Good job, Letterman

Not bad, huh?

How many of you saw the Republican presidential debate? There are ten Republicans who want to be president of the United States. Did you see them? I mean, they looked like guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.

--David Letterman

"Bomb Iran" says McCain

You may have already read about this but I just found a Guardian article today entitled "Saved by the Bomb: Senator McCain has Hit Upon a Solution to All the Republican Party’s Woes: A Nuclear War with Iran". Depressing as hell:

Campaigning in Oklahoma the other day, the Republican senator John McCain was asked what should be done about Iran. He responded by singing, “Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran”, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann. (Join the hilarity and see for yourself on YouTube.) How can any thinking person disagree? I mean, any country with a president who doesn’t shave properly and never wears a tie deserves what’s coming to it - a lot of American bombs, with a few British ones thrown in to ensure we don’t miss out on the ensuing upsurge in terrorism.

The problem is how to unload enough bombs on Iran before next year’s US election to bring about enough flag-waving to get the Republican party re-elected. This is essential if we are to safeguard the revenues of companies such as Halliburton - particularly at a time when the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction is discovering what a shoddy job Halliburton has been doing. In projects at Nasiriya, Mosul and Hilla - declared successes by the US - inspectors have discovered buckled floors, crumbling concrete, failed generators and blocked sewage systems - due not to sabotage but largely to poor construction and lack of maintenance.

The trouble is that the re-election of the GOP is becoming more problematic as opinion turns against George Bush’s little invasion of Iraq. Even Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah recently condemned the US action as “an illegal foreign occupation”; his nephew, Prince Bandar, hasn’t been returning calls for weeks.

More worrying is the plummeting popularity of the party, as White House corruption becomes ever more difficult to disguise. The LA Times reports that what Representative Thomas M Davis III called a “poisonous” environment has begun to dent fundraising - an unheard-of problem for the Republicans.

So the only solution is to bomb Iran, as Senator McCain so wisely and amusingly suggests. The real issue is whether to use regular weapons or do the job properly and go nuclear.

How can the Republicans be so cavalier about nuclear war? They seem to have no idea what it will really do to the world. And they seem to WANT the increased terrorism such an attack will trigger.

Friday cat blogging!

Molly and Thomas Yin-Yang

Photo by Gabe Horn

Let's hear it for cats!

Well, here's an odd piece of news reported by CNN. It's entitled "Cat too scary for Canadian mail carriers". Take a look:

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) -- Canada's postal system has stopped delivering mail to a home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after a mail carrier was scared away by a "very threatening cat," the Winnipeg Free Press said Friday.

A Canada Post spokeswoman said the agency was concerned about the safety of its carriers, although it hoped for an amicable solution to its dispute with cat-owner John Samborski.

"The letter carrier who delivers mail there ... was brought up on a farm, she is very comfortable with animals," spokeswoman Kathi Neal told the newspaper. "Apparently this is a very threatening cat."

Samborski told the paper that his 8-year-old, declawed, black cat Shadow is docile, and it was "ridiculous" for Canada Post to make him to pick up his mail from a post office instead of delivering it to his door.

Shadow "likes to eat and sleep and cuddle. You could drop a bomb and he'd just open one eye, take a look, then close them and go back to sleep," Samborski, 41, told the newspaper.

I sure wish they'd given us a picture. Of the cat and the letter carrier! :-)

Quote of the week

This was published by Sojourners:

You can’t take the evil of slavery out of the world and abolish it without making the world more just. You will never prevent people living in bonded labor or from getting caught up in sex trafficking while they are so desperate that they have no other choice but to sell themselves. As long as we in the West crave ever more excess, we conspire in their desperation, exploiting it and make ourselves sick in the process.

- Clare Short, Member of British Parliament and former Secretary of State for International Development. She resigned from the latter post over the U.K.'s involvement in the Iraq War. (Source: Ekklesia)

Oh good grief.

Can you believe this? Bush is now calling himself "the commander guy". Take a look:

Here's the relevant passage of his address to the Associated General Contractors of America, from whitehouse.gov:

"I liked what James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton reported back after a serious investigation of Iraq. I liked their ideas. And it's something that we should seriously consider .... By the way, in the report it said, it is—the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that's what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear—I'm the commander guy."

What can I say? Pathetic.

New Batch of Bush Bumper Stickers

* (On an infant's shirt): Already smarter than Bush.

* 1/20/09: End of an Error

* That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway

* Let's Fix Democracy in THIS COUNTRY First

* If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran

* Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.

* You Can't Be Pro-War And Pro-Life At The Same Time

* If You Can Read This, You're Not the President

* Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant

* Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?

