Musings of a Liberal Texan

2010-07-15T12:19:00.001-07:00

This is what keeping campaign promises looks like:

Healthcare reform
Education reform
US/Russia arms treaty
Wall St reform
Tobacco regulation.
Credit card reform.
Public lands bill
Restores U.S./Russia relations
SCHIP expansion (children's health insurance)
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
2 Justices to the Supreme Court
Stem cell research expansion
$20 Billion from BP for businesses harmed by oil spill
Restored critical protections under the Endangered Species Act
The largest tax cut in the history of the United States (for the middle class)
Billions in restoration of U.S. infrastructure
600,000 (private sector) jobs created since January
Positive GDP growth for four straight quarters...

119 promises kept, with 245 in the works

2010-07-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

So why do I care?

Why do I care about that calf ripped from its dairy producing mother a couple of hours after its birth?
Why do tears spring to my eyes as I watch a dolphin desperately leap from its tiny pool onto the concrete as the audience gasps and the other dolphins race to the glass to see the fate of their compatriot?
Why does a grip sweep my heart as I cycle past the dog chained 24/7/365 as it wags its tail hoping I will stop and release him or at least offer comfort?
Why does my throat contract and dry out as I see tiny chicks thrown into a dumpster, atop thousands of others struggling to survive an inevitable doom?
Why do I toss and turn as images of tiny piglets being slammed against the pavement over and over and over again, thwarting peaceful slumber?
How does it affect me personally?
It has no bearing on my life…
Except that it does.
For every animal, for every child, for every senior, for every mentally or physically handicapped abused, neglected, tossed, struck, brutalized I am complicit in the action.
I am allowing it by existing on this planet.
I am a party to it by flicking to the next story, flipping to the next article.
For every second that it is allowed to continue, I am an accomplice.
I care because it matters.
To each and every individual.
As they are dependent on my benevolence.
They rely on my compassion.
It is my moral duty as a human being.
It is my responsibility as co-resident on earth.
I care because if I didn’t I would see no reason to exist.

2010-06-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Immigration Musings
TOPICS Immigration Right-wing extremism
Arizona's immigration battle becomes a major nexus for white supremacists and the 'mainstream'
By David Neiwert
Thursday Jun 10, 2010 12:00pm

Referenced video can be found here:

Videographer Dennis Gilman attended last weekend's "Phoenix Rising" rally in Phoenix last weekend and made this amazing video. You really have to watch it to believe it.

My favorite moment is the woman who believes there is a "radical Islamic Mexican Catholic movement" that "has been taking over our nation and getting rid of and killing American citizens".

But notice: There are a number of familiar faces here, most notably Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Russell Pearce. These are guys who show up on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC as spokesmen for SB1070, presented nominally as the "mainstream conservatives" who championed the law that they're all defending as having garnered so much popular support, etc. etc.

Of course, as we've noted previously, both Arpaio and Pearce have long histories of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and various other white supremacists and flaming hatemongers.

So it really is not a surprise to see them cavorting about and rubbing shoulders in a perfectly comfortable way with such folks at this rally.

But then, consider that the "Phoenix Rising" rally was actually organized by Barbara Coe, leader of the nativist group California Coalition for Immigration Reform, which led the fight to pass the anti-immigrant Prop 187 back in 1994. You see, CCIR has a sordid history that led to their being designated a "hate group" by the SPLC:

Vitriolic, conspiracy-minded and just plain mean, Coe routinely refers to Mexicans as "savages." She claims to have exposed a secret Mexican plan (the "Plan de Aztlan") to reconquer the American Southwest. Last May, at a "Unite to Fight" anti-immigration summit in Las Vegas, she launched the kind of defamatory rant for which she is infamous. "We are suffering robbery, rape and murder of law-abiding citizens at the hands of illegal barbarians," she warned her cowering audience, "who are cutting off heads and appendages of blind, white, disabled gringos."

More recently, she attacked the new Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, accusing him of seeking to return Southern California to Mexico.

But the most curious thing about the former police clerk -- whose friends have said she told them she was forced from her job in 1994, after using a city-owned camera to photograph people she thought were illegal aliens -- may be her offhand comments to the Denver Post this November. In a profile of her close friend, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), the paper said Coe described speaking to and belonging to the Council of Conservative Citizens. That group, which has called blacks "a retrograde species of humanity," has long been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group -- as has Coe's own California Coalition for Immigration Reform.

Even more recently, Coe has attack the current president as well:

Barak [sic] Obama and his anti-American "czars" are taking a page from Hitler's Nazi Germany playbook - only worse, much worse. Be afraid, be very afraid!

This is precisely what Rep. Linda Sanchez was accurately describing last week:

“There’s a concerted effort behind promoting these kinds of laws on a state-by-state basis by people who have ties to white supremacy groups,” she continued “It’s been documented. It’s not mainstream politics. (Legislators) are being approached by folks, who are front organizations for white supremacist hate groups. They propose the language of these bills and get people to carry these bills in the state legislatures.”

Of course, you'll notice that the Fox News freakout over Sanchez's remarks quickly subsided and the issue quietly went away. Maybe because their researchers realized that it Sanchez was right.

Or maybe they had crews out in Arizona last weekend, and discovered the truth for themselves.

[Be sure and visit Gilman's YouTube Channel, which has lots of excellent videos in a similar vein.]

2010-06-03T07:33:00.001-07:00

Slick Musings

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill.
The US and Europe ignore it

John Vidal, environment editor The Observer,
Sunday 30 May 2010 Article history

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.

The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.

Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."

That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.

"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."

"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.

It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.

Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents – one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.

Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. "We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation," said a spokesman.

"We have a full-time oil spill response team. Last year we replaced 197 miles of pipeline and are using every known way to clean up pollution, including microbes. We are committed to cleaning up any spill as fast as possible as soon as and for whatever reason they occur."

These claims are hotly disputed by communities and environmental watchdog groups. They mostly blame the companies' vast network of rusting pipes and storage tanks, corroding pipelines, semi-derelict pumping stations and old wellheads, as well as tankers and vessels cleaning out tanks.

The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.

The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."

A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."

Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."

Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."

Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.

"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."

2010-05-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

Rand Musings

There has been a lot of swirling around the most recent Tea Party candidate, Rand Paul and his comments regarding the Civil Rights Act and the American Disability Act. Rand is a pure libertarian. His dad is libertarian lite by comparison. Why do I say this? Let's take a look at just a couple of his views.
ADA
The Americans with Disabilities Act. This was a long time coming. I think about how much the image of those with disabilities has changed, just in my lifetime, I see it as being intrinsically tied to this particular Act. Prior to the ADA, those with disabilities where ferried off to institutions. Not all of them, but a crazy majority. Tucked away, out of sight, as the prevailing mentality was that disabled people - physically, mentally, etc. have nothing to offer society. Those that didn't fit into the established mold of what was deemed "normal" by the establishment had no avenue to enter into society. Unless they had the family, community, and financial support their life script was written. Institutionalized living.

CRA
The Civil Rights Act. Yet another bit of federal legislation that, in my mind, is embarrassing in its necessity. How sad that it took an act of congress to right our collective conscience. But make no mistake, it took an act of congress. I remember the National Guard coming in to the south to enforce the new legislation.

Rand believes that these Acts are over reaching in that they impose mandates on PRIVATE business. Rand believes that states and local government are better suited to address the concerns of its citizens. He also believes that a bit of creative out of the box thinking (stifled by federal mandates) will allow for solutions for individual states, individual municipalities to solve problems for their constituents. For instance, instead of forcing businesses to put in costly elevators to accommodate those that cannot get up the stairs, put those employees with limited mobility on the first floor.

All of this is based on a false premise and a bit of silliness. For the above problem, Rand completely ignores the fact that disabled CUSTOMERS are restricted to first floor business, completely cutting them off from anything that is placed above ground level. The ADA has provisions for the blind with the little dots below office numbers, etc. which make being blind less of an obstacle, for those in wheelchairs with mandates for door and hall width, for the deaf with bird tweets or pings at crosswalks so that they know how much time they have to cross the street. It is full of provisions that carefully address problems and provide solutions for issues we as able bodied individuals take for granted. I think of the shows on television that have allowed insight into "disabled" peoples lives - like Little People Big World - which has helped normalize the views of the general population to those of diminished stature. Had it been left to local or state governments, I can't help but think that institutions would still be the only place for those now provided access with the ADA.

Much like the Civil Rights Act. Had the state and local governments been left to address racism and civil rights, we would still be seeing people in rags picking cotton. Or we would have had another Civil War. Who were the ones in the South that PERPETUATED the lynchings, the arrests, the brutality? How many black men that were falsely accused of crimes were placed in front of a jury of white people and doomed? How many black people were targeted by local sheriffs and police? How many black people in the care of the local police were released to angry mobs to be ripped to shreds? I think about the 2010 Texas Board of Education that has the responsibility to provide fact based information for the textbooks from which hundreds of thousands of children will be learning.
2010.
And they refuse to include the names of the 8 Hispanics that died fighting with those in the Alamo.
2010.
And they refuse to include any reference to the influence of hip hop music - only country and rock and roll - for fear of "crude" lyrics being played in the classroom.
2010.
And they reference the historic election of our first black president but refuse to reference him BY NAME.
2010.

Rand is wrong. I understand the idea that state and local governments need to deal with individual issues that are unique to their areas. But when we have a NATIONAL problem, a NATIONAL issue, it must be dealt with nationally. I don't want Texas being responsible for the quality of my food and environment. Even with the federally established environment goals, restrictions and mandates - Texas has failed miserably. I shudder to think of what would be happening if Rick Perry had any more power than he currently holds.

Rand is wrong. The past decade has proven that the incredible influence of corporations and business has been detrimental to our country. The banks' predatory lending, the oil companies refusal to take responsibility for monumental mistakes has shown that with diminished regulations those with the money, power and access have no interest in the common good. We send representatives of ourselves into our government to have the common good as their central focus. Is that the case now? No. So adjustments must take place. Term limits are crucial. We do it for the president, it is imperative that we do it for congress. We need to make it so that other people besides multi-billionaires can run for office. There are changes to be made.
There are always going to be changes that need to be made.

But Rand's changes would send us careening back to an era that should never be revisited.

I will fight anyone that believes that the access now granted those without the power, without the money, without the voice should be rescinded.
I will fight any movement that wants to give business MORE power and the individual citizens LESS.
I am older now but still able to rage against the belief that business is the be all and end all.
If you believe that, I respectfully request that you go take a swim off the Louisiana coast.
Have a taste of the uniquely seasoned seafood.
Take a tour of the brilliantly slick and brown coastline.
Caution: Try to avoid the dead dolphins, sea turtles, manatee and fish!

2010-04-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

I thought this was a great story.

Shannyn Moore
Just a girl from Homer
Posted: April 25, 2010 05:26 PM

Palin's Pinnacle of Hypocrisy

Sarah Palin took the stand Friday in the trial of Former University of Tennessee student David Kernell. Kernell is charged with hacking Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account while Palin campaigned in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Kernell is facing 50 years in prison over this incident. He would be 72 years old when he gets out of prison. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin was asked if she thought the charges against Kernell were excessive:

Palin said, "I don't know, but I do think there should be consequences for bad behavior."

Hmmm...consequences for BAD BEHAVIOR???

This coming from the Quitter Governor of Alaska who:

• used state resources to relentlessly pursue a family vendetta
• took per diem as governor while sleeping in her own bed
• took her kids at state expense on official State of Alaska business trips
• lashed out at socialized "death panel" health care while her family was covered by socialized "death panel" health care
• enjoyed socialized health care in Canada when she growing up and needed it
• has health care provided to her grandson through Indian Health Services
• advocates abstinence when it never worked for her own family
• family members ignored subpoenas and were found in contempt
• and the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on....

But...the pinnacle of Palin's hypocrisy might just be with this trial. "...I do think there should be consequences for bad behavior." Really? What about hers? How about Sarah Palin's hacking into another state employees' computer back in 2004? If hacking into someone's computer is "bad behavior," what were her consequences?

Sarah Palin hacked Randy Ruedrich's computer to find some dirt on him. Here are a few highlights from Richard Mauer's Anchorage Daily News article originally from 2004 but modified in 2008:

Former Oil and Gas Commissioner's Missteps Went Beyond His Partisan Work.
By RICHARD MAUER

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.

Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich's computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

WHAT? She was HACKING? But that's "bad behavior"! That can get you 50 years in federal prison!

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician "said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff," Palin said in an interview. "I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was there."

Yep, you sure were. Right there HACKING a computer.

Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.

Don't get me wrong, Ruedrich isn't exactly on my list of stellar humans. But neither is Sarah. She was accused of a similar "misuse" of office the same year.

Much later, when Ruedrich settled state ethics charges June 22 by paying a record $12,000 civil fine and admitting wrongdoing, Palin said she finally felt some measure of vindication for bucking Ruedrich and members of her party.

Sarah seemed to justify her "bad behavior" of hacking because she found proof of wrong doing. I don't know Mr. Kernell, but I wonder if he thought he might find something proving wrong doing in Sarah's emails. Maybe Mr. Kernell was "bucking" the Republican party.

She quit the commission in frustration on Jan. 16, months before the state's secret investigation and its formal charges became public.

Quit number 654. (Just guessing)

Even Ruedrich's departure provided little clarity, Palin said. As she began the ethics inquiry, she was under orders from the Department of Law to keep it secret from the AOGCC staff, even as she went through his desk and computer and solicited information from others in the office.

I guess the Department of Law couldn't find someone more qualified to lead an investigation into wrong doing. No wonder it took the Feds to crack the Corrupt Bastard Club Case.

"It felt like somebody else should be doing this, because they probably know what to look for," Palin said. "I printed off things that were obvious Republican Party documents, because I figured that's what they meant when they said, 'Get on his computer and send us anything that you believe to be partisan.' "

Sadly, this is not where the hypocrisy ends.

In a blog on her Facebook page Palin called for Obama to boycott the climate conference in Copenhagen. Why? Specifically, the "ClimateGate" email incident. Yes it's been debunked, but she clung to the emails obtained when hackers broke into the accounts of prominent climate scientists. Charges against David Kernell were filed October 8, 2008. More than a year later, November 17, 2009, the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit discovered thousands of emails and documents had been hacked through their server.

Palin didn't blog about the "invasivey, privacy" aspects for the scientists. She wanted the emails of "ClimateGate" investigated, but not the way the feds had reacted to her Yahoo account breach. She wanted proof for her "Rapture-Will-Fix-It" Environmental policy and praised climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe for his grandstanding. Senator Barbara Boxer said during a committee meeting, "You call it 'Climategate'; I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate'." Sarah and Bristol have both testified to the horrors of hackery.
For Scientists?
Crickets.

So...another "do as I say, not as I do" moment in the continuing nauseating saga that is Sarah Palin

2010-04-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

FASCINATING READ

There's A Method to Republican 'Madness'
by Robert Parry | April 1, 2010 - 10:11am

Washington’s conventional wisdom for explaining the intensity of Republican obstructionism toward President Barack Obama breaks down one of two ways: either it’s a philosophical disagreement over the role of government or a desperate need to stay in line with a radicalized right-wing base.

But there is another way to view the GOP political strategy, as neither principled nor reactive to the rantings of Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It is that the Republicans are following a playbook that has evolved over more than four decades, to regain power by sabotaging Democratic presidents.

In this analysis, the Republicans believe they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition “for the good of the country” (and usually do).

The “destroy Obama” game plan tracks most closely with Newt Gingrich’s strategy for undermining Bill Clinton 16 years ago. But today’s strategy also traces back to Richard Nixon’s sabotage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s October Surprise gambit against President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in 1980.

In all four cases – covering the last four Democratic presidencies – the Republicans did not behave as a loyal opposition but rather as a single-minded political enemy that viewed the White House as its birthright and Democratic control of the Executive Branch as illegitimate.

During the first years of Clinton’s presidency, leading Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Dole, actually denounced President Clinton as a “pretender.” They noted that Clinton gained the White House with less than a majority of the popular vote (because of the third-party run of Ross Perot).

Rather than accept Clinton as a legitimate president, the Republicans unleashed their newly minted right-wing media machine (much of it having been assembled during the Reagan-Bush-41 years with the help of conservative foundations and right-wing media moguls).

Magazines, such as The American Spectator, and newspapers, like the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, spread ugly rumors about the Clintons, while radio talk show hosts, such as Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, filled the airwaves with hours and hours of Clinton-bashing.

In Congress, House Republican firebrand Gingrich whipped his party into line against Clinton’s top legislative goals. For the first time, every Republican voted against the federal budget, which included tax increases to rein in the deficit that had surged to unprecedented levels under Reagan and George H.W. Bush (41).

Meanwhile, the escalating anti-Clinton media assault drew in the Washington Post and the New York Times, which were determined to prove they could be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican and thus to shed once and for all the “liberal media” label.

By 1994, the Whitewater “scandal” about an obscure Clinton real-estate investment had become front-page news and a Republican-controlled judicial panel had picked former Reagan-Bush-41 appointee Kenneth Starr to head up an aggressive investigation into the Clintons’ personal finances – and later into their private life.

Back on Capitol Hill, Gingrich's “revolutionaries” rallied – and railed – against Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated health-reform bill.

‘Black Helicopters’

Across the countryside, the harsh language in Congress and the ugly accusations from talk radio fed into a right-wing paranoia. Armed militia groups began forming to resist the threat of “one-world government” and its “black helicopters” arriving from the United Nations to strip away American liberties.

