You cannnot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
And this:It's outrageous, it's shocking. But it shouldn't be totally surprising when we hold up tolerance and diversity as the guidepost for public life this is what you end up getting.
-- Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
And this:But neither party seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.
-- Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
And this:The Foley revelations are 'an attempt to discourage Christian conservative voters and to get some percentage of them to stay home so that the Left can retake the United States Senate and the United States House.'
-- Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families
There is never an acceptable excuse or rationale for the type of deviant behavior former Congressman Mark Foley has admitted to. Homosexuality is every bit a part of the culture of death as is abortion and contraception. Not surprisingly, Foley was an ardent supporter of both, representing the interests of Planned Parenthood 64 percent of the time thus far in 2006.
-- Human Life International
Are you satisfied with the way Republicans are handling the Foley-congressional page scandal?
Yes - 21%
No - 79%
Sea ice in the Arctic last month melted to its second lowest monthly minimum in the 29-year record of satellite measurements.
Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Colorado said the total surface area covered by sea ice during September was smaller than in any previous year apart from 2005, when it reached an all-time record minimum. And it was only a sudden change to cool and stormy weather in August that prevented another record low being set this September, they said.
"At this rate, the Arctic Ocean will have no ice in September by the year 2060," said Julienne Strove, one of the NSIDC's research scientists
...
Arctic sea ice acts like an insulating lid on the northernmost ocean, reflecting sunlight and preventing the water from absorbing heat and warming up.
Scientists fear that as more and more sea ice is lost, a "positive feedback" will kick in, with the Arctic Ocean absorbing more sunlight, which will in turn cause the loss of more sea ice.
We will forgive you.
They are such liars. And no, I am not speaking only of the dissembling GOP House leaders led by Speaker Dennis Hastert who, out of naked political calculation, covered up for one of their own in the sordid teen stalking case of Rep. Mark Foley.
Call me old school, but I am still more concerned with the Republicans molesting Lady Liberty while pretending to be guarding the nation’s security, an assignment which they have totally botched. The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation.
On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, “State of Denial.”
“I don’t remember a so-called emergency meeting,” Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission. The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent.
In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against Al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.
“Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away,” Woodward reports. “He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.” A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.
I was thinking about Captain von Trapp this morning as played by Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. One New York summer long ago we saw that movie at least 13 times. Toward the end of the film, the Captain sings Edelweiss to give the children and Julie Andrews time to flee the arena they have just performed at. He dedicates the song to Austria, which has welcomed the Nazi Anschluss. This scene is engraved in my memory.
The Military Commissions Act is totalitarian police-state legislation that has just been enacted by the U.S. Congress. It provides, among other things, that the President can decide U.S. citizens are enemy combatants. It strips foreign born enemy combatants of habeas corpus. Charges and evidence are secret and the person so termed can be held in secret and can even be executed in secret (through a “presidential finding” signed on 9/17/01). There is no recourse.
I don’t think these laws are aimed at terrorists. I think they are aimed at political dissenters (peace activists?) and will be used accordingly. It must be noted that the media has omitted the crucial details related to U.S. citizens in their scanty coverage of this Act.
Conan O'BrienToday President Bush is on a trip to California, but he and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger went out of their way to avoid each other. Experts say this is bad news for the Republican Party, but great news for the English language.