* George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight

* Impeachment: It's Not Just for Sex Anymore

* America : One Nation, Under Surveillance

* They Call Him "W" So He Can Spell It

* Cheney/Satan '08

* Jail to the Chief

* No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade?

* Bush: God's Way of Proving Intelligent Design is Full Of Crap

* Bad president! No Banana.

* We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language

* We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them

* Is It Vietnam Yet?

* Bush Doesn't Care About White People, Either

* Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Handbasket?

* You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.

* When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $1.46

* The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century

Sent to me by Charlotte Alexandre

Please recycle those plastic bags

I've come across an article today in The Independent about a woman who's campaigning against the plastic bag:

When wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found hundreds of albatross chicks dying on a remote Hawaiian atoll amid a sea of rubbish, she was appalled. Now she's leading a small Devon town's revolution against the plastic carrier bag.

Here's more of what the article says:

Mankind's appetite for the plastic bag is deeply daunting. It is estimated that one million are used every minute - their average working life just 12 minutes before they are discarded. Every year each person on the planet will consume 300 of them - nearly one each every day. In terms of their environmental cost, the figures are equally stark, says Ms Hosking. "Plastic stays in the environment for between 500 and 1,000 years. Every plastic item that was ever made is still in existence. Some of it starts to break down - maybe into tiny pieces but it is still there."
...
She recalls seeing dolphins cavorting in the water off Maui playing with a plastic bag as if it were an underwater football and later seeing dead dolphins washed up on the beaches - a bag covering their blow holes.

She also remembers the day she watched a heavily protected green turtle choke to death on a plastic bag in front of her.Or the humpback whales arriving in their Hawaii breeding grounds exhausted after dragging huge chains of plastic debris behind them for thousands of miles from their summer feeding territory in Alaska.

Then there were the Hawaiian monk seals - the only tropical seal in the world and one of the 100 rarest species on earth. Conservationists say it is down to its last decade or two despite surviving 15 million years since pre-historic times. Marine scientists identify the remaining population by the scars left on their bodies by plastic packing bands.

Years ago, I went on a whale watch off the coast of Cape Cod and at then end of the boat journey the guide told us that if we were to pick only one thing to do to help save the whales it would be to get our groceries paper rather than plastic bags because of the danger to whales from plastic rubbish in the sea. I've never forgotten that.

Please recycle plastic bags if you use them. Here in Tulsa, you can recycle plastic bags at any Albertson's store. And if you throw away plastic packing strips or beverage pack holders, please cut them into small pieces so that animals don't get tangled up in them.

The story: "Bush vetoes war-funding bill with withdrawal timetable"

Mission to Mars

I thought I'd pass on a CNN article that I found very interesting. It's called "NASA rethinking death in mission to Mars" and it's about thinking through the possibilities of what could happen on very long space trips. Here's part of what it says:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back?

When should the plug be pulled on a critically ill astronaut who is using up precious oxygen and endangering the rest of the crew? Should NASA employ DNA testing to weed out astronauts who might get a disease on a long flight?

With NASA planning to land on Mars 30 years from now, and with the recent discovery of the most "Earth-like" planet ever seen outside the solar system, the space agency has begun to ponder some of the thorny practical and ethical questions posed by deep space exploration.

Some of these who-gets-thrown-from-the-lifeboat questions are outlined in a NASA document on crew health obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request.
...
One topic that is evidently too hot to handle: How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?

Sex is not mentioned in the document and has long been almost a taboo topic at NASA. Williams said the question of sex in space is not a matter of crew health but a behavioral issue that will have to be taken up by others at NASA.

The agency will have to address the matter sooner or later, said Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has advised NASA since 2001.

"There is a decision that is going to have to be made about mixed-sex crews, and there is going to be a lot of debate about it," he said.

Ah, we're such Puritans in this country. It's pathetic.

Well, go read the rest of the article and learn about the issues NASA is willing to address.

The airwaves

I came across a column today by David Sirota called Disturbing Questions on a Monday Morning. It's just a collection of stuff that is bothering him and I want to show you what he has to say about the radio situation in this country:

- Does George Will really believe Americans are stupid, or is he stupid? In Will's column for Newsweek this week, he says America's media presents truly diverse voices because "there are 14,000 radio stations—twice as many as in 1970—and satellite radio has nearly 14 million subscribers." What Will doesn't say is that while the number of stations may have increased, the number of owners of stations has dramatically decreased - and as we all know, ownership decides content. According to the nonpartisan Project for Excellence In Journalism, "the top 20 companies own more than 20 percent of all domestic radio stations." Meanwhile, two companies (XM and Sirius) own all of satellite radio. So the question again, is whether George Will is too stupid to actually research these facts before writing a column, or does he think Americans are just stupid enough to believe his propaganda?