Every day, Americans were confronted with a level of disorder in their political system that they had not seen in decades – and President Clinton took most of the blame for the government disarray.

Having covered CIA destabilization campaigns in Third World countries, particularly Nicaragua, I was struck by the similarities. In the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush-41 administrations destroyed Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista revolution by systematically making the country ungovernable via a combination of economic dislocations, political/media propaganda, and paramilitary activities.

Finally, in 1990, Nicaraguan voters – faced with a choice of electing the U.S.-financed candidate Violeta Chamorro or suffering a continued U.S. economic embargo and a resumption of attacks by U.S.-supported contra rebels – opted to accede to Washington’s desires and voted for Chamorro.

By the second year of the Clinton administration, it seemed something similar was occurring in the United States, in part, because the Reagan-Bush-41 administrations had left behind not only a capacity for “information warfare” in the Third World but a domestic version of that propaganda infrastructure.

Documentary evidence from Reagan’s presidential library now shows that the overseas and domestic propaganda machines were built simultaneously as Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey recruited conservative foundation executives like Richard Mellon Scaife to help finance these activities.

Casey also put a senior CIA propagandist, Walter Raymond Jr., into Reagan’s National Security Council to create an inter-agency propaganda bureaucracy and to oversee its operation. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Reagan’s Propaganda Succeeded.”]

Another major accomplishment of the Reagan administration was the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, which on the surface was intended to finance pro-U.S. political/media entities around the globe.

But NED had another side. Since many of the NED-funded organizations were based in Washington – and since the NED bureaucracy was dominated by neoconservatives – NED, in effect, became a permanent funding mechanism for the neocon community in the U.S. capital.

Ironically, NED, which currently has a $100 million annual budget, may have done more to influence the course of the United States than any of the countries it has targeted for “democratization.” NED funding explains why Washington’s neocons have remained so influential despite their involvement in so many policy disasters, such as the Iraq War.

Even when the neocons find themselves adrift during brief periods out of power, many of them remain afloat with the help of NED grant money. They can hang onto a financial life-preserver tossed from some institute that benefits from the federal funding.

That way, the neocons can continue writing op-eds and books, while weighing in on TV talk shows and at conferences that shape U.S. government policies.

These political/media mechanisms dating back to the Reagan years may have been originally designed to protect the political flanks of a Republican administration, but it turned out they could be put to use just as effectively for offense as for defense.

When Clinton managed to wrest the White House from the Republicans after 12 years of Reagan and Bush-41, the GOP realized that it could well shorten its time out of power by savaging the new President and creating chaos to undermine his political power and his popularity.

Clinton-Hating

In February 1994, I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and was stunned to see the array of Clinton-hating paraphernalia, including slick videos suggesting that Bill Clinton was a murderer and semi-nude photo-shopped images of Hillary Clinton. (Some of the anti-Clinton propaganda was being financed by the same right-wing foundations that had collaborated with Reagan and Casey.)

By early fall 1994, the anti-Clinton hysteria was sweeping the country, though Democrats were mostly oblivious to its ferocity. Shortly before the 1994 elections, I had dinner with a savvy Democratic operative at the Monocle restaurant on Capitol Hill and told him that it looked to me like the Democrats would lose both the House and the Senate.

He responded that I might be right about the Senate but that there was no way the House would fall to the Republicans. A few days later, however, that was exactly what happened.

While the Democrats were slow on the uptake, the Republicans definitely “got” what was happening and why. In celebration, the Gingrich “revolutionaries” made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of the new Republican congressional majority, hailing him as their “national precinct captain.”

Though today’s conventional wisdom holds that a big difference between 1994 and 2010 is that Gingrich had a positive message in his “Contract for America,” that analysis misses the point that it was the tearing down of the Clintons – represented by Limbaugh’s daily tirades – and the impression of national disarray under Clinton that were key to the GOP victory in 1994.

In the years that followed, the anti-Clinton hysteria would have other consequences. On April 19, 1995, right-wing militia fanatic Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb at the Oklahoma City federal building killing 168 people. Limbaugh and others who had stoked the fires of paranoia would angrily deny any suggestion that they had contributed to the catastrophe.

Despite Clinton’s reelection in 1996, the Republicans did not give up their determination to destroy him. In 1998-99, they instituted impeachment proceedings that sought to oust him from office for lying about his extramarital sex life. Though Clinton survived a Senate trial, he and his family were humiliated and Republicans were energized to restore the Reagan-Bush dynasty by putting George W. Bush into the White House, even if he did lose the popular vote to Al Gore.

The same two elements – tearing down a Democratic president and creating a sense of political havoc – are again at the center of Republican strategy, except that today the GOP is even better placed to carry out a repeat than the party was in 1994. Then, there was no Fox News dominating the cable TV ratings and the right-wing media was far less developed than it is today.

Though the Republicans can’t say that Obama wasn’t legitimately elected (he won with 53 percent of the vote and a record 66.8 million ballots), the Right has questioned his legitimacy in other ways, such as the spurious claims that he was born in Kenya despite his Hawaiian birth certificate.

The Tea Party crowd also has decried him as some Islamic-terrorist-loving, America-hating communist, socialist or Nazi – if not the anti-Christ. A popular Tea Party poster shows Obama as a white-faced Joker, the sociopathic character from the latest Batman movie.

With funding from corporate and other right-wing interests, the Tea Partiers also have done their best to create political chaos.

Last summer, Tea Party activists disrupted “town hall” meetings on health care, and this spring, they forced Democratic members of Congress to run a gauntlet of insults and other abuse as they walked to the Capitol to vote on health-care reform – scenes reminiscent of white racists shouting at black students at Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

High-Level Encouragement

The organized chaos even entered the Congress itself, as Republican lawmakers cheered protesters on – and at times acted like them.

Last year, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouted “you lie” at Obama during a presidential address. During the health-care vote, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, yelled “baby killer” while Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan, was speaking against a Republican motion to stop the bill by requiring revised anti-abortion language.

Republican leaders also engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, with House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio declaring that passage of health-care reform would lead to “Armageddon,” a religious reference to the end-times battle between a warrior Jesus and the anti-Christ.

In the days after the health-care vote, the disruptions did spill over into violence, with bricks thrown through the windows of Democratic offices and death threats made against members of Congress. Some militant Tea Partiers vowed to stage an armed rally near Washington.

Though Boehner and a few other Republican leaders finally criticized acts of violence, others continued to wink at the unruly behavior or shift the blame onto the Democrats for talking about it.

"It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, criticizing Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine for "dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon."

For her part, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin defended her advice that her backers should “reload” and her decision to put crosshairs on the districts of endangered Democrats, saying the references had nothing to do with violence. She blamed the controversy on “this BS coming from the lame-stream media, lately, about us inciting violence.”

Amid these mixed messages, right-wing extremists now appear to be shifting from aggressive words and disruptive protests to going operational.

On Monday, FBI agents arrested nine alleged members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group, called Hutaree, charging them with a plot to kill a police officer, bomb the funeral and touch off an armed uprising against the U.S. government. The Hutaree see themselves as at war with the anti-Christ.

Despite the growing specter of political violence, the Republicans appear set in their determination to foment as much disruption as possible between now and the November elections, and thus reap expected gains, with hopes that they can win back the House and Senate and then further neutralize Obama.

Inside-Outside

While some Washington pundits see the Republicans as captives of the extremism on the Right – unable to dismount a dangerous tiger – the counter-analysis would be that the GOP and the Tea Party/militia crowd are just two parts of the same political movement, one inside the system and the other outside, but both working toward the same goal, a restoration of Republican/Right control of government.

In their view, only then would political comity and governmental normalcy be restored, because the Democrats always seem eager to get along and do what’s necessary to make government work.

To refer back to the Nicaragua comparison, the GOP’s inside-outside game is like Nicaragua’s pro-U.S. “internal opposition” operating as a non-violent political arm while the U.S.-funded paramilitary contras wreaked havoc in the countryside, both with the goal of removing the Sandinistas from power.

And as long as this “make-the-political-system-scream” strategy continues to work, it is probably unrealistic to expect the Republicans to disavow it. Washington power and the money that comes with it are so intoxicating that the political risks appear well worth it, especially if Democrats and the American Left don’t have the means or the courage to stand against abuses by Republicans and the Right.

That pattern of acquiescence by the Democrats and the Left dates back to the emergence of this Republican anything-goes strategy more than four decades ago. As audiotapes at LBJ’s presidential library make clear, Johnson was aware of Nixon’s pre-election sabotaging of the Paris peace talks in 1968, but remained silent to avoid risking damage to Nixon’s presidential legitimacy.

Similarly, Jimmy Carter and other leading Democrats, such as former Rep. Lee Hamilton, were aware of substantial evidence that Ronald Reagan’s campaign secretly undercut Carter’s efforts to win the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran in 1980, but the Democrats have chosen to look the other way.

Hamilton, who prides himself on his “bipartisanship,” led a congressional investigation into the Iran-hostage “October Surprise” mystery in 1992, but refused to pursue late-developing evidence pointing to Republican guilt even after his chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella, asked for an extension because so much new information was pouring in by the end of 1992.

Barcella told me later that Hamilton simply ordered the inquiry brought to a close with its finding of Republican innocence. Much of the new evidence implicating the Republicans was then stored away, including a Russian intelligence report confirming secret meetings between Republicans and Iranians. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege]

For his part, ex-President Carter appeared more concerned about the danger of being accused of sour grapes than learning anything new about how the Republicans sank his presidency.

In 1996, while meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, Carter reportedly raised his hands into a physical stop position when Arafat tried to confess to his role in the Republican maneuvering to block Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations.

“There is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said, addressing Carter at a meeting in Arafat’s bunker in Gaza City. “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election.”

Arafat was apparently prepared to provide additional details and evidence, but Carter raised his hands, indicating that he didn’t want to hear anymore.

The Pattern Continues

So, the Republicans have never been made to pay a political price for their scheming to undercut sitting Democratic presidents -- and to grease the GOP’s route back to power. Whenever a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans believe they are free do whatever they want to block him from solving national problems, making him look weak and ineffectual.

That was true of Johnson, Carter, Clinton and now Obama.

This GOP strategy is pursued even if it tarnishes the international image of the United States or if it undermines national security, even if it means more than 20,000 additional U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, or 52 American hostages facing longer captivity in Iran, or the likes of Timothy McVeigh feeling empowered to blow up a federal building.

The strategy continues even if it raises the current threat level against President Obama and Democratic lawmakers. The strategy continues because it works.

2010-03-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Maternal Musings
Every now and then I get this pang, this knot in my stomach, a wave of mixed love, sadness, joy. As I remember the feel of Josh's tiny hand in mine or Cody's little chubby arms around my neck. I remember their little voices, their little faces turned to me, their blissful, unfettered laughter. I see them as they sleep, the peaceful slumber of the innocent and the waves of unfathomable love for them as I smoothed their hair and kissed their beautiful faces.

My boys are moving towards independence...running into to trouble, growing, stretching, falling, tumbling, rebounding, becoming.

Every now and then, I get this rush of love and adoration for them.

I miss the little them.

Now, now they hug me so hard they pop my back as they lift me six inches off the ground.

Now they wave and throw a kiss as they back their truck and SUV out of the driveway, thumping, pumping bass vibrating glass in every window within a block.

Now, he texts “I miss you, mom” randomly from his college campus or spring break with his girlfriend's family.

I get the amazing joy of hearing how my son is kind, courteous, chivalrous, and polite.

From the girlfriend's family.

From the vice principal.

From the teachers.

The beautiful cherubs I brought into this world.

The screaming, insomniac and the prolific eater.

The little toddler that gently stroked his infant brother's head until he fell asleep.

The little guy that threw a rock as hard has he could in a fit of rage and instantly regretted it as it hurled towards his brother 20 feet away.

Damnable athletic talent.

The blistering fights, the starburst of random kindness, the tight, strong, unconditional intertwining of souls.

Brothers.

My boys.

My boys are moving towards adulthood.

I love my work, the people with whom I work. I love my friends and family. I love my husband, I adore him actually. He's a great guy, he's thoughtful and giving. He's funny as hell and he knows me. I didn't think anyone would every really know me. And still be able to be with me. It's weird how we are with ourselves.

So cruel.

It's funny how we latch on to the negative, mean things people say to us, the things that others exhale and leave hanging around our neck, like anchors.

Dragging us down under the weight of phantom judgments and ghost perceptions based on falsehoods.

A thoughtless slight slices through the skin and latches onto our being.
If we are lucky we, we get to a place where we find the love for self. Where we realize that we are who we are as amazing, resourceful, compassionate, mixed up entities with swirling hoola hoops of life experiences encapsulating us, permanent frames of reference that act like buffers from the world, protecting us yet keeping us from all that is available to us.

One three word sentence from a teacher in fifth grade kept me from being creative for almost twenty five years.

It wasn't her fault.

She had no idea how much her words would become part of my being. Upon submitting my very sad little art project, she took one look and said “stick with sports”. In my mind, she was an expert, she was the authority on all that is art, all that is creative and beautiful. And I was told, in my mind, that I was excluded from that world.
We all face obstacles.

We all face trials and challenges.

Some may seem more extreme than others, some actually are.

But no one gets through this life, if they are truly experiencing life, unscathed.

At some point in our lives we have to realize that it is ours. It is up to us that we make it what we want it to be.
My husband loves me.

He adores me.

And I am worthy of that adoration.

And he is worthy of mine.

I believe that he will always be with me and me with him.

And as my boys move towards the lives that they make for themselves, I will accept that through all the setbacks, the obstacles, the times when I thought I couldn't do anymore, that I was failing...miserably, I succeeded as a mother.

I sheltered.

I consoled.

I comforted.

I guided.

I taught.

I loved unconditionally.

And I stepped back and allowed them to fail under my supervision. I always saw them as future husbands, future partners, future roommates that would need to know how to keep themselves fed, housed, laundered, on time, above water.

I taught them to think outside the box, to love, to laugh, to find the joy.

To realize that with every single thing that happens, there is something to be learned, there is something to that will help us to grow.

No matter how awful, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
I look at their friends, their girlfriends, their interactions and I am so proud.

I helped them help themselves and I couldn't be happier to wave goodbye from the front door as they venture into the world as images flash in my mind of the glorious children they used to be, the young men they are now and the wonderful grownups they are becoming.

2010-02-25T17:04:00.001-08:00

Animals in Entertainment Musings

So, what is it going to take?
What has to happen in our society that turns this around and sends us in a different direction?
We had a woman, an innocent neighbor of a woman that decided she could keep a chimpanzee and treat it as a “child”...only it was locked in a cage and was several hundred pounds, that has her face removed . Ripped off her head.
An elephant goes on a crazy rampage.
Tigers attack the man that has spent his entire life training them causing irreparable damage.
And now, a trainer is killed by an Orca at one of these godforsaken, animal entertainment for profit while pretending to be a rehab.
What more has to happen?
How many animals have to be incarcerated, driven mad and act accordingly?
How many more animals are going to be kept in confinement, for a few moments of human entertainment before we strive for the next level of civility?

Animals are traumatically gathered in the wild and hauled into completely incomprehensible and unnatural environments, away from their families, away from all they know, into a world that makes no sense.
I am so over this.
Before, ignorance about the shocking abuse, horrendous living conditions of animals for entertainment, experimentation, fashion and food was the excuse. How could you know when there was no evidence? No documentation. But that is simply not the case anymore. With information literally at your fingertips with access to the internet, there is no excuse. Videos, undercover footage, documentation in every conceivable form. Just a click away.
There is no excuse any more.
For a supposedly civilized society, we do the most uncivilized things to those most dependent upon our civility.

2010-02-19T13:00:00.001-08:00

Memo to Dick Cheney: Ssshhhh, Use Your Indoor Voice
Jeff Schweitzer. Marine Biologist and Former Clinton White House Science Advisor
Posted: February 19, 2010 12:46 PM

Former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared before a fawning crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this week to promote his efforts to create an alternative universe in which truths about terrorism becomes lies and lies become truth. His daughter Liz also served as surrogate mouth piece.

With daddy hanging on her shoulder, nodding approval, Liz had the following to say about the Christmas underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: "There's no polite way to put this, but that kind of incompetence gets people killed." Forgetting 9/11, she actually had the audacity to accuse the Obama administration of missing warnings from the intelligence community that an attack by Yemeni terrorists was imminent. In her haze of amnesia, she went on to decry the "incompetence, misjudgment and presidential neglect" and that, "There is no doubt that the daily intelligence briefings that the president receives contained much more information on the threat from Yemen."

Let us remind Liz of the damning memo sitting on the desk of Condy Rice and in her father's in-box one full month before the attacks of September 11, 2001. On August 6, 2001, the Presidential Daily Brief had the following title: "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." The intelligence briefing stated that the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." More to the point the document expressed concern that al Qaeda had been "considering ways to hijack American planes" to use as weapons to fly into buildings. The President and Vice President were told that "Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike." In May 2001, an intelligence report noted that al Qaeda was attempting to send operatives into the United States to carry out an attack using explosives. To take Liz's own words, "there is no doubt that the daily intelligence briefings that the president receives contained much more information on the threat" from al Qaeda.