- Part 2 of "does George Will really believe Americans are idiots, or is he an idiot?" In his column, Will cites the willingness of media companies to promote right-wing voices and the difficulty of progressive voices from getting the same treatment as proof that progressives can't "compete in the marketplace of ideas." He says "consumer sovereignty" is choosing conservative voices. Yet, he says nothing about the fact that, with the media now owned by a handful of for-profit corporations that simultaneously use their Washington lobbying clout to push for all sorts of conservative policies, those media owners that decide who to put on the air have a personal/financial stake in promoting conservative voices. Does Will really think Americans are so stupid that they don't know that companies owned by conservatives will put conservatives on the airwaves they own, and that such a decision has nothing to do with "consumer sovereignty?" Or is Will too stupid to understand that basic truism?

I've been very disturbed by the reduced number of media owners for some time. And, needless to say, George Will does unsavory things to my blood pressure.

Unclaimed and wasted Katrina aid

This is really disgusting. It's a Washington Post article entitled "Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed". Here's part of what it says:

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

The struggle to apply foreign aid in the aftermath of the hurricane, which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion so far, is another reminder of the federal government's difficulty leading the recovery. Reports of government waste and delays or denials of assistance have surfaced repeatedly since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

Just go read the rest of the article. The incompetence of this administration is simply beyond outrageous. It's really sickening.

Let's hear it for hypocrisy!

The article is entitled "Senior Official Linked to Escort Service Resigns". Take a look:

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Now here's the sickening part:

As the Bush administration's so-called "AIDS czar," Tobias was criticized by some for emphasizing faithfulness and abstinence over condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS.
...
As a top official overseeing global AIDS funding to other countries, Tobias was responsible for enforcing a U.S. policy, enacted during the Bush administration, that requires recipients to swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

These people don't really believe in sexual purity for themselves. Just for other people. The little people, that is, as Joe Sudbay points out over on AMERICAblog.

It's getting hotter and hotter

It's been a very cool spring so far in Tulsa, Oklahoma (and who knows the reasons for that?) but not so in other parts of the world. I want to call your attention to an article in The Independent called "Overheating Britain: April temperatures break all records" . Take a look:

The possibility is growing that Britain in 2007 may experience a summer of unheard-of high temperatures, with the thermometer even reaching 40C, or 104F, a level never recorded in history.

The likelihood of such a "forty degree summer" is being underlined by the tumbling over the past year of a whole series of British temperature records, strongly suggesting that the British Isles have begun to experience a period of rapid, not to say alarming, warming. This would be quite outside all historical experience, but entirely consistent with predictions of climate change.

The Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, in a joint forecast with the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, has already suggested that 2007 will be the hottest year ever recorded globally.
...
Spring 2007 (defined as March, April and May) will probably be Britain's hottest spring. It has followed the second-warmest winter in the UK record (December, January and February) and the warmest-ever autumn (September, October and November 2006).

Before that, we had Britain's hottest-ever month (July last year), which included the hottest-ever July day (19 July, when the temperature at Wisley, Surrey, reached 36.5C, or 97.7F, beating a record that had lasted since 1911).

To crown it all, yesterday the Met Office announced that the past 12 months, taken together, have been the hottest 12 months ever to have occurred in Britain, with a provisional mean temperature of 10.4C. The previous record (March 1997 to April 1998) was 9.7C.

I visited some friends in the north of England two years ago during late June, I think, and they were having a heat wave. I had never before in my life been hot in Britain. But I was for this visit. Very distressing.

Giuliani's attitude toward Democrats

Frank Ford just sent me the transcript of a recent Keith Olbermann commentary. It's entitled "Republicans equal life; Democrats equal death?" and is subtitled "Rudy Giuliani exploiting fear for power and personal gain". Here's part of what it says:

Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center, and the breaking of what Sen. Barack Obama has aptly termed “9/11 fever,” it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history’s great ironies.

Only in this America of the early 21st century could it be true that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, moreover, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

And here Olbermann goes into what the mayor said:

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be best at this — we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it.”

Insisting that the election of any Democrat would mean the country was “back ... on defense,” Mr. Giuliani continued: “But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have. If we are on defense, we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

He said this with no sense of irony, no sense of any personal shortcomings, no sense whatsoever.

Then Olbermann slams Giuliani with questions:

Which party held the presidency on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party held the mayoralty of New York on that date, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party assured New Yorkers that the air was safe and the remains of the dead recovered and not being used to fill potholes, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party wanted what the terrorists wanted — the postponement of elections — and to whose personal advantage would that have redounded, Mr. Giuliani?

Which mayor of New York was elected eight months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, yet did not emphasize counter-terror in the same city for the next eight years, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party had proposed to turn over the Department of Homeland Security to Bernard Kerik, Mr. Giuliani?