So yes, Liz, you are right, we do need to be deeply concerned about the "incompetence, misjudgment and presidential neglect" as you note, but you have the wrong president. The problem is Bush/Cheney, not Obama/Biden. We now know that Cheney and Bush ignored explicit and repeated warnings about al Qaeda attacks, including the use of hijacked airplanes. There is no polite way to put this, but we sadly know that this kind of incompetence gets people killed, as the grieving families of the 3000 lost in the World Trade Center attacks will attest. That blood is on Cheney's hand, and no amount of spinning and rewriting history will cleanse that stain.

In one of the oddest developments in our history, after the September attack voters and the media meekly accepted the bizarre idea that somehow Bush and Cheney were free of responsibility pre-9/11. That claim is ridiculous and deeply offensive to any thinking person. The notion that somehow Cheney is not guilty of neglect prior to 9/11 is nothing but another sick attempt to rewrite history with smoke and mirrors. September 11 happened on Cheney's watch, and he had plenty of intelligence to warn of the event. That is simply an undeniable fact. Neglect, mismanagement and the fog of arrogance allowed the plot to succeed. Cheney's attempt to divert attention from his misdeeds and incompetence by attacking Obama is disgusting. No matter how many times they repeat otherwise Cheney and Bush are fully and completely responsible for allowing the 9/11 attack to take place.

Cheney's assault on Obama is even more disingenuous given the incident with Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an airplane with his shoe bomb just a few months after 9/11. Bush and Cheney had clamped down hard, steamrolling over civil rights, and instituting new security measures, but that did not prevent a terrorist from walking onto a plane with a bomb on their watch. The incident spotlighted a gaping hole in homeland security even after Bush and Cheney could no longer use the nauseating "pre-9/11" as an excuse for gross incompetence.

Cheney views Obama as weak because Obama expects to act within the constraints of the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Obama is weak because he believes in the vision put forth by our Founding Fathers by giving those arrested the rights others before us sacrificed so much to protect. (Forget that we have evidence that processing Umar through the civil courts has led to extensive cooperation that likely will prevent future attacks). In stark contrast, Cheney believes, incredibly, that "whatever the president does during war is legal." He actually uttered those fascist words and repeated them on national television. He means quite clearly that the president can, during an endless war on terror, authorize against American citizens such heinous crimes such as beatings, torture, murder, property confiscation, indefinite detention with no representation, and unlimited warrantless spying, if the president alone decides such actions advance the cause of war. Cheney believes and openly declared that the president's powers are unlimited. History has shown what unlimited power brings, and that is Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler. Yet Cheney went on Fox News and claimed that our president, the President of the United States of America, has the same unlimited powers as those monsters. Whatever the president does is legal. That is the most frightening declaration any public official in our history has ever made. Those views should marginalize Cheney to the backwaters of American history. Instead this is the guy attacking Obama in full glory with no hint of his extraordinary radicalism in his news coverage.

Cheney believes we must sacrifice our civil rights to protect them; that we have to burn the village to save it. He is wrong at the most fundamental, deepest levels. The war on terror is not the first existential threat we have faced. We have fought and prevailed in the past without sacrificing everything our founders created, and we will do so again. Sadly, Cheney just does not get that basic point. After many public denials, Cheney finally owned up to his role in authorizing torture, after years of denying any involvement. He did so without even a hint of concern that he blatantly lied to the American people for his entire term in office. He lied about Valerie Plame. He lied about wiretapping. He lied about Iraq. He hides his records and secret meetings by making the weird claim he is not part of the Executive Branch. He has no regard truth or the essence of our history.

So we have a man who willingly discards the basic principles embedded in our Constitution attacking the president for upholding the law of the land. We avert our eyes from that absurdity rather than confront Cheney's twisted assertions.

We have the double standard and awesome hypocrisy in Cheney's approach to Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Other than some feeble objections from John Stewart the lies go unchallenged.

We have the man most responsible for neglecting to prevent 9/11 attacking Obama for a foiled attack of much smaller magnitude. His claim is largely reported without pointing out the obvious conflict with historic fact.

Everything about Cheney perverts the truth. His views on national security are sick and paranoid. His dark apocalyptic vision of a United States led by a dictator with limitless power to protect us from an external evil by trampling civil liberties has no place in the bright American landscape. He needs to keep his voice down so that sane adults can have a conversation.

But I know that will not happen, so I again bow to reality. In a previous blog I urged Republicans to make Sarah Palin their candidate in 2012. I now have an additional wish: that Palin make Cheney her running mate. The election in 2012 should be a clear mandate from the voters on whether the United States is going to become a theocratic dictatorship or remain a sectarian democracy as originally conceived. A Palin-Cheney ticket perfectly represents the former, and so I can think of no better way to give the American voters the choice they deserve. We are at a fork in the road of our history, and we will choose one path or the other. There is no middle lane. We can no longer pretend that the two paths represent different approaches to the same goal and that they eventually meet somewhere down the line. They do not. The paths are forever divergent; a democratic society based on the rule of law cannot coexist with a police state driven by zealotry and religious passion. The two choices we face lead to radically different futures, each incompatible with the other, never to reconcile into a shared vision. So let's choose and give the American people exactly what want, whatever that turns out to be.

2010-02-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

What to Say to Those Who Think Single Payer Advocates Are Wacko
Published on Monday, February 8, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

by Paul Hochfeld

What do we say to our more conservative friends, who genuinely think that the Single Payer solution to our health care crisis would be a disaster? Try what follows. In the end, you may simply agree to disagree. That’s O.K., but what follows may give them pause to think.

Already, 60% of all our health care dollars come directly or indirectly (because employers insurance premiums are tax deductible) from the taxpayer. The care of our oldest neighbors are financed by Medicare, i.e. the taxpayers. The care of our disabled neighbors is financed by Medicaid. Ditto the care of our poorest neighbors who, because health follows wealth, are also at greater risk of high expense. Fourteen hundred insurance companies, at significant expense, stratify the rest of the population by “risk”. Their top-secret formula results in them covering the employed people, small groups, and individuals who can prove that they are at low risk. What about the others? When those who can’t afford the premiums get sick, go bankrupt, and can’t pay their bills, “we” all pay for it in higher charges. Furthermore, employer-paid premiums are tax deductible which means insurance company profits are subsidized by the taxpayer.

As near as I can tell, this is a big taxpayer rip-off. Additionally, our non-system is fraught with numerous perverse incentives that result in more care, but not necessarily better care. Physicians must share a significant part of the blame here, but that’s a different, though important, discussion. Addressing these perversities is problematic because we don’t have a Health Care System we have For-Profit Sick Care Non-System that, to extent that it has any design at all, is designed to serve the for-profit insurance and the pharmaceutical industries. Perverse incentives work for those who profit from them. They don’t work for patients or those who pay the bills, i.e., taxpayers.

Single payer means one risk pool. You’ve heard the slogan. Everyone in. Nobody out. We gather all the money that employers and individuals are currently paying for health care. It’s not more money. It’s the same money, already being spent on health care, but by pooling it, we can save 20% right off the top. Providers won’t have negotiate fee schedules with all the different payers. Providers will only have to send bills, electronically, to one place. Furthermore, substantial savings accrue as the system matures. When an ER Doctor in Oregon sees a patient passing through town, he will access her electronic medical record in Iowa, resulting in, not just less expensive care, but better care. None of this is going to be accomplished until we have Public Health Authorities administering a health care system with the goal of health, financed publicly and delivered privately.

This isn’t pie in the sky. Check out what the other developed countries are doing, but please don’t respond with anecdotes. We have 45,000 new anecdotes every year that illuminate how real or perceived financial barriers to timely, appropriate care cause unnecessary death.

The real question is whose “system” produces the least number of unnecessary deaths and the least suffering for the dollars being spent? Yes, other countries are struggling because of limited resources, but they are dealing with the problems maturely, they are making difficult decisions, and, by recognizing that health is a human right, they are getting a healthier population for less cost.

Is access to appropriate health care a human right? If not, we can agree to disagree. If so, it is a legitimate function of our government to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks. Also, doesn’t the government have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure the taxpayer is getting value for its health care dollars? Insurance company CEO’s have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits even if it means investing large sums of money in manipulating public policy… and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. It’s unfathomable to me that some people distrust “The United States” more than United Health Care. That may be where we end up agreeing to disagree.

In any case, the taxpayer is being ripped off, big time.

2010-02-09T05:02:00.000-08:00

The Story That No One Will Tell
by Rep. Alan Grayson.
Congressman Alan Grayson represents Central Florida (FL-8).

The story that everyone wants to tell is that the Democratic Party is disheartened and disintegrating. Teabagger Republicans are juiced up and on top. Or so the media says, over and over again.

But the House candidate who raised the most money in the entire country during the last FEC reporting period -- $860,000 in three months -- is not a teabagger. He is not boosted relentlessly by Fox News. He's not even a Republican. He doesn't think that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that President Obama was born in Kenya, or that global warming is a hoax.

This House candidate also, remarkably, had the largest number of contributors. Over 15,000 individuals contributed, many of whom have given time after time, whatever they could. The House candidate who raised the most money did so without French-kissing lobbyists, without flattering the idle rich, and without reaching into his own pocket.

The House candidate who raised the most money, from the most people, is an outspoken populist who tells it like it is on the war, on jobs, and on health care. His website is called CongressmanWithGuts.com. In the 100,000 e-mails that he has received this year, the most common refrain is, "You are saying what I've been thinking."

I know who he is. Because he's me.

But no one has reported that the House candidate who raised the most money, from the most people, is a proud Democratic populist. No one.

There are something like ten thousand political reporters in this country, maybe more. The information above is readily available. Anyone could have visited an official government website, www.fec.gov, any time this past week, and seen it for themselves. We did our part -- we sent out two news releases, both local and nationwide. But in lieu of any actual reporting in the media, there is instead what Simon & Garfunkel vividly described as the "Sounds of Silence":

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

The political reporters camped out in D.C. often act like a giant Xerox machine for the fib factory known as the national Republican Party. Recently, they saw fit to report (and repeat, and repeat) the Republican Party's crackpot claim that we are withholding a secret poll with bad news in it for us. (We aren't; there is no such poll, but the Republican Party is soooo good at manufacturing plausible lies.) Not one word from those reporters, though, about what would seem to be an irresistible "feel good" story -- that thanks to People Power, that brash, plain-spoken Democratic Congressman from Orlando is the Number One fundraiser in the country. Nothing about that.

The fact that an unapologetic progressive Democrat could amass such support, not by trading favors for money, but by striking a chord with so many ordinary people, refutes the pervasive meme of Democrats divided and despondent. Particularly when it's a Democrat who says that "you can't beat a Republican by being one." Particularly a Democrat who quotes Harry Truman and Howard Dean: "If you run a fake Republican against a real Republican, the real Republican will win every time."

Freshman Democrat Alan Grayson, number one in the country. The story that no one will tell. It doesn't fit their preconceptions. So you're just not going to hear about it.

Unless you happen to read the Huffington Post.

2010-01-25T09:17:00.000-08:00

When the media is the disaster
In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, false depictions of victims as criminals hinder the relief effort
By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter."

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you're pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn't likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply's long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don't think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they're people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven't shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn't mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It's pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn't obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word "looting" from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

"Loot," the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out "At one time loot was the soldier's pay." It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers' pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don't believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn't even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it's usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don't need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word "panic" wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of "stampedes." Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it "security" -- rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery "risks sparking chaos." The chaos already exists, and you can't blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they're unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti's dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they've never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that's theft, but I'm not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it's not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I've heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn't label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing ... Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that "some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don't end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: "The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one."

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn't help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it's bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England's green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be "violence," or "looting," or "law-breaking." It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don't have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I'd like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let's start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: "Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti's starving millions."

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? "As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti."

For the murdered policeman: "Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings."

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: "Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world."

That one might not be totally accurate, but it's likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, "A Paradise Built in Hell," is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

2010-01-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

My husband and I saw Food Inc. To me, it is “must” viewing for every American. Not because it glimpses the horror that is the life of the factory farm animal in the United States but because it shows how our food, our sustenance, our “fuel” has been hijacked by the corporate machine.
It's not that I am anti-business. I am absolutely not. What I am against is a few owning most. Because when a few own most we get corruption, we get manipulation, we get monopoly.
Which is what is happening in our food production. Farmers are literally indentured servants – forced to get loans to provide the required CAFOs for the giants like Tyson, and then continuous mandated to revise filtration systems and overhaul the feeding apparatus to company mandates, going further and further in debt. If they refuse, the corporate giants pull their contracts, and they are left with nothing.
Monsanto has copyrights on seeds. Yes. That's right. Seeds. So when the farmers plant their crops, they are not allowed to gather the seeds following the harvest. Should they employ a seed cleaner (a massive machine that separates the seeds from the dirt and other matter after harvest – which by the way have been destroyed or requisitioned so that they are a very rare machine indeed) to gather the seeds for the next harvest, Monsanto or like corporations destroy them financially by bringing in their arsenal of big time law firms and burying them in legal debt.
Those that speak out about the horrendous conditions that they endure, that the animals endure, are silenced by having their livelihoods destroyed.
The corporations would not speak to the film maker. They would not allow any kind of tour of the facilities where OUR FOOD COMES FROM.
The film maker made it abundantly clear that the only way this exists is by perpetuating the “farm” myth. The green grass, the “happy” cows, the fresh air, the rolling hills, ma and pa farmer tending to the animals. Every package depicts this utopian scene and nothing could be farther from the truth.

We don't want to know.
We don't want to see.
It is easier to go to the grocery store and pick up those items without thinking about HOW it got there. If we have a family, if we work, if we are involved in our communities, we barely have time to get our basic household chores done without reading every label, without investigating every thing that we purchase. For crying out loud, isn't that what the FDA or USDA is for? Don't they have standards?

We have allowed it to get away from us. Our food has been hijacked and we have allowed it because we have been told that the highest standards have been met, and that it is good for us and that it has been geared to bring the highest quality at a cheaper price. And we are so terribly terribly busy. We are trying to work, to spend time with our friends and family, to get exercise, to do volunteer work, to be involved with our churches and neighbors. Animals that cannot process corn are being fed corn because it is highly subsidized and it is cheap. The fact that they cannot process the corn means that they are more susceptible to disease so they are pumped full of antibiotics. With the overuse of antibiotics comes the inevitable creation of super resistant bacteria and bugs.

And then we get to the incubator of deadly viruses and illnesses that are cultivated in the breeding ground that is intensive confinement. Thousands of animals stacked on top of each other, so packed together they can't move, cattle standing in mountains of their own waste, in buildings with no access to clean air, water, or anything that is considered natural in their environment or behavior, dead animals , diseased animals in with the living. How is it possible to NOT have deadly diseases, horribly debilitating viruses and bacteria flourishing in these cesspools?

The thing is, you don't have to be vegan, you don't even have to be a vegetarian. All you have to be is aware. You have to be vocal. You have to demand that your food, the food you put in your body will not be tainted. You have to buy local. You have to find out which retailers are purchasing food from ethical sources, from ranchers that feed their animals food that can be processed by the animals. You have to use your wallet to determine what will be supplied. If you demand it, it will be supplied. Remember that guy that was going to sue Nabisco for the transfat in Oreos? How they mocked him and talked about frivolous lawsuits? That guy got the media to take notice of trans fat, and its inherent adverse toll on the human body AND change occurred. Now, trans fat is a thing of the past. It takes all of us deciding to cut back a bit and buy things that are better for us. Sure, the dollar menu is tempting and when you have no money, it is impossible to pass up. But at what cost? What we need is alternatives. We need to make it happen for ourselves. Grassroots movements can create co-ops where local growers, local ranchers, local farmers can collectively bring their goods to the public.

But what you can do right now is this:
BUY LOCAL.
BUY FROM FARMERS MARKETS
BUY SEASONAL.
BUY HUMANELY RAISED, APPROPRIATELY FED ANIMAL PRODUCTS
and watch FOOD INC.

Contact your representatives. Tell them that want better oversight of our food supply. Demand it.

2010-01-01T07:49:00.001-08:00

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville

2009-12-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

Sure! Drill baby drill! New technologies! Safer! Cleaner! Even in environmentally sensitive areas!

Except for......Alaska oil spill now up to 100 gallons
Just last week, BP said the release involved an estimated 3 gallons of oil
By Associated Press

BP now estimates as much as 100 gallons of crude oil may have spilled in an area around a well house where a pipe broke in the Prudhoe Bay oil field, Alaska officials said Tuesday. BP's initial estimate was 3 gallons of oil.

The spill, discovered Dec. 21, came from a 6-inch line carrying a mixture of crude oil, water and natural gas, said spokesman Weld Royal of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. As of Tuesday, BP's updated estimate is that 300 to 700 gallons of liquid spilled, with as much as 100 gallons of that being crude oil. Last week, BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said the release involved an estimated 3 gallons of oil and 131 gallons of water.

Environmental Conservation officials acknowledge it's difficult to accurately assess spill volume where several liquids are involved, Royal said.

Royal said about six acres of snow-covered tundra, gravel pad and reserve pit have been affected. About 386 cubic yards of contaminated snow have been removed and stockpiled for transport to a temporary staging area.

The spill was discovered by a BP oil field operator doing a routine inspection. The break in the 6-inch line occurred where the production line left the well house.

* Continue Reading

Tom DeRuyter, the state's on-scene spill coordinator, said an investigation continues into why the line separated.

Cleanup workers will continue to remove contaminated snow near the well house using hand tools, Royal said. A skid loader will be used to clean a more heavily oiled area near the well house and reserve pit. Also, the well house will be removed to allow heavy equipment access to the more heavily contaminated area.

BP operates the Prudhoe Bay oil field -- North America's largest oil field.

Last month, one of the North Slope's biggest spills -- 46,000 gallons of oil, water and natural gas -- was reported at the Lisburne oil field, another BP-operated site. That spill occurred when an 18-inch line split on Nov. 29. The cause of that spill is believed to be ice buildup in the line.

Lois Epstein, an Anchorage consultant on pipeline safety, said the recent spills highlight a long-standing problem on the North Slope in certain pipelines that carry oil, gas and water. For decades those lines, unlike transit lines that carry oil after processing, have been unregulated by the federal government, she said. The flow lines were placed under state regulation only recently.

2009-10-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

>What's truly stunning to me is that the ultra-conservative contingent of the republican party has endorsed Perry. The guy that made a huge show of declining bailout money but showed up at the back door with an application for funds when no one was looking.

Perry's Secret Jerusalem Trip Raises Questions

Reporting Bennett Cunningham

The city of Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world and it has a new defender: Texas Governor Rick Perry.

In August, Perry was given the "Defender of Jerusalem" award. So Perry and his wife flew first class to Israel at more than $5,000 per ticket. The governor's security detail of four Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers was also along for the trip.

They all took the 7,000 mile journey to accept the award at a time when the governor was asking everyone else in state government to cut back on travel. During a speech in Houston, Perry directed state agencies to "curtail taxpayer funded travel."

According to state documents, the taxpayers' bill just to take Perry's security officers on the 5-day trip was more than $70,000. The breakdown includes $17,000 for rooms at the swanky King David Hotel, nearly $13,000 for food and more than 350 hours of overtime.

The specific price tag for the governor and his wife are secret. So when CBS 11 asked to see the governor's expense records for the trip, we received four pages and no specifics. Perry refused to do a formal interview with us and would only say, "Going to Israel or other countries is a wise investment for the state of Texas."

Keith Elkins is executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. Elkins and his organization fight for government transparency. Elkins says, "This Governor operates under the premise of 'believe what I say, not what I do.'" While Elkins suggests, "There is something else going on here," he doesn't know what that 'something' is.

Records obtained by CBS 11 show the governor's airfare and trip costs for he and his wife were paid for by Irwin Katsof, a financier for energy companies around the world. And the man who presented Perry with the Defender of Jerusalem award, Guma Aguiar, owns a company that made billions of dollars in the Texas natural gas industry. Aguiar also created the award given to Perry.

Just two weeks before Aguiar and Perry posed for pictures in Israel, Aguiar posed for a mug shot in Florida. He was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of marijuana. Aguiar pleaded no contest.

Sheila Krumholz is the executive director of the Washington D.C. based Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the effect of money on public policy. She says, "There is just too much of a potential for a conflict of interest with these trips particularly with privately sponsored trips." Krumholz also wonders, "Is this the real deal or a sleight of hand to provide political cover of those attending?"

CBS 11 obtained a list of people on the trip. The organizers describe those attending as "an elite cadre of 20 executives in, gas and oil, biotech, finance and technology." The list includes an out of state Congresswoman and Texas Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo, whose agency regulates the oil and natural gas industry in Texas.

Carrillo says he paid his own way but refused to show CBS 11 any of his expenses. Also on the list of travelers: a host of energy executives, the governor's family -- which included his son's fiancée -- and a member of the State Senate Committee on Natural Resources, Juan Hinojosa of McAllen. Hinojosa told us the trip was not about energy. "I don't recall discussions about oil and gas with the business people there," he said.

The governor and others met with the President of Israel, the Prime Minster and Israeli soldiers. They toured the old city of Jerusalem and snapped photos of Aggie souvenirs (the governor is a graduate of Texas A&M). Perry even took time to do an interview with an Israeli TV station. Remember, the governor is doing all this while asking other state employees to "curtail travel."

Like the governor, State Senator Hinojosa's entire trip was paid for by Katsof, the financier. Hinojosa also received the Defender of Jerusalem Award. But unlike the governor's four pages of documents, Hinojosa gave us everything he had -- fully disclosing the nature of the trip.

Hinojosa maintains there was no conflict of interest by accepting the trip. "We as public officials have to make decision on public policy. Not who contributes money or pays for a trip," he explained. But Krumholz disagreed, saying, "This trip raises real concerns for the potential for a secret junket."

The trip also had its share of perks. CBS 11 obtained private emails and found the organizer, Katsof, asked attendees what kind of scotch they preferred for a "scotch and cigar bar" where they would admire "a starry Jerusalem." Krumholz says trips like this "can be a lucrative way to conduct business. You pay for vacation and in return you may get contracts or government brokered deals worth millions of dollars."

In late May a Texas appellate court ruled that all DPS expense reports for the governor's security detail were to be made public. A few days later, the state legislature passed a bill to get around that court ruling, allowing DPS to hide the expense reports of the governor's security detail from public view. The law took effect immediately.

2009-10-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

LIEBERMAN THE LYING WANKER

from Chattahbox.com

Lieberman’s 60th vote is needed to get the Senate bill to the floor and overcome a Republican filibuster. And once again, he is abandoning the Democratic Party when he is most needed. Despite his campaigning for Sen. McCain during the presidential election and speaking out in opposition to candidate Barack Obama during the RNC, Majority Leader Harry Reid still welcomed Lieberman back into the fold and allowed him to retain his committee assignments.

During Lieberman’s 2006 Senate run as an Independent, after losing the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, Lieberman campaigned heavily for single payer, universal health insurance for all:

“What I’m saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance,” Lieberman said during a July, 2006, debate.

Lieberman also supported a proposal called, “MediChoice,” which would “allow anybody in our country to buy into a national insurance pool like the health insurance pool that we federal employees and Members of Congress have.”

Lieberman also promised his health insurance plans would cover “95 percent of those who are not covered now, and it will reduce the pressure on rising costs for all the millions of others.”

Three years later apparently, Sen. Lieberman is now strongly opposed to even a watered down state opt-out public option. In recent days, Lieberman has puffed up his chest and taken his disingenuous “I’m against the public option” road show to Fox News band any other media outlet that would have him.

One day Lieberman claims he opposes the opt-out public option, because it would raise the deficit and increase the burden on taxpayers. The next day he makes a contradictory argument, claiming a public option would reduce rates paid to health care providers, which would result in higher costs to consumers.

2009-10-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

JOE LIEBERMAN SUCKS

Howard Kurtz (WAPO) writes:

This from a senator who, as much as anyone, helped run up the national debt since 9/11 by pushing to raise the military budget to its highest level since World War II. It is a budget inflated by enormous expenditures on high-tech weaponry irrelevant to combating terror, such as the $2-billion-a-piece submarines -- produced in his home state of Connecticut -- that he claimed were needed to combat al-Qaida, a landlocked enemy holed up in caves. Lieberman is worried about the impact of a very limited public option on the debt the same week as he and others in Congress passed a $680-billion defense bill larded with pork of the sort the Connecticut senator has always supported. . . .

Maybe he can also take some time then to justify his strong support for the government bailout of troubled banking and insurance companies that has tripled the federal deficit this year to $1.4 trillion. Is AIG not now a 'government-run insurance company,' and doesn't the $185 billion of taxpayer money thrown at that sorry enterprise add up to more than twice the yearly cost of the health reform package?

2009-10-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

Good People Musings

I know a lot of good people. I mean, a lot of really good, thoughtful, kind, compassionate, dear people. This is not about them.

This is about a couple of people that I heard today that were such a resoundingly refreshing gust of crisp, cool and wonderful air that I feel the need to share.

Alan Grayson

You probably know him as the guy that said the republican health care plan is if you get sick, die quickly. Today I heard him in a committee meeting when he requested the opportunity to ask questions of Broun (Republican Rep from Georgia, I think) who has initiated legislation which, again, attempts to pull all funding from ACORN. He coolly asks if Broun knows what bills of attainer are. This is something specifically called out as unconstitutional as it attempts to spearhead legislation towards a particular entity in an effort to punish. Essentially, it is a way to bypass the judicial branch and the legal system. Grayson is repeatedly asked to relinquish his time to which he empathically says no - until he graciously cedes his time at 5 seconds. Broun squirms and fidgets whining about how this isn't that but it is blatantly obvious that this effort is exactly that and Grayson has the cohones to say so. Rock. Star.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

Elizabeth Warren.

Yet another blissfully sensical, logical, graceful discussion regarding the financial institutions and how our government has enabled them to hijack the financial system. At one point she says that she teaches constitutional law at Harvard, yet she doesn't understand her credit card. She says that there is a perfectly legal line in every 30 to 45 page legal agreement attached to a credit card whereby it states that the credit card company can charge any amount, at any time for any reason and the holder is required by law to pay it. She said that every single item we touch, taste, feel, see is regulated to be safe and has basic standards to which it must adhere - i.e. toasters must be made in such a way that they don't blow up upon use, yet nothing like that exists for our financial system. Great. Woman.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/elizabeth-warren-speaks-w_n_329425.html

2009-10-20T05:07:00.000-07:00

The Evil Public Option

(from the funpie weblog)

In the town where I grew up, there were a couple of mom and pop bookstores, one called Borders, and one called Barnes & Noble. These small businesses, the backbone of our economy, provided a wide array of reading material, music and games, along with coffee and scones. Each also provided a type of membership card. The one from Borders was free, and entitled holders to additional discounts on books and free desserts on their birthdays. The one from Barnes & Noble cost $25 and entitled holder to save at least $25 over the course of purchasing something like another $1000 worth of books. Both were a great deal, and these little mom and pop stores provided each other with a healthy competition in the spirit of the American Dream.

Then one day, a “public option” was forced upon my little town. This government-run public option – some called it a “library,” I called it a nazi-loving beauracratic nightmare – had the audacity to swoop down and start offering books to people for FREE! How in the hell could our little mom and pops ever hope to compete with that?!? This evil library also gave out membership cards, and anyone who had one could take home a whole STACK of books for up to a MONTH at a time!!! Sure, sometimes people had to wait a little bit for access to bestsellers, and since books had to be returned you couldn’t give them as gifts or keep them on your shelves to show people how well-read you were, but still. No one on the planet could possibly compete with this kind of undermining of the free market.

Soon after this public option library came to town, Borders and Barnes & Noble were forced to close up their small businesses, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, and bringing us one step closer to Stalinist Russia. That is why I will never again support a public option of any kind for anything. I love America too much. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the post-office, which means I have to drive all the way past the fire house, the public elementary school and the police station, so I’d better get going.

2009-10-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

Quick Musings

As anyone can tell you, I believe in close and firm monitoring of those entities involved in the financial system. Clear and present reform as well. But it appears that our tendency is to focus on the label rather than the content. There are swirlings of outrage regarding Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was a huge company. Thousands of people worked for that entity. Thousands. Was each and every single person involved in that company tainted, a money grabber that threw our country into economic ruin? Was each and every employee at Enron corrupt? Judging by the outrage, the crying, the blank, bewildered looks by those carrying their belongings from the building in cardboard boxes the answer would have to be no. It is our way to sweepingly swipe at an entire entity - Iran (all of Iran), California, Wall Street, Conservatives, Liberals - and cast all out. Baby. Bath water. Let's show a little insight, a little maturity, and little bit of wisdom.

Healthcare

You can say socialism. You can say the 1/6th of our economy. You can say people helping themselves. But what this all boils down to is that our system is broken and pointing at the paint job, pointing at the low air in the wheels, griping about the sound system has nothing to do with fixing the engine. The engine is broken and we are fixing it. Eventually if we get our way, insurance companies will cease to exist. That is my hope. We have to get people well. Only those that have no exposure to the real world, only those that have not seen the devastating effects of pain, of fear, of chronic illness, the stress of the impending cost of getting oneself well say that reform is not needed. Only those that have not seen people destroyed by illness can wag their finger and talk about laziness and bootstraps. STFU. 99.9% of people do not want to be a burden. They want to do for themselves. They want to contribute. You are not the only human being in the world with tenacity and ambition and the drive to do well. What you feel is what we all feel. However when you are ill to the point that you cannot function at 20% let alone 100% no amount of ambition and gumption will change it. You can judge and mock and castigate but it changes nothing. Those unable to do for themselves MUST be helped by those that can. It is our obligation as a compassionate society. Isn't it funny, how we run to help those in other countries affected by famine, natural disaster or are victims of war but we look down our nose at those in our own country that just need a temporary hand up? I hurt my back and for 4 weeks I was in pain. During that short time, I felt my entire personality change. Pain is a personality killer. It is exhausting. It is physically and emotionally devastating. You cannot do what you need to do. You cannot emotionally or psychologically invest. You don't have it to invest. That was one month. What about those in pain for 6 months, a year, five years, ten?

Enough of the judging. We are a society by and for the people. We must care for those that need help. If it is indefinitely, then so be it. I don't mind. That is what I was put on this earth to do. Contribute, create, care. I was put here to do for others and for myself. It is not my job to judge those that come back twice, thrice or indefinitely for assistance. Something in their lives has made that a reality. It is not my place to judge.

Peggy Noonan / George Will

Can go to hell.

Faux News

Is the oasis for the fanatical rightwing and ultra conservatives. There is no other place for them where they get that agenda 24/7. The ratings are high because there is no dilution. MSNBC, CNN etc. have a centrist if not a left leaning view. There is much dilution. I can switch from 6 to 10 outlets and get a pretty good idea of what's going on. Turn to Faux News and I get one that is whack I can't even believe they aren't in hystericals on a regular basis.

Best Friends

There is nothing better than having a best friend. I am fortunate that outside my family (my mom, sister, my wonderful husband) I have Lori. Lori is the easiest, the most fun, the most compatible person to me that I have ever met. I don't need a bunch of people that I call friends. Just a couple close people. I am so blessed.

Paul

I missed Paul a lot this week. I feel his presence every day but I feel his spirit always. I miss his voice, his wit, his input.

2009-10-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Beyond the Fringe Right Reaction

Here is a round-up of world reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Obama as reported by news agencies.

UN SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN KI-MOON

We are entering an era of renewed multilateralism, a new era where the challenges facing humankind demand global common cause and uncommon global effort. President Obama embodies the new spirit of dialogue and engagement on the world's biggest problems: climate change, nuclear disarmament and a wide range of peace and security challenges.

FRENCH PRESIDENT NICOLAS SARKOZY

It confirms, finally, America's return to the hearts of the people of the world... you can count on my resolute support and that of France.

ANGELA MERKEL, GERMAN CHANCELLOR

In a short time he has established a new tone, creating a willingness for dialogue and I think we all should support him to make peace in this world possible. There is a lot do but a window of opportunity has been opened. His advocacy of a world free of nuclear arms is an aim we all need to make real in the next few years.

YUKIO HATOYAMA, JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER

I am really pleased. I want to congratulate him from my heart. I've seen the world changing since President Obama took office. It was outstanding when he made the speech in Prague calling for a nuclear-free world.

NATO SECRETARY GENERAL ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN

President Obama has made extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples.

He has also demonstrated his strong commitment to help build peace and defend fundamental human rights, including through the atlantic alliance. This honour is well deserved.

MOHAMED ELBARADEI, HEAD OF THE INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER

There is nobody today in my view who is more deserving of that peace prize than Barack Obama. In less than a year he brought a radical change in the way we look at ourselves, in the way we look at our world. He is restoring the basic core values that every one of us should live by - dialogue, respect, democracy, due process, human rights, a security system that does not depend on nuclear weapons. His dedication to these values rekindles hope that, finally, we could have a world at peace with itself.

IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER MANOUCHEHR MOTTAKI

We have no objection if this prize is an incentive to reverse the warmongering and unilateral policies of the previous US administration and if this encourages a policy based on just peace.

The appropriate time for awarding such a prize is when foreign military forces leave Iraq and Afghanistan and when one stands by the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people.

SIAMAK HIRAI, SPOKESMAN FOR AFGHAN PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI

We congratulate Obama for winning the Nobel. His hard work and his new vision on global relations, his will and efforts for creating friendly and good relations at global level and global peace make him the appropriate recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID

We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan. He has not taken a single step for peace in Afghanistan or to make this country stable.

We condemn the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama. We condemn the institute's awarding him the peace prize. We condemn this year's peace prize as unjust.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER

You have already inspired so many people around the world, and I know that this award also expresses the hope that your presidency will usher in a new era of peace and reconciliation. Nowhere is such a peace needed more than in the Middle East, a region that has been long marked by terror and bloodshed.

I look forward to working closely with you in the years ahead to advance peace and to give hope to the peoples of our region who deserve to live in peace, security and dignity.

CHIEF PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY NEGOTIATOR SAEB EREKAT

We hope that he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East and achieve Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establish an independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital.

HAMAS LEADER ISMAIL HANIYEH

We are in need of actions, not sayings. If there is no fundamental and true change in American policies toward the acknowledgment of the rights of the Palestinian people, I think this prize won't move us forward or backward.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, FORMER SOVIET LEADER AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNER

I am happy. What Obama did during his presidency is a big signal, he gave hope. In these hard times, people who are capable of taking responsibility, who have a vision, commitment and political will should be supported.

SOUTH AFRICAN ARCHBISHOP AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER DESMOND TUTU

He's not even finished a year in his first term of office of a relatively young president. It's an award that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our world a safer place for all.