Who wanted to ignore and hide Kerik’s organized crime allegations, Mr. Giuliani?

Who personally argued to the White House that Kerik need not be vetted, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party rode roughshod over Americans’ rights while braying that it was actually protecting them, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party took this country into the most utterly backwards, utterly counterproductive, utterly ruinous war in our history, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party has been in office as more Americans were killed in the pointless fields of Iraq than were killed in the consuming nightmare of 9/11, Mr. Giuliani?

Drop this argument, sir.

You will lose it.

I hope he's right but I'm not so sure that Giuliani will lose it - the safety argument, that is. Because for some reason, alien to me, the American people, as a whole, seem incapable of understanding either logic or cause and effect. And they somehow believe that the Republicans keep us safer than Democrats despite all evidence to the contrary.

Mstislav Rostropovich (March 27, 1927 - April 27, 2007)

A great musician and an equally great human being has died today. Mstislav Rostropovich - known to many as "Slava" - was music director of the National Symphony Orchestra during most of the time I lived in the Washington, D.C. area.

Here's what my friend, photographer Walter Calahan, has to say: Mistislav Rostropovich

Many of my friends worked for him and they loved him.

Here's something Wikipedia says:

Rostropovich fought for art without borders, freedom of speech and democratic values, resulting in a reprimand from the Soviet regime. His friendship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his support for dissidents led to official disgrace in the early 1970s. He was banned from several musical ensembles and his Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1978 because of his public opposition to the Soviet Union's restriction of cultural freedom. Rostropovich left the Soviet Union in 1974 with his wife and children and settled in the United States.

And something else:

His impromptu performance during the Fall of the Berlin Wall as events unfolded earned him international fame and was shown on television throughout the world.

Aside from the marvelous bear hug he wrapped me in when we were introduced, what I will remember most was the way he conducted the National Symphony on the mall every Fourth of July while he was in Washington. You never saw anybody so exuberant about America. It was joyous to behold. One year he danced in the rain during the performance of Stars and Stripes Forever. He simply radiated a love for human rights and democracy and freedom. May he rest in peace.

Laura Bush and her "suffering"

By now, surely, it has come to your attention that Laura Bush said in an interview that nobody suffers more than the President and she. You can read about it in an article entitled "Laura Bush: 'No One Suffers More' ". What I want to show you is a comment by someone named Lani in reference to that article. Take a look:

Memo to Laura Bush:

"No One Suffers More"

Oh, really.

Does your 'house' have power 24/7? clean water? food? heat? air conditioning? effective sewage removal? Do you have access to basic health care? Oh, really?

Has your 'house' been bombed? Have Marines broken down your doors, repeatedly, and held you and your entire family at gun point while they destroyed and looted most of your meagre belongings before maybe deciding to rape your teenage daughter? No? Oh really?

Have you or your loved ones spent time in Abu Ghraib? No?

How about Gitmo? No?

Has your country's entire civilian infrastructure been destroyed?

Have your children come back from Iraq in body bags?

Do your wounded relatives suffer in inadequate VA hospitals or are they deprived of the medical benefits they were promised when they joined up? No? I didn't think so.

How many of your relatives are suffering with the after effects of exposure to Depleted Uranium? None? Oh!

What about wives whose husband's irradiated ejaculate BURNS THEM? Any of your loved ones dealing with that horror? No? Oh!

And while we're on the subject, how many of your relatives have given birth to babies with severe birth defects that are similar to the birth defects that have been showing up in Iraqi newborns for over a decade? None? Oh!

Suffer?

You don't know the meaning of the word.

You and your war criminal husband just know how to make others suffer and suffer and suffer.

You both make me ashamed to be considered as a member of the same species. You may be human but you are NOT humane and your actions defile the Christianity you claim to follow.

And I also like this observation toward the end of the article:

[I]f our First Lady were sincere about her suffering, she would have to grab George and sit down with him to get honest and real ... about the War on Iraq and about the trusted men who have led him astray in making the greatest military blunder in U.S. history.

Laura would have to explain to George how his own chosen staff has led him astray with lies and fabrications in the interest of an imperial neoconservatism. She would have to explain to George that preemptive attacks are, by definition, immoral. She would have to explain to George that there were no WMDs in Iraq, no connections to bin Laden and Al Qaida, and no relevance to the war on terrorism.

Laura would have to explain to George how Dick and Karl have corrupted his administration, lost Congress to the Democratic party, discredited the Republican party, blackened America's name in the world, and now threatens to leave him with a legacy of overseeing the most notably incompetent and corrupt administration in U.S. history.

But she will not do these things. It is not for nothing that she is called a "Stepford wife" so much on the internet.