FORMER POLISH PRESIDENT AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNER LECH WALESA

So soon? This is too soon. He has not yet made a real input. He is still at an early stage. He is only beginning to act.

This is probably an encouragement for him to act. Let's see if he perseveres.

FORMER US PRESIDENT AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER JIMMY CARTER

It is a bold statement of international support for his vision and commitment to peace and harmony in international relations. It shows the hope his administration represents not only to our nation but to people around the world.

FORMER US VICE-PRESIDENT AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER AL GORE

I think it's extremely well deserved. I think it will take some time before people put together all the different moves that linked his speech at the UN on the abolishing of nuclear weapons, his shift on the missile defence programme in Eastern Europe and the movement of Russia to joining the international consensus that confronted Iran to abide by the non-proliferation treaty.

JODY WILLIAMS, FORMER NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER FOR CAMPAIGN TO BAN LANDMINES

I think that it is kind of foolish to think that the Nobel Prize isn't politicised - it's not a humanitarian prize, it's a prize in recognition of change in the world to contribute to peace, sometimes its a recognitions of visions for peace. He is facing huge contradictions as well - he is going to be sending 40,000 new American troops into Afghanistan just as he receives the Nobel Peace Prize? I think that is a contradiction that needs to be seriously looked at.

SOUHAYR BELHASSEN, PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is a way of encouraging him to not renege on the universal principles that he has championed.

We would have preferred a human rights defender like Oleg Orlov from Memorial in Russia or Natalia Estemirova [human rights activist murdered in Chechnya].

2009-10-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, SNL is funny. I find it amusing that the far right only finds the humor when they are scoring on Obama but whatev.

Here's a quick list of what Obama did in his first 100 days. But let's not forget, the mess that was left for him will take years to clean up. Expecting a new guy to come in and completely clean up all the graft, the sleeze, all the infiltration of outside influences, within a year is naive. It took well over 8 years to get to this point, it will take time to clean it up.

1. Health Care: The Obama White House cleared an important hurdle in the health care reform debate when it appropriated $19 billion in the stimulus package to help implement an electronic medical record system. The money is paltry compared to the hundreds of billions set aside for an overhaul of the health care system in the budget. But officials inside and out of the White House say its significance is hard to overstate.

"We need to have health IT so we have a better idea both of what works but also... so people can share information," Zeke Emanuel, Obama's health care adviser told the Huffington Post in mid-March. "We are on our way in a way that we have never committed ourselves before."

2. Communications: A presidential campaign built on innovative messaging and advanced technology has, naturally, become a White House defined by similar characteristics. As such, the reach of the administration's new media efforts - from hosting online question-and-answer sessions with the president to publishing the first White House blog - has been as expected as appreciated. It's unfortunate, said one tech savvy Democrat, because the new policies have had tangible impacts. "The White House streams every event with the president on its website, even press events," he said. "It's remarkable because, this Sunday they held a swine flu press conference that ordinary people [including many who may have been personally nervous about the topic] were able to watch online... Before you had to wait for a readout or hope that CSPAN would cover it. This is one of those things that people don't quite understand the significance of."

3. Transportation: Since the passage of the economic stimulus package in mid-February, the Obama Department of Transportation has approved 2,500 highway projects. The movement of stimulus money out the door has been as swift as it has been effective: $9.3 billion has been spent in all 50 states. Touting its impact, DOT officials say 260,000 jobs are expected from this investment. And with competition for contracts fierce, the department is set to approve even more projects than previously envisioned. "There will be more money for additional transportation projects," said the official.

4. Education: Maligned for its handling of the financial and banking crises, the Obama Treasury Department has nevertheless implemented policies with real qualitative and quantitative impact on debt-burdened families. Chief among those was a $2,500 tax credit to help offset the cost of tuition (among other expenses) for those seeking a college education. Nearly five million families are expected to save $9 billion, according to Treasury officials.

5. Cars: The automobile industry at the White House and Congress's behest has undergone seismic structural changes, managerial reorganization, and massive cuts in employment. But for all the tough love, the president has put in place the framework for an industry recovery. Perhaps the most significant of steps was to allocate $2 billion in stimulus cash for advanced batteries systems. One high-ranking Hill aide called battery technology "the next big frontier" in the automotive world, adding that if the U.S. could dominate this market it would reclaim its perch as the world's premier car manufacturer.

6. Pakistan: Cognizant of a destabilizing situation in Pakistan, the administration's diplomatic team, with a major assist from Japan, secured $5 billion in aid commitments "to bolster the country's economy and help it fight terror and Islamic radicalism" within the country. The money, as Pakistan observers -- notably Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry - note, will prove instrumental in bringing the nation away from the brink of failure and increased Taliban control.

7. Cities: More than any prior president, Obama has put a spotlight on America's struggling cities, even creating an office of Urban Policy in the White House. It is the Justice Department, however, that lays claim to one of the most consequential of urban affairs achievements. Through the Recovery Act, DOJ secured $2 billion for Byrne Grants, which funds anti-gang and anti-gun task forces. The money, cut during the Bush years, is expected to have massive ramifications on inner-city crime and violence.

8. Engaging the Muslim World: While certainly discussed, foreign affairs experts insist that Obama's engagement with the Muslim world has been at once remarkable and under-appreciated. From the first interview with Al Arabiya to his Nowruz address to the Iranian people, to his proclamation that "American is not at war with Islam" during an appearance in Turkey, seasoned observers have been routinely impressed. "Through these [statements and interviews]," said one Democratic foreign policy hand, "He has been able to dramatically change America's image in that region."

9. Forests: Since taking office, the White House has put under federal protection more than two million acres of wilderness, thousands of miles of river and a host of national trails and parks. The conservation effort - the largest in the last 15 years - came with the stroke of a pen when Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 in late March.

10. Tone: Leaving a meeting at the White House on Tuesday a progressive member of the House of Representatives commented to the Huffington Post just how impressed she was with the president's manner. "He is so calm," said the member, "and has a great ability to make you feel like you're being respected and listened to."

2009-09-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

Mr Obama! Tear. Down. This. Wall!

Tear down the graft.

Tear away the facade.

Tear apart the greed.

Tear it down.

2009-09-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had the example of what is wrong with my country, what I see as the flagrant cruelty inherent in the current system.

There is a company, a Texas company, that is extremely profitable and doing a booming business. This company has a strict code of conduct, policies and procedures by which an employee must abide. An employee, for example, must come to work sick. If that employee is too sick to come to work, he/she will not be allowed to return to work without a doctor's note. Regardless of severity, regardless of cause, this employee who might be suffering from a cold, experiencing a stomach virus, etc. must go to a doctor.

This from a company does not provide any health insurance to its employees.

That's right.

Not only does this employee that is earning just above poverty wages lose a day's pay, the employee has to pay top dollar, in the vicinity of $100, for a doctor's visit as well as any medication that might be prescribed.

This is what's wrong about our country.

2009-09-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

All this Tea Party and shouting about Healthcare Reform has no credibility to me.

Why?

Because supposedly it's about big government spending, spending money we don't have, adding to a deficit that our children's children will have to pay. But I didn't see one of these guys out during the bush years when we were thrown into horrendous debt with an unjustified war. Why has this become the issue du jour NOW? Why after 8 years of unprecedented spending, infringement on our civil liberties and flagrant disregard for law is this particular issue suddenly worth freakin' out about?

But to Healthcare.

This is what I want to know. Why do we have health insurance? Why are we hanging onto this industry that exists to take money from people, take a cut and then disperse the remainder to those that actually do the work?

Health insurance is a middle man.

It provides no service.

It obviously does not attempt to negotiate some stellar deal for its consumers.

It instead, takes money from people and then attempts to keep the people from which it takes money from the services they need.

It makes no sense.

It makes no sense that we cling to this system looking upon it as a life preserver in a sea awash with fear when in actuality it is an anchor to which we are clinging.

This non-service middleman not only takes our money, it determines who will get service and who will be denied.

It determines how long they will allow you to use this non-service middleman, which correlates directly with your health.

If you are healthy, you get it.

If you are not, you don't.

And this is the system to which we cleave?

And we wonder why people think we are ridiculous?

Why other countries who LIVE the healthcare systems they have adopted are stunned by our swallowing of the misinformation perpetuated by those with the most to lose should we actually decide to do the right thing and get a single payer system.

The insurance companies and those heavily invested in them.

I have experienced nationalized healthcare as a citizen and as a non-citizen. The service is exemplary, the efficiency is top notch, the cost more than reasonable.

But nothing, NOTHING, can begin to describe the sheer relief, the burden lifting exhale that comes from knowing that you will pay either nothing or an amount completely and totally affordable. The stress one experiences here following an injury or a bout of illness is difficult to fathom.

Every day, you await the bills.

The bill from the doctor, the hospital, the anesthesiologist, radiologist, the lab, etc.

Add this to the office visits, the medications, all the additional stuff depending on what it is that you are suffering from.

We put this burden on SICK/ILL people!

People who are no where near 100%, people suffering, hurting, missing work, unable to do daily activities, enduring any number of other things that life throws at them.

I listened in stunned silence as well people shouted at a wheelchair bound woman asking if this woman had more rights than them?

Wow.

Just wow.

I don't believe that we are like this. I believe that some people are like this. But I don't believe the majority of us are like this. If so, why do we step up so big time for those in crisis? Those in need?

No, I won't believe that people are like this now.

I think they are angry.

I get that.

I believe that they are angry that their party let them down.

That their party gave them no choices against Obama.

And that they were beaten.

And now bits and pieces of policy are twisted and morphed into scary images of government controlled everything with us wearing gray flannel accepting our lives of rationing and misery.

I listen to rush, hannity, savage, beck, etc.

And every single one of them is on the twist and shout bus.

Twist a story and shout it from your platform as much and as intensely as possible.

With each of these guys saying the same thing with their own particular spin, I can see how the average listener, with their anger and frustration at being marginalized and disregarded, begins to take this as gospel. I mean, if you hear one person say something, and then another but in a different way with a different perspective, and then another...you begin to believe it. You begin to believe that the country is on the verge of complete collapse. That your country has been hijacked. That the life that you have known will disappear. It is inevitable that people would begin to freak out.

I find it irresponsible. I am all for different perspectives being reflected in opinion. I don't want to just hear my point of view being regurgitated back at me. We are all different with different ideas. But there are certain things that we need to abide by. We need to abide by the truth. You cannot, for instance, say that Joe Wilson was right because Obama has a back room deal going on regarding amnesty for illegal immigrants which will allow the new citizens access to healthcare. That's the lamest justification I have heard. The guy screamed "You Lie" to the President of the United States.

No.

It's not the same as booing.

You can boo an idea.

But something so personalized, so pointed and so incorrect, does no deserve to be justified. You detract from your argument by justifying bad behavior. Especially since the guy apologized and then turned around and said that he wasn't sorry.

In my opinion, it is time to do away with health insurance.

We go to our doctor.

He/she sends the bill to the government.

Our taxes pay the bill.

Not charity.

Not complicated.

But deserved.

So very very deserved.

2009-09-08T18:45:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the Rolling Stone article "Sick and Wrong" by Matt Taibbi, you need to stop reading this and go read that.

It is a seven page gut wrencher.

I want to believe that it being a slow news period that every single smidge of news is exaggerated and blown into a weird distortion all for ratings.

I want to believe that Obama is playing the cool card. The no drama, unruffle-able, calm leader of the free world.

I want to believe that the democrats will break from history and unite with purpose and strength with one objective - to get this done. And to get it done properly.

But every single word in that article rang true to me. Every penny in the coffer of the representatives and senators from the entities fighting reform was a nail in the coffin of its demise. I believe we will not only get squat, I believe we will see the destruction of a brilliant opportunity squandered. Squandered and sullied.

No other president has been given this kind of an opportunity. The opportunity to completely change peoples' lives. To alleviate the family destroying, financially collapsing, stress inspiring thing that is our current healthcare system. The system that systematically purges the sickest of the sick in order to balloon their profit margin.

We cannot, WE CANNOT expect a for profit entity to care about anything other than PROFIT. It is ridiculous.

It is pathetic.

It makes me so angry that our vote for change, our vote for sweeping reform and a shift of our citizens consciousness away from the egocentric and to the external - to those that need a hand up - that as a community we all benefit when we raise others up - is being denied. There is nothing idealistic or unrealistic about it.

We came together and we said we insist on a change.

We are done with business as usual.

Change it.

We voted them in, they didn't deliver and they were purged.

This can and will happen to you if you do not REPRESENT the people that placed you in this position.

Believe it.

Single payer was the only real chance we had at fixing our broken system.

And it was taken off the table before the fight even began.

2009-09-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred."

As he told his audience in 1936, "It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them."

2009-08-30T04:29:00.000-07:00

The republicans are not even the least bit interested in bipartisanship. I understand Obama's need to have consensus but that is a dream that will not come true. At this time in history, this is all about not allowing the democrats to have success. I don't believe that it is all an astroturf effort. I have listened to rush et al and the craziness in is in full effect. What my hope is that they get so extreme that even their most ardent supporters start to scratch their heads and wrinkle their collective brows. But what is more likely to happen is an extremist attack against the administration.

The democrats need to ensure that all needs are met and to push this through. We need reform and once it is in place those gripped by the fear of socialism, death panels, forced circumcision, etc. will realize that the those stirring the pot had no basis for their fear mongering. Some might continue to support them but I believe the majority will feel betrayed and not just a bit silly.

I am tired of seeing unnecessary suffering in this country.

I am tired of those that happen to be blessed with wealth and comfort judging those that are not.

I am tired of people acting like health care is a privilege.

It is not.

It is a right.

It is a right in a free, wealthy and "Christian" society.

Push it through.

2009-08-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

I hold my nose and read a godawful blog in the Houston Chronicle occassionally which I will not reference here as I do not want to promote this kind of crazy. But I did read a good comment that I thought was worth posting as it is concise and factual.

"Nazism is fascism, by the way, which is far right.
Socialism is an economic system, not a form of government.
Socialism provides greater individual freedom, not less.
Totalitarianism is not socialism.
Fascism is not socialism.
Big government is not socialism.
Our present oligarchy is not socialism.
Conservatives aren't freedom loving.
Conservatives by definition, don't want change.
That is why all government is conservative--the role of government is to protect--you can't protect what hasn't come yet.
That is why all politicians are conservative: you can't win voters who don't exist yet.
That is why popular movements bring the real changes in society, and laws, governments and other institutions catch up later.
And now, the time for change has come as our current economy has failed.
Obama can't stop the future, no matter how hard he tries, he is a mere mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave. The future will come, whether we fight it or welcome it, just as night becomes day, winners become losers, and so on. Even the Bible makes this observation."
Posted by: Jason at August 25, 2009 04:30 PM

2009-08-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

I am a huge, huge Whale Wars/Sea Shepherd supporter. My husband and I dVR it and watch, spellbound.

It's funny. I have changed a lot of practices, habits in my life based on my love for the dependents in this world. I am moved to tears AND to action by the blatant cruelty we inflict on those that cannot fight back. I have seen endless, countless videos of the most horrific examples of the daily torture we inflict on animals and on children.

I have seen it all.

Literally.

And I am also extremely aware of what happens when hunters hunt and kill their prey. I know. I have seen it.

But last night was still horrifying. The part that caught me and threw me around, emotionally, was seeing this glorious animal fighting for TWENTY FIVE MINUTES while the harpoon was still in his head, having been shot six or seven times, he fought with all his might. The blast of water from his blowhole was what made it unbearable. Knowing that this animal took 25 MINUTES to slowly choke and drown on its own blood, was soul destroying.

I am outraged.

I was fortunate in that I didn't have to sit in that helicopter and watch, powerless, as this incredible animal fought for his life, fought and twisted and flung himself desperate to disengage. Seeing him going all out - 17 knots - trying to get away from the harpoon ship - unable to get a good enough breath to dive - he was doomed. Seeing that harpoon blast out and pierce the whale was gutting.

I cannot reconcile the brutality.

The abject cruelty of human beings always stuns me.

I have seen it.

I have watched.

I have been a witness for the animals and cried out in primal pain knowing that the last image that these animals witness on this earth is pure evil.

Because that's what it is.

I don't know how you can explain it away.

Feeding the masses.

Entertainment.

Human advancement by testing.

Culture.

Tradition.

Clothing.

None of it justifies the terror, the indescribable pain, the horror of what these animals endure.

God! We are so much better than this!

25 minutes.

Go and punch a pillow for 25 minutes.

Or jump in place.

See how long it actually is.

See how long that animal suffered.

How long it struggled for breath.

How long it thrashed around causing the harpoon to inflict that much more damage and pain.

I sat in my chair sobbing.

Sobbing for the animal.

Sobbing for humankind.

Sobbing for the people who were out there trying desperately to stop this brutality and being rendered powerless.

Paul Watson has been the captain of the Sea Shepherd crew for 35 years without one whale killed during all that time.

And in one campaign, three.

Three precious animals, three majestic mammals of the ocean were mercilessly slaughtered for profit.

We can do better.

But at this moment, I honestly do not believe that we want to.

2009-08-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

Why the shouting?

I think I know the answer, in fact I know that I know. But I wrestle with this. I understand the anger. I understand that feeling of not being heard, of the country that you love and live in careening recklessly, out of control towards impending doom.

I felt that way.

I empathize, deeply, I honestly do.

I remember the despair and outrage at being called a terrorist, unpatriotic (whatever that really is), an aider and abettor, a conspiracy theorist.

I get that.

I also understand how in all that darkness and disillusionment that spark of someone else, someone out there that heard me and felt as I did. How that voice speaking is like a life line, a buoy in a raging sea.

I get that.

But never did I think it was a good idea to go and shout at someone trying to explain something.

Regardless of their point of view.

Sure, I got angry with friends and family that kept on and on about how wrong I was. I was incensed. I couldn't understand how they didn't SEE it. No matter how rational, angry, crazy I got about it, they just didn't see how wrong going to war was, the ownership society, the corporations sweeping in and creating legislation.

But never did I think that going in and shouting and screaming and carrying swastikas was the most effective course of action.

But others did.

I get that as well.

I know that it got crazy there towards the end.

Why the screaming?

Where was the outrage when we were throwing billions upon billions at Iraq? When there was no reason to be there? Where we sent in mercenaries? Where we sent our guys into harm's way with defective body armour? Where we started something with no exit strategy?

This is what staggers me and makes me stand in complete awe at the incredible ability of those that want - for whatever reason - to manipulate people. Because that's what it is. Obama seems to have withdrawn with the expectation that people would understand that this legislation isn't even out of committee yet. That there is no bill to speak of. That everyone is putting in their two cents, different entities are bringing in different points of view. It's like wigging out about a house plan when only the structural drawing is done. No architectural no mechanical electrical or plumbing. Just the structural. And we have people screaming No! No waste of money on gold toilets (what gold toilets?)! No Waterford crystal chandeliers (what??)! It's ridiculous.

Honestly, I think these are normal, working class people (for the most part) that are in a mind set of - we have lost our country. A black, socialist, communist, Muslim, terrorist has taken over our country. Everything we have ever known and loved. Everything we have held dear. Everything we thought would be there forever, as it is now. Everything we have held as American....slowly being ripped from our hands.

And those with a vested interest, those with ulterior motives, those who have been feeding gluttonously at the trough of graft and greed, see an opportunity to mobilize these very real, very affected, deeply moral and principled people as the face of outrage and resistance. Hannity starts his program with a subtitle of "Conservative Underground" and "Conservatives in Exile".

The outsiders.

The forgotten.

The ignored.

And for hours upon hours, on weekdays on AM radio they say the same things over and over. Bureaucrats making decisions instead of your doctors.

Death counseling for seniors.

No protection for special needs or dependent beings.

Government funded abortion.

On and on. Some present with a sense of urgency. Some with indignation. Others with sarcasm. But they all say the same things. Over and over and over. I want my country back. Obama is a racist. Obama hates white people. Do you know that they are still bringing up Rev. Wright? Aires? All the nonsense that was thrown from the right - stuck on the radio dials.

Did you know that since he took office there has been a race/creed based shooting once per month? With references to Obama or the threat to country evidenced by every single one?

I have no issue with a debate. I think it is the only way to have a real democracy. I do not want one party to have their way unchecked.

But I cannot get behind the shouting.

Do you remember towards the end of the election? The people that swarmed to the Palin rallies? The monkeys? The caricatures? The adamant clutching onto the false "Muslim" "terrorist" labels?

That should have been our first clue.

There are plenty of people in this country that will never admit that they are racist. But they are. When you bring a sock puppet with a black man's name attached, you're a racist. When you think a place is too dark or decide not to enter a convenience store because there are only minorities, you're a racist. There are people that believe that Muslims are a threat. That brown people are scary.

And there are people who are clever enough to capture that sentiment, that fear, because that's what it is, fear, and use it to promote their agenda.

The MSM....you know...the one owned by conservative run corporate giants aka the liberal elite, have been ignoring middle America. So they are coming out and ensuring that they are heard.

By shouting at town hall meetings.

Or is it, that the MSM is only presenting the concerned citizens - you know the 85% that believe Obama isn't a real American - as crazed, irrational screaming fringe. But that's not exactly what is being conveyed is it? No. They are being presented as citizens who have been shut out of the process, desperate to be heard. Normal, every day Americans that don't want socialized medicine. And, keep your government hands off my medicare.

I think Obama expects us to be grown ups. To wait for the plan to be presented to our individual representatives for debate and negotiation and to see that the idea is to bring down costs, to encourage prevention, to reduce the stress that has been weighing so heavily on the most susceptible, the most vulnerable, those that believed they had coverage and found themselves with no recourse.

The plan is not to make life harder, but ease the burden - so that our seniors won't have to choose between a meal and medication.

This ridiculous exaggerated imagery of grey wool sacks in Soviet style hospitals, rationing is not the goal for anyone. Honestly, who wants that? Who doesn't have parents or know seniors? Who doesn't know a disabled person? Did anyone hear about the bill that is either passed or very close that will pay the college tuition of veterans? This is in line with the liberal agenda. Believe me. I've seen it.

Delayed surgeries, shortages of vaccines, doctors forced to live in ridiculous places because the doctor quota is filled in an area. That is not part of the plan.

I know. I know.

I'm godless.

I want babies to die.

I hate tradition.

I hate America.

I know.

The biggest problem with us is that we are so easily moved into chutes of complacency - absentmindedly moving into categories so that we are more easily able to define. Liberal? Gay loving, god hating, baby killing, anti-military, aider and abettor. Conservative? Neocon, profiteering, bigot, racist, war-mongering bullies.

The problem is that perhaps the tiniest fraction of people fit into these categories. Microscopic numbers really.

But they are the most vocal, the most present in this situation.

They have the ones with the megaphone and the audience.

So when the person that refuses to buckle or cave, who casts out fake conservatives, who repeats over and over again that he is the keeper of the beacon - the last stronghold of morals, virtues and decency says that the country is in peril, those that identify with him, those that have been left behind look for the light in the darkness.

But rush, hannity, savage, beck.

They are nothing but showmen.

Entertainers.

Perhaps they believe they are speaking for the people in some far recess of their minds. Perhaps they believe that they are doing the right thing. But I don't think that's the case. I believe that this is all about money. It is all about how many people they can influence. How many they can get to listen to them and to buy the products they spend most of their time selling in commercials between segments. It is all about getting these people so impassioned that they move would make anyone drunk with power. Can you imagine? Having millions of people not only listen to you but to go and do what you suggest? I cannot fathom that kind of rush. Doesn't matter if you invoke Nazi Germany, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Gulags to get them there, that's not what's important. Your sponsors, your bosses, your advertisers hear you speak and see the army rise.

It must be amazing.

But is it in the best interest of the country?

As soon as we can get past these ridiculous stereotypes, these pathetic excuses, these moronic caricatures of our fellow citizens, the better.

I don't know what Obama should do. That's why I'm not president and he is. Should he address this or continue his "No Drama" approach? Should he figure out a way to get his "fight the smear" website to other avenues of communication that varying segments of our society use?

All I know is that we need to ratchet down the hysteria. I have a deep dread that this is going to end badly because no one addressed it. We ignored or justified or played down the fringe element that seems to be getting more and more out of control every day. We thought - it's just a few, they don't speak for the majority.

But it takes just one.

Just one person that has had enough.

That sees no end.

No hope.

The minorities are taking over.

The Mexicans are taking jobs and our healthcare.

The Socialists and Communists are infiltrating the weak hearts of the limp wristed liberals.

The gays will be legitimized and will flaunt their lifestyle choice in the faces of our innocent children.

The freaks will be out in droves forcing their ways upon our society.

It will take one person.

One lone person to decided that he is willing to die for his country.

That he is ready to sacrifice his life to save the innocent babies doomed to death, the weakening of the beloved country, the demise of the Judea-Christian foundation that is the foundation of this country.

It will not be an external enemy that destroys this country.

It will be an internal split of the citizenry based on falsehoods and lies.

Unless we decide to be grown ups.

2009-08-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

Obama wants to kill your grandma
Five right-wing myths about healthcare reform, and the facts
By Mike Madden

Turning America socialist apparently wasn't enough for him -- now President Obama is trying to make old people kill themselves, callously deny important medical procedures, funnel tax dollars to abortion clinics and wiggle the government's way into every doctor's office in America.
At least, that's the sense you might have about the healthcare reform proposals Congress is considering from listening to opponents describe them. Already, conservative activists have erupted against the plan, with protesters hanging Democratic lawmakers in effigy and disrupting town hall meetings.
As both the House and the Senate clear out of the Capitol for the month, expect the viral buzz -- and the TV battle -- about what's in the bills to grow louder and louder. The White House finally seems to have realized that the administration can't win the policy debate without addressing some of the attacks from the right. Aides recently released a video rebutting some of the claims about what healthcare reform would and wouldn't do. An administration official told Salon Wednesday that the White House will soon launch a Web site modeled on the "Fight the Smears" site Obama's campaign ran last fall, where voters can find -- and debunk -- some of the rumors about the reform proposals, and the White House is already collecting chain e-mails at "flag@whitehouse.gov," an address Obama aides set up to receive them.
But the administration might already be behind the curve. Over the last few weeks, opponents have managed to get out their spin on the bill through talk radio, blogs, chain e-mails and other channels. And their talking points depend on a notably elastic approach to the truth. Here's a fact check of some of the more alarming claims that the right is making about healthcare reform, claims that are already hardening into myth.
Myth 1: Democrats want to kill your grandmother. This claim seems too outlandish on its face to get much traction, but Republicans actually made some headway on it recently. Two House GOP leaders put out a statement warning that the healthcare reform bill "may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia." To hear opponents of reform talk about it, the legislation would force seniors to go in for sessions once every five years -- and more frequently if they're sick -- where doctors will encourage them to end their lives. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., summarized the scare tactic pretty well on the House floor last week, when she said the bill would "put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government," and therefore, wouldn't be pro-life. The GOP has pushed this line especially hard with some of the conservative groups behind the government's intervention in the Terri Schiavo case a few years ago, hoping to get antiabortion allies on board fighting reform. "Can you imagine the response of the American people when they find this out?" one-time GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson asked about the alleged euthanasia scheme on his radio show last month. "They're going to counsel you on preparing you to die," Rush Limbaugh pronounced a few weeks ago. Proof of how far this attack has spread came last week, when a caller to an AARP forum asked Obama about it directly. (Probably unwisely, the president tried to make light of the question, saying there weren't enough government employees to go meet with old people to talk about end-of-life care.)
There is a kernel of truth at the root of this attack: The legislation would order Medicare to pay for consultations between patients and doctors on end-of-life decisions, which it currently doesn't cover. But the consultations wouldn't be mandatory; if your grandmother doesn't want to go talk to her doctor about end-of-life care, she won't have to. Because Medicare doesn't pay for this kind of planning now, only 40 percent of seniors who depend on the government insurance say they have an advance directive that tells healthcare providers what measures they do and don't want used to prolong their life, even though 75 percent say they think it's important. The lack of planning actually costs a lot of money. Medicare spends billions and billions of dollars annually on expensive treatment during the last year of a dying patient's life. Without allowing Medicare to pay for end-of-life consultations, it's hard to know whether patients even want to go to such expensive lengths.

Myth 2: The government -- i.e., you -- will have to pay for abortions. This is another way the GOP is stirring up antiabortion activists against healthcare reform -- by warning that your tax dollars will be used to pay for someone else's abortion. An ad by the Family Research Council dramatizes the issue about as creepily as possible. "To think that Planned Parenthood is included in the government-run healthcare plan and spending tax dollars on abortions," a distraught older man tells his wife, sitting at their kitchen table after opening a letter from the government. "They won't pay for my surgery, but we're forced to pay abortions." The narrator lays out what's going on: "Our greatest generation denied care, our future generations denied life." A House Republican aide says the GOP thinks this could be the most potent type of viral attack against reform, since antiabortion Democrats will have trouble voting for the legislation if it includes taxpayer funding for the procedure.
But only the most extreme antiabortion reading of the legislation would say it does that. The words "Planned Parenthood" and "abortion" don't appear anywhere in the text, despite conservative buzz that it would funnel millions of dollars to killing babies. (A proposal in the Senate version of the reform legislation would require insurance plans to cover preventive care and screening visits to community health providers, which could include Planned Parenthood.) Even an AP story that Matt Drudge was hyping on Wednesday as proof that the government would be funding abortions didn't go quite that far -- instead, the story detailed a fight over whether women who buy government-subsidized private insurance through a proposed exchange system should be able to have abortions covered by their plans. Pro-choice lawmakers are trying to craft a compromise that would require insurance companies to pay for abortions out of premiums paid by patients, not out of tax dollars. Pro-choice Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., amended the House version of the legislation to state that abortion is not part of an "essential benefits package" that all insurance plans must provide -- meaning someone could offer a special "pro-life health insurance" plan that doesn't cover abortions, even under the reforms.

Myth 3: Obama will ban all private health insurance. Allegedly, the House proposal for healthcare reform bans private insurance. This rumor comes complete with a citation: "Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal," the unflaggingly pro-business paper Investors Business Daily wrote in an editorial last month. Other right-wing blogs and news outlets picked up on the idea, as well. It fits in with a broader message Republicans have been using: The reform will lead to a total government takeover of healthcare.
The IBD line is literally true -- Section 102 of the House bill says insurance companies can't independently issue any new individual policies after the legislation takes effect (though existing policies are grandfathered in). But it misses the point. Private plans aren't banned, but rather shifted into the new health insurance exchange the legislation would set up. You can still get a private policy, but the way in which you buy it changes. If you wanted to buy your own insurance, you have to do it through the government-run insurance exchange. Your policy becomes part of broader risk pools, which makes the premiums cheaper and keeps insurance companies from dumping them once they get sick. PolitiFact looked into the claim and rated the IBD editorial "pants on fire," its lowest rating -- as in, "Liar, liar, pants on fire."

Myth 4: The government can't possibly run a healthcare program. Opponents of reform trot out comparisons to government services frequently when they try to argue against a public, government-funded healthcare plan. Republicans drew up a chart that purports to show how convoluted the bureaucracy involved in any government plan would be. This message doesn't make Obama the enemy, it makes government inefficiency the enemy. "If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare done by the government," conservative economist Arthur Laffer told CNN this week.
If that doesn't quite make sense, there's a reason -- Medicare and Medicaid are, of course, government-run healthcare programs. Medicare in particular is quite popular; polling shows some seniors are anxious that the reform will affect the care they already get from the government. (In fact, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says she frequently encounters voters who say they want to keep the government out of their Medicare.) The Department of Veterans Administration also runs a healthcare system that experts praise for its well-developed health information technology network, which lets doctors see results of tests and procedures any patient has had anywhere in the network -- eliminating the wasteful duplication that Obama says he wants to cut out of the larger healthcare world, as well.

Myth 5: Unlike private insurance, government bureaucrats will ration care. This line also makes government the enemy. "You may want healthcare that your doctor has prescribed for you," Peter Ferrara, of the anti-tax, anti-government Institute for Policy Innovation, wrote on the National Review last month. "But the rationing bureaucracy in Washington that doesn’t even know you, or your doctor, may decide that your doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or that you are too old for the government to pay for your hip replacement to stop the pain, or to get an expensive triple bypass or a pacemaker operation to save your life." Since the Obama administration keeps talking about encouraging doctors to shift to outcome-based pay scales and evidence-based guidelines for what treatments or procedures to use, opponents don't have much trouble painting a troubling picture of faceless government hacks denying the care you -- or your loved ones -- need.
Of course, there are already plenty of faceless hacks denying people care right now; they just work for private insurance companies, not the government, and they're denying care because that helps keep the insurers' profit margins up. At a recent House hearing, just three insurance companies testified that they had "rescinded" -- or dropped -- coverage for nearly 20,000 patients between 2003 and 2007, often after patients had submitted claims they thought would be covered. Even Republicans seem to know the insurance companies can be bad. "I would always rather the devil I know than the devil I don't know," House GOP boss John Boehner said last week, explaining why going after the government works even though private insurance companies would seem to be just as much of a villain.

2009-06-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

Crucial, crucial article in a series that I will be following. It is still pertinent because it continues. Read it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219224/

2009-05-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

Josh will be gone mid-August. Gone to UT. He graduates on June 6th and then we are mere months from his departure. It's crazy. The images I have of that kid, the memories are fantastic. From the nights when I would have to lay in the crib to comfort him back to sleep when he was just a tiny guy to his crazy climbs to the top of just about anything from the age of 18 months to the look on his face when he got an Iphone to My God! There are too many strong, vivid colorful memories of a boy that was so ill fitting to this world - that felt out of step, felt inferior, and odd in comparison to his peers to a confident, funny, bold beauty. His easy going demeanor veils a driven, ambitious motivated kid that has found what he loves to do. At 17! What a gift.

I adore him. I adore his humor. His empathy. His out of nowhere flash of kindness. I love who he has become. I love that others have found him and have brought him around to the realization that he has a lot to offer. He is braver socially than he used to be, and I attribute that to his friends accepting him for his quirky hilarious self.

So I am mere months from my first child testing his wings and flying from the nest. My job to assist him to adulthood seems to be going as it should. I feel I have facilitated a little guy into independence and it's a really good feeling.

I'm proud of him.

2009-05-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

Are you fucking kidding me?

The rightwing has gone off the deep end. Biden and Obama go out for a burger which I think is beyond belief that this is considered news. Regardless, they are in an absolute frenzy with Obama NOT having ketchup and having the audacity to request a spicy mustard which transforms into an elitist request for Grey Poupon Dijon Mustard.

Are you getting this?

This is all they got?

I am continually stunned by what people will allow into their brains via their ears.

I can only imagine what kind of national crisis it would cause if he requested a veggie burger.

God forbid.

I know. I know.

I shouldn't even listen.

When Rush is talking about the purity of the party damning the moderates, I have to say, it's like all my dreams coming true. Here they are literally opening the exit door and tossing people out because they aren't conservative enough. They don't even get that the democrats won because they were seen as the party of inclusion. Instead of catching that clue, they go FURTHER right, screeching about values and morals and the high road. Before you know it, my mom will be registering democrat.

What was truly pathetic was rush saying that moderates where those that just went where the power is. Fence sitters, middle of the roaders.

W. O. W.

So if you aren't a zealot. If you aren't bashing people for not believing like you, get out! We don't need ya! We got our hard core 20% and that's all we need.

It's fun to see your team win. It is. After a good competition. But it's not fun to watch the other team self destruct. I think having opposing parties is good for the country. I would like to see more parties coming in and taking a run for the end zone. And maybe that's how that happens. A big powerful party splinters into a bunch of truly viable parties. I thought that was going to happen with the dems but it would be a good thing for the republicans...at this point any way.

2009-05-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Believe Me, It’s Torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
by Christopher Hitchens August 2008
Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.
Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

View a video of Hitchens’s waterboarding experience.
It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:
“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.”
On the night before the encounter I got to sleep with what I thought was creditable ease, but woke early and knew at once that I wasn’t going back to any sort of doze or snooze. The first specialist I had approached with the scheme had asked my age on the telephone and when told what it was (I am 59) had laughed out loud and told me to forget it. Waterboarding is for Green Berets in training, or wiry young jihadists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scribblers. For my current “handlers” I had had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma, but I wondered whether I should tell them about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades. I was feeling apprehensive, in other words, and beginning to wish I hadn’t given myself so long to think about it.
I have to be opaque about exactly where I was later that day, but there came a moment when, sitting on a porch outside a remote house at the end of a winding country road, I was very gently yet firmly grabbed from behind, pulled to my feet, pinioned by my wrists (which were then cuffed to a belt), and cut off from the sunlight by having a black hood pulled over my face. I was then turned around a few times, I presume to assist in disorienting me, and led over some crunchy gravel into a darkened room. Well, mainly darkened: there were some oddly spaced bright lights that came as pinpoints through my hood. And some weird music assaulted my ears. (I’m no judge of these things, but I wouldn’t have expected former Special Forces types to be so fond of New Age techno-disco.) The outside world seemed very suddenly very distant indeed.
Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I am somewhat proud of my ability to “keep my head,” as the saying goes, and to maintain presence of mind under trying circumstances. I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the “dead man’s handle” that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? “That’s to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements.” I was briefly embarrassed that I hadn’t earned or warranted these refinements, but it hit me yet again that this is certainly the language of torture.
Maybe I am being premature in phrasing it thus. Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not “waterboarding” constitutes torture. I have had some extremely serious conversations on the topic, with two groups of highly decent and serious men, and I think that both cases have to be stated at their strongest.
The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.
Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance. Mr. Nance is not what you call a bleeding heart. In fact, speaking of the coronary area, he has said that, in battlefield conditions, he “would personally cut bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic M.R.E. spoon.” He was to the fore on September 11, 2001, dealing with the burning nightmare in the debris of the Pentagon. He has been involved with the sere program since 1997. He speaks Arabic and has been on al-Qaeda’s tail since the early 1990s. His most recent book, The Terrorists of Iraq, is a highly potent analysis both of the jihadist threat in Mesopotamia and of the ways in which we have made its life easier. I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States. The argument goes like this:
1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.
2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.
3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.
4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.
Masked by these arguments, there lurks another very penetrating point. Nance doubts very much that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted that long under the water treatment (and I am pathetically pleased to hear it). It’s also quite thinkable, if he did, that he was trying to attain martyrdom at our hands. But even if he endured so long, and since the United States has in any case bragged that in fact he did, one of our worst enemies has now become one of the founders of something that will someday disturb your sleep as well as mine. To quote Nance:
Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.
Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words “waterboard” and “American” could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.

2009-05-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

All this nonsense about America being founded by Christians establishing a Christian nation.

The Founding Fathers

John Adams"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

Thomas Jefferson"Christianity...[has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man....Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus."

"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity."--- Benjamin Franklin, Works, Vol. VII, p. 75

2009-04-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

So, it's been about 24 hours since I had Marley's head in my hands, locked eyes with him and felt the spirit of that beautiful animal leave.

Thursday we witnessed the dizzying descent.

He seemed to plummet.

Unable to put any weight on his back legs, his spirit still pushing him to play.

He was would fall and then pull himself up and then collapse again.

We made him as comfortable as possible, giving him three aspirins and some "pet ease" which knocked him out until the following day.

The next day, he seemed a bit better. I carried him to the car, went by Burger King and got him two bacon cheese burgers and went to the park.

He was so happy.

He walked and sniffed and had that lovely smile on his face...even as his body betrayed him.

He wanted to go further but he simply couldn't.

So we sat on a blanket and he ate his treats with his head on my lap. We sat together absorbed in the beauty of the day, the joy of just being together.

All in all we were in the park about an hour.

But it was the best hour I could have had with him.

He knew, I know that he did. He never complained or gave up but he knew.

His nervousness at the vet was different.

Of course, he never enjoyed going to the vet.

But there was a difference this time, a resignation but a hesitancy.

We went in together, we sat on the blanket on the floor with him and held him.

When the vet came in, we put him on the table.

He shook a bit but he never took his eyes off of me, never flinched.

He looked into my eyes and I told him I loved him and he left.

As we left, I turned back. He looked so peaceful, as if asleep on our living room floor. There was nothing traumatic or horrifying about the process.

Last night the dogs were completely thrown off. The storm was raging and Baxter, Spencer, Maya and Twee didn't understand. They ran back and forth to the back door, to the front gate looking at the front door waiting for the their leader, their alpha to return.

Dinner time was a jumble.

Early evening there was complete unease.

There is a hole.

A gaping abyss that had been filled for 16 years.

It was the right thing to do.

He was ready.

It was time.

And we did everything we could do to make his life a good one and God knows he returned the favor tenfold.

Our Marley is gone. The big goofy wonderful dog, scarred by the cruelty of others, but finding sanctuary with our family, with two wonderful, empathetic energetic boys, and a gentle and kind man that drew him out of his fear and past and helped him to become a brilliant example of companion animal.

We will miss you and thank you for all that you brought to our family.

We love you.

2009-04-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

My Marley

It’s hard to put the words to the memories I have of Marley.
My beloved dog of almost 16 years, he was a co-parent to my toddler boys when I was alone.
He guarded my house, my yard, me and the boys from all that would harm us.
He played games with the boys that made them squeal with laughter.
He would allow them to tug relentlessly on his ears and lips and tongue.
He would follow them and herd them away from danger.
If they ventured out too far in the surf for Marley’s liking, he would be out there, swimming if he had to, to guide them gently back to the shore.
He ran with them, he lay with them, he played and frolicked with them.
As they grew older, and their interests inevitably strayed from home into the outside world, he waited for them.
Any scrap of attention was enough, any scratch on the head or pat on the back was adequate.
He smiled to the point a wide gleeful grin that inevitably made all that saw him, smile back.
He was a tolerant, yet firm guide to the uneducated children around him.
He nipped at those that were cruel, warning them that the loving dog that they antagonized with sticks and stones was only tolerating them out of love for his family.
He was an only dog for so long but stoically gave up his territory to five other dogs and a variety of cats over the years.
But he was always the “Best Dog”. The dog that helped the other dogs learn the rules. The dog that sat and lay down and lifted his paw.
The dog that always came when called.
The dog that frolicked in the water and stood still for a bath.
The dog that loved a good towel dry.
The playful, frisky fun loving dog that played tug-o-war and soccer.
Even when his age caught up to him.
Even when his hind legs would collapse under him.
Even when it was so obvious that he was in pain.
He would still play.
He would still run.
He would still find the joy in our presence however infrequent it had become.
Marley was the dog.
The dog that no one wanted.
Returned for fighting or aggressive behavior, I would walk past his kennel and he would watch me. His name was Merlot at the time. I would find a reason to go the back of my brother’s vet clinic just so I could see him.
Finally, I decided that I couldn’t stand to see him in that kennel – this vivacious shepherd collie mix with the beautiful coat and energy that emanated from him. I thought he must be going mad in there. I decided to take him to the beach on a weekend visit to my mom. I put him in the front seat and picked the boys up from day care. They couldn’t believe it. They hugged him and he licked them.
I was nervous.
I knew he had been terribly abused (later I would find out that it was way beyond what I thought) and that he had a history of erratic behavior.
But he took to the boys.
By the time we got to the beach house it was dark. My mom heard us pull up and opened the door. On that drive, during which the boys were asleep for ¾ of the trip, Marley had adopted them. He started growling at this shadowy figure approaching the car.
I knew right then and there that I would never let this dog go.
I knew right then and there that this dog would lay down his life for me and for my boys. I knew that he was devoted and I in turn became devoted.
His loyalty gave my mom a sense of relief knowing that her daughter and grandkids would be protected in that little white house in rural Conroe.
And she was right.
No one dared approach me and the boys.
Especially men, when Marley was around.
Marley had been terribly abused – I knew the moment I picked up a broom and he shook so violently, cowering, flinching and peeing all over the floor.
He hated men. He had been horribly scarred.
But he found us. And he found a man, Lance, that he grew to love and trust and, in turn, trusted other men that we allowed into our home as he trusted us more and more.
The number of people that would stop and tell me how beautiful he was.
His coat was so shiny, his coloring so gorgeous.
He had such a pride.
I remember the first time I shaved him. I told the boys to be sensitive when they saw him as Marley seemed a little embarrassed. When the boys came in and hugged on him and told him how beautiful he was, his whole disposition changed. He lived for the attention of those boys!
As the years have worn on, Marley has never complained.
As arthritis and hip dysplasia ravaged his hindquarters, he never whined or complained. When he tore his ACL, his back leg dragging behind him, he soldiered on. That’s an overused term.
That dog could barely use his back legs and then he tears a vital ligament and still pushes himself. We couldn’t risk surgery at his age, so we medicated him to ease his pain. His front legs became massive, with his “elbows” turning outward under the continuous strain that they were now under. His back end was nothing – the muscle withered and the skin just hung there. But he always was up for a frolic in the yard or a quick jaunt around the block.
It was Saturday April 18th, 2009, the day of torrential rain, when the backyard started to flood as did the street. I watched Marley all day, knowing that he hated thunderstorms but seeing him lying on our wood floor, shifting fairly often but not getting up. I realized, it was too difficult. Every time he tried, he would slip and collapse back down. I would bound over to lift him up and he looked at me with his usual unconditional love and grace.
I realize now that we had been self-indulgent.
We knew he was struggling but we were all gone most of the day and didn’t see his struggles.
God knows, he wouldn’t make a fuss.
So we allowed him to stagnate, reflecting his joy at our return home by an excited tail and his delighted expression but little else.
We could easily dismiss it, easily wave it aside because none of us wanted to be the one to say, that’s it.
I realized that I had chosen him.
I had decided all those years ago at my brother’s vet clinic that I would take a chance on this crazy aggressive dog as a single parent with two toddlers. It was up to me to be brave enough to put him first, as he had always put us first.
And then it hit me again.
There was more to it than even that.
Marley was my last connection to my brother.
My older brother, Paul, who died three years ago after struggling with ALS for six years.

Marley was a living reminder of the gift Paul had with animals.
And the love he and I shared for the dependent beings of this world.
Letting Marley go was also letting Paul go.
Something I thought I had done a long time ago.
But I hadn’t.
So I selfishly held on to Marley all the while professing my ease with releasing my brother to a “better place”.
I didn’t put it together, the refusal to acknowledge something that was bashing my conscience on a daily basis, that Marley was suffering, because I couldn’t let go of that last living memento of my brave and wonderful brother.
On April 24th, I will take Marley to the park.
Just him and me as we used to do.
I’ll give him 3 aspirin and let him frolic and sniff and lay and relish a glorious day in the park with me.
I will let him have a bacon cheeseburger and I will hug him and be with him on his terms until he’s had enough.
And then he, Josh, Cody and I will go to the vet and we, his family, will hold him as he eases out of this world surrounded by those that he loves the most, as we remember the unequivocal joy that animal gave to us daily and unselfishly.
We will mourn the loss of our beloved, Marley, our first family dog.
We will always love him and look forward to the day of reunion.

2009-04-17T07:46:00.001-07:00

Health Reform Without a Public Plan: The German Model
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton.
In the previous two posts, I sought to explain why the public health insurance plan that Barack Obama had firmly promised during the presidential campaign appears to have become a deal-breaker in President Obama’s quest to sign a genuinely bipartisan health reform bill later this year.
What if that plan were sacrificed on the altar of bipartisanship? Would it be the end of meaningful health reform?
Not necessarily, if the health systems of the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland are any guide.
None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.
To see how this can work, think of the basic functions that any health system must perform. To wit:
1. the financing of health care, that is, the extraction of the required funds from individuals and households who ultimately pay for 100 percent of all health care
2. the pooling of individual risks with the aim of protecting individuals and households from the high costs of medical care in case of illness
3. the purchasing of health care from its providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc.)
4. the production of health care goods and services
5. the regulation of the entire system so that it operates towards socially desired ends.
Who should perform these functions is powerfully driven by the distributive social ethic that nations wish to impose upon their health systems.
In Europe, as in Canada, that social ethic is based on the principle of social solidarity. It means that health care should be financed by individuals on the basis of their ability to pay, but should be available to all who need it on roughly equal terms. The regulations imposed on health care in these countries are rooted in this overarching principle.
First, these countries all mandate the individual to be insured for a basic package of health care benefits.
Many Americans oppose such a mandate as an infringement of their personal rights, all the while believing that they have a perfect right to highly expensive, critically needed health care, even when they cannot pay for it. This immature, asocial mentality is rare in the rest of the world. An insurance sector that must insure all comers at premiums that are not contingent on the insured’s health status — a feature President Obama has promised — cannot function for long if people can go without insurance when they are healthy, but are entitled to premiums unrelated to their health status when they fall ill.
Second, these nations try to tailor the individual’s contribution to the financing of health care closely to the individual’s ability to pay — almost perfectly so in Germany, albeit less perfectly in the other two countries.
In Germany, statutory health insurance, which covers 90 percent of the population, is financed by a payroll tax. The individual’s premium is not a per-capita levy, as it is in the United States. It is purely income-based. Ostensibly, about 45 percent of the premium is contributed by employers, although economists are persuaded that ultimately all of it comes out of the employee’s take-home pay (See this and this).
An employee’s non-working spouse is automatically covered by the employee’s premium.
Unemployment insurance pays the premiums for unemployed individuals, and pension funds share with the elderly in financing their premiums, which are set below actuarial costs for the elderly.
Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.
The health insurance premiums paid by Germans are collected in a national, government-run central fund that effectively performs the risk-pooling function for the entire system. This fund redistributes the collected premiums to some 200 independent, nongovernmental, competing, nonprofit “sickness funds” among which Germans can choose.
For example, if individual A chooses sickness fund X, then the central fund will give to fund X a capitation payment that uses over 80 variables to identify individual A’s actuarial risk. The same payment would be made for this individual to any other fund.
Thus, the sickness funds in Germany only perform the third function mentioned above — acting as purchasing agents on behalf of the central fund and patients.
Space does not permit a detailed description of the Dutch and Swiss systems. But these countries, too, have married the financing and risk-pooling systems, which try to own up to the principle of social solidarity, with a delegation of the purchasing function to competing, private insurance carriers. In the Netherlands, the latter may be for profit or not for profit. In Switzerland, they are basically nonprofit, except for supplementary coverage for items not in the basic package.
All three countries offer their citizens reliable, portable health insurance based on the principle of social solidarity, but without a government-run health insurance plan like Medicare. The $64,000 question is whether America’s private health insurers would be willing to countenance the tight regulation required for that approach.

2009-04-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

This just makes me so proud to be a Texas resident.

Lawmaker defends comment on Asians
Call for voters to simplify their names not racially motivated, Terrell Republican says
By R.G. RATCLIFFE

AUSTIN — A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”
The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.
The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.
Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.
Easier for voting?
Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.
“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.
Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”
Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said Republicans are trying to suppress votes with a partisan identification bill and said Brown “is adding insult to injury with her disrespectful comments.”
Brown spokesman Jordan Berry said Brown was not making a racially motivated comment but was trying to resolve an identification problem.
Berry said Democrats are trying to blow Brown’s comments out of proportion because polls show most voters support requiring identification for voting. Berry said the Democrats are using racial rhetoric to inflame partisan feelings against the bill.
“They want this to just be about race,” Berry said.

2009-04-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

This from Kathy Freston:

I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat - on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us.

The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.
See how easy it is to make an impact?

Other points:
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day--that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we--the relatively affluent--have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."

A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems--that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level--local and global.

Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute

2009-03-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot said, usually from those that comment from the periphery - refusing to get involved in the very real dilemna our country faces in its treatment of animals -about PETA euthanizing animals.
I understood immediately why this was probably the case but it was speculation.
I have removed the disturbing photos that went along with the article but I think that it is important to fathom what these people see on a day in day out basis.

From Ingrid Newkirk:

In my first year working at a grossly substandard animal shelter in Maryland, I forced myself to go in early to euthanize dogs by holding them in my arms and gently helping them escape an uncaring world without trauma or pain and to spare them from being stabbed haphazardly—while they were fully conscious, terrified and aware—in the general vicinity of their hearts with needles blunt from reuse and left to thrash on the floor until they finally died by the callous people who would arrive later to do the job.
I always wonder how anyone cannot recognize that there is a world of difference between painlessly euthanizing animals out of compassion—aged, injured, sick, and dying animals whose guardians can't afford euthanasia, for instance—as PETA does, and causing them to suffer terror, pain, and a prolonged death while struggling to survive on the streets, at the hands of untrained and uncaring "technicians," or animal abusers.
It's easy to point the finger at those who are forced to do the "dirty work" caused by a throwaway society's casual acquisition and breeding of dogs and cats who end up homeless and unwanted, but at PETA, we will never turn our backs on neglected, unloved, and homeless animals—even if the best we can offer them is a painless release from a world that doesn't have enough heart or homes with room for them. It makes it easy for people to throw stones at us, but we are against all needless killing: for hamburgers, fur collars, dissection, sport hunting―the works. PETA handled far more animals than 2,124 in 2008. In fact, we took in more than 10,000 dogs and cats and work very hard to persuade people to spay and neuter their animals and to commit to a lifetime of care and respect for them. We go so far as to transport animals to and from our spay/neuter clinics, where they are spayed or neutered and given vet care, often for free! Since 2001, PETA's low- to no-cost spay-and-neuter mobile clinics, SNIP and ABC, have sterilized more than 50,000 animals, preventing hundreds of thousands of animals from being born, neglected, abandoned, abused, or euthanized when no one wanted them. And on a national level, PETA is focusing on the root of the problem through our Animal Birth Control (ABC) campaign.
If anyone has a good home, love, and respect to offer, we beg them: Go to a shelter and take one or two animals home. The problem is that few people do that, choosing instead to go to a breeder or a pet shop and not "fixing" their dogs and cats, which contributes to the high euthanasia rate that animal shelters face. Most of the animals we took in and euthanized could hardly be called "pets," as they had spent their lives chained up in the back yard, for instance. They were unsocialized, never having been inside a building of any kind or known a pat on the head. Others were indeed someone's, but they were aged, sick, injured, dying, too aggressive to place, and the like, and PETA offered them a painless release from suffering, with no charge to their owners or custodians.
Every day, PETA's fieldworkers help abused and neglected dogs—many of them pit bulls nowadays and many of them forced to live their lives on chains heavy enough to tow an 18-wheeler—by providing them with food; clean water; lightweight tie-outs; deworming medicine; flea, tick, and fly-strike prevention; free veterinary care; sturdy wooden doghouses stuffed with straw bedding; and love.
What we see is enough to make you lose faith in humanity. One pit bull we gained custody of, named Asia, looked like a skeleton covered with skin when PETA released her from the 15-pound chain she had been kept on for years. Asia suffered from three painful and deadly intestinal obstructions, which prevented her from keeping any food down. She faced an agonizing, lingering death, so our veterinarian recommended euthanasia to end her suffering. We pursued criminal charges against those responsible for her condition, leading to their conviction for cruelty to animals. That is just one of the dozens of cases we see every week.
The majority of adoptable dogs are never brought through our doors (we refer them to local adoption groups and walk-in animal shelters). Most of the animals we house, rescue, find homes for, or put out of their misery come from miserable conditions, which often lead to successful prosecution and the banning of animal abusers from ever owning or abusing animals again.
As long as animals are still purposely bred and people aren't spaying and neutering their companions, open-admission animal shelters and organizations like PETA must do society's dirty work. Euthanasia is not a solution to overpopulation but rather a tragic necessity given the present crisis. PETA is proud to be a "shelter of last resort," where animals who have no place to go or who are unwanted or suffering are welcomed with love and open arms.
Please, if you care about animals, help prevent more of them from being born only to end up chained and left to waste away in people's back yards, suffering on mean streets where people kick at them or shoo them away like garbage, tortured at the hands of animal abusers, or, alas, euthanized in animal shelters for lack of a good home. If you want to save lives, always have your animals spayed or neutered.
Posted by Ingrid E. Newkirk

2009-03-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

Correction: I thought the HBO Documentary Death at a Factory Farm was a series of investigative reports, but it was in fact a singular investigative report. Regardless, if you haven't seen it, find it and watch it. You owe the animals that you eat at least that.

2009-03-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

HBO Series

I have been "DVR'ing" the HBO series Death of a Factory Farm. I hadn't been able to watch it for one reason or another - being out of town, working, extracurricular events that needed my attendance. But I had today off and once the cleaning service left, I caught up on some of the shows I had recorded. I skipped over the HBO series several times.

It's not like I haven't seen what goes on.

I have.

I have witnessed such unbelievable cruelty from my fellow man - towards companion animals, those used in entertainment and for experimentation.

I have seen turkeys and chickens being sodomized and raped.

I have seen dogs being skinned alive.

I have seen whales being harpooned and sharks being caught and thrown back to drown after their dorsal fin is cut from their body.

I have seen the Japanese trap dolphins in a cove and then execute the most horrendous cruelty that it gives me nightmares.

To say that I am deeply, deeply sensitive to these images is no understatement.

I literally cry out when the act is witnessed - with no regard for those around me.

It is primal.

When an elephant screams from being bull-hooked, I cannot, actually, I will not contain my horror.

It is so easy to drift though this life. Casually stepping over, ignoring, averting our eyes from the things we find distasteful. It is so easy to order food we find so lovely, so satiating, so cathartic to our daily experiences, with no regard for the process.

The process.

That's the hard part.

You know how people tend to minimize? If you work in an office or with different departments you see a lot of it. Those engaged in a particular function are well aware of the intricacies but those outside, well, it's too much, isn't it? Too much to think about all that others must do in order to accomplish a job, a project. I have people in my office, actually in my department but outside my division that cannot grasp the complexities of work performed by others. And it is too much to play detective so the opposite is performed. "Easy" "simple" "quick" "just" are continually used in reference to others. Yet it is minimizing.

Anyway. It is easy to pick up a meal, order a course without thinking about the process.

Yet our consciousness is forever assaulted by investigative reports or news stories that reveal the inevitable outcome of the factory farm environment.

The disease.

The substandard products.

The pollution.

The resource grab.

And the extreme cruelty.

Within 13 minutes of starting the first installment I had cried out. I had paused the program and sobbed uncontrollably.

It is a personal affront to me.

To see the fourth most intelligent being, the pig, being brutalized, it's offspring hurled through the air and into a wheeled container, one little piglet tossed upon another until the container is filled, with some bouncing off and landing hard on the concrete floor, while their mothers watch. I cannot fathom this. I should be able to, but I can't. I cannot understand how anyone can do this to a living being. I understand that people need to eat. Of course we need to eat.

But this?

The mothers, after their babies have been taken from them, usually give up living - refusing to eat or drink.

We are well past the false belief that animals are equal to machines.

They are thinking, feeling, cognizant beings that are dependent upon us.

Dependent on our benevolence.

And we do this.

The screaming of these little piglets. It's so awful.

The ones deemed too small are smashed against the concrete floor, sometimes over and over and over again until they are dead. Or maybe just half dead...thrown into buckets to convulse their way into God's hands.

Buckets and buckets of dead baby pigs.

Stacks upon stacks of dead pigs dumped into a pit until it was filled with dead pigs and then covered.

The mothers are kept in such filth that it is inevitable that disease would be rampant. Footage of these filthy conditions, of junk bins where the "downer" pigs are placed - downer meaning ill, injured, etc., the complete and total disregard for these animals. Kicking these animals that are unable to walk - kicking over and over and over as this animal desperately tries to move.

My God.

I cannot fathom what could have happened in a person life that would make this acceptable. Watching as they dragged all these animals out and one by one hang them by a chain from a front loader....taking 4 to 5 minutes for it to die. It is soul destroying.

Too sensitive? Too upsetting? Sorry. Too fucking bad. This is what YOU are perpetuating when you buy the end products. You can continue to avert your eyes saying it's too much, too troubling, call it an isolated incident. It is not isolated. The people that are involved in the raising of pigs, that must perform the day in day out maintenance of intensively confined animals, hate them.

This must stop.

And the only way it stops is to stop purchasing the products. Buy from local, humane farms. Sure it cost more...primarily because the farms take extra efforts to be humane. The cheaper the end product, believe me, the more inhumane, the more cruelty inherent in the flesh.

It bothers me to no end that those that consume the end products consider themselves too sensitive or the images too graphic to witness what those that have given their lives to feed them have to endure.

To say that it's not important.

To say that it's somehow not associated with anything you consume, is a lie.

You are lying to yourself.

You are disregarding the truth.

You are pretending.

You are averting your eyes from something that is egregious, yet consider yourself a kind, gentle, loving, empathetic, generous soul. If puppies were being slammed repeatedly against a concrete floor would you still say nothing?

How about kitten tossed on top of one another into a large container?

How about a beloved pet that has broken legs...being kicked repeatedly to make it move?

Still not a big deal?

Still isolated?

Still part of life?

DO SOMETHING!

Think about what you are eating EVERY time you eat. Think about where that animal came from, how it came to be on your plate and what it had to go through to get there.

I ask that you visit the Humane Farming Association (hfa.org) where the information is collected. I ask that you witness what these animals have endured to be on your plate.

You don't have to join PETA, you don't have become some radical animal rights advocate throwing red paint on people in furs.

You just have be a witness.

I think about those that lived in towns abutting concentration camps that averted their eyes. I am in no way equating people with animals...I am simply pointing out what we as caring compassionate people must constantly be alert to. We as humane individuals must be vigilant, must be strong and willing to confront the evils that has been allowed to fester and grow in cloak of secrecy.

We are better than this. I know we are.

Do something.

2009-02-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

Listening to rush and hannity yesterday I was stunned that people during Obama's town hall meeting were asking for new kitchens and bathrooms and more money to compensate them for their MickeyD job that they have had for four years, free gas, free this, free that.
Honestly.
A new kitchen?
Some people don't understand what this whole stimulus package is supposed to be a-stimulatin'.

But those rascals did it again! Caught me believing them! Crazy ME! This is hannity/rush SPIN!
The kitchen/bathroom request? Comes from a homeless woman that made a desperate plea for someone, anyone to please address the fact that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, are without a place to sleep, to live.
The compensation for a job? That was from a college student that is trying to work and go to school and is worried about not getting a job when he is done.
The free gas? There they go again. It was in snippets from someone talking, taken out of context in order to promote this obama-worship / Messiah gig that they believe everyone is falling prey to. Everyone but they, of course.

It's so funny how people like hannity and rush who are entertainers and nothing more, can sit around guffawing about other people begging for assistance. So immune. They rail about NATIONALIZED HEALTHCARE like it is the Chernobyl to the American Way. They are completely oblivious to the fact that this would help businesses by relieving the burden of insurance and it would assist our citizens in reaching their full potential as human beings - healthy and strong. They don't care. They're covered.

I listen because I need to know what is being said. It nauseates me, it infuriates me, but I didn't realize it would sucker me. It did. I stand corrected.

2009-02-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

History

I have always had an issue with "corporate" America...being involved in it. Maybe it's a pride issue.

Maybe I can't stand having people consider themselves better than anyone else or "dog and pony shows".

Maybe I can't allow others to take credit for my work.

I want to believe that I have avoided the office environment for all my adult life because there is something in me in regards to my sense of justice and fair play that makes existing in that environment too unnatural, too damaging to who I believe myself to be. When I write something like that it makes me shudder a bit thinking how that might sound. I am by no means a person that has lofty opinions of herself. I actually admire those that can work within the system to get things done. That has been a sense that I have gained since my current employ. I admire and yes, envy a little, those that can play the game and move forward...without undermining their integrity OR become slimy and slick in the process.

I wish I could control myself enough to be that person. Someone that can work others' egos to the benefit of what is considered to be a worthy issue. But I am too emotional. Too frank. I don't do flowery sugar coating. I can't stand being dishonest. And I don't seem to have the ability to talk myself into believing the bullshit in order to advance the cause. It annoys me, actually. I have been able to do it...I think twice. And it had to do with a frustrated mom and a kid that was on the verge of being abused. You can see. The escalation past what we all know to be acceptable. I know that others see it but it is terrifying for some to step in. Terrifying because we are taught to mind our own business, especially when it comes to parents and their children. You don't know how that person will react or if you'll make it worse or if everyone around you will look at you as if you are insane. Confrontation is a scary thing. But those two times, I did it right. I kept my eyes on the kid and offered help and empathy instead of distaste and judgement. It worked both times. I didn't lie or schmooze. As objectionable as I find big people beating up on little people, I was able to consider that selfish and pushed the child's need ahead of my knee jerk reaction to go and knock that momma out.

I have been with the city for going on three years and I frankly have never had an experience like it. I immediately felt at home. Usually, it takes me time to warm up to people to get over that shyness and allow others to see me. But within the first 15 minutes I was letting everyone see who I was. I felt comfortable and loved the environment. I do love my workplace. My department is absolutely the best one in the city if not the state. We have a great leader. We have great people. It's awesome. There have been not so great times but I never had the inclination to quit or walk away. It wasn't a corporate games type of place. I always felt it was honest and straight up and maybe that's why I was so comfortable. I got into GIS and feel for the first time in my adult life that I have found what I want to do. Challenging, technical, there are days I feel like I am so out of my league but I never ever feel like quitting. I just feel more determined to get it, to rise to the challenge and master it. I have been in my element. Happy in my work place.

But I have come to find that I think my team, maybe my "team leaders" have been sheltering me from the very corporate rules/game/ bullshit is indeed prevalent and well established within the city. I laugh and joke and get teased a lot about my "power to the people" mindset, but it is as my veganism, the essence of who I am. It appears, if were to take a backward glance over my shoulder, that pretty much everything I do and think and live by has its core principle rooted in human and animal rights. I can't stand to see anyone being treated unfairly, unkindly. Especially the least of us. And that's so condescending. What I mean is, those with the least power. And honestly, power is everything in this world. It's what drives everything - it drives policy, whether people live or die, eat or starve, receive medical services or not, succeed or fail. Those of us with the least amount of power rejoiced when someone who came across as a person who recognizes this social fact surged to the presidency on a wave of support by the "little guy". Obama, to me, appears to be someone that has what I have but has been able to do what I cannot...work within the system and put the cause in front of his feelings.

I digress.

Have you been on a really hot beach, I mean like tingly skin heat hot beach and you are under an umbrella within the confines of the shade, happy, feeling the breeze and then suddenly the umbrella catches the wind or becomes unstaked from the sand and you are exposed? The flash of white light, the deathly slow realization and adaptation but serious wake up call?

That's how I feel right now. I thought talking to the director of my department about it would help. I thought putting additional thoughts officially in writing and sending them to my director a day later would help. But to no avail. I am still reeling. I don't want to be over dramatic. But this is a value shaker. I feel that a foundational belief I have firmly planted on secure limestone holding up the 46 year old home called me has had a 9.0 earthquake shake the living shit out it. I'm not down, per se, but I am shaky.

How naive am I? Ok. Here goes. I thought Human Resources, you know the department that takes applications, establishes benefits, insurances, etc. was a department dedicated to the resources know as humans. The workers. From directors to technicians to caretakers. You know. Like the Parks department is about parks, Planning is about planning, and Finance is about finance. I really thought that up until about 36 hours ago when my husband, who has been a player in the corporate game, yo, for 20 years informed me that no. Human Resources has nothing to do with caring for the worker. Human Resources is about covering the ass of the corporation. The higher ups. It's about towing the company line. At first, I was stunned. That can't be true. That makes no sense. I mean, it's one thing if you are in the private sector. You're subjected to continuous competition. There are all kinds of different reasons for the private sector to justify what they do. But I am blindsided by the realization that it has seeped into the public sector.

Essentially what happened was my department had a "mandatory" safety meeting. The entire department congregated in the Streets Division. And for the next 90 minutes the director of human resources told that us that we are not doing our jobs, that we get paid only for the hours we work, that we don't know the mission statement, don't expect a raise for your crappy job performance, there are 250 applicants waiting to take your job from you. You get the picture. It was terrible. I mean, he was talking to the front line. The guys who go out every freakin' day in the ridiculous heat , the rain, the freezing cold, in emergencies, in all kinds of situations and circumstances and physically work their asses off. And here's some arrogant ass who sits in an air conditioned office screaming at his staff, exercising his authority abusively telling guys that are getting paid a fraction of his pay that they need to work harder, be thankful for all the city has to offer them and grateful for a job. I was so angry. I don't like being threatened. I don't like my team being threatened. I don't appreciate being told that I don't work hard enough, that I don't put out a quality product, that I should be bowing and scraping to upper management for all that they do for me. Is it pride? I don't think so. It is more of an assault on what I know to be true and right. I don't believe there is ever a reason to talk to people, especially people who are less powerful. Who are subordinates.

I am still so affected. I'm angry. I'm upset. I feel I am on the verge of tears. And I struggle with how ridiculous that is. Why cry? Why be upset to that point? It's work! It's not world peace. It's not the Gaza strip. It's not puppy mills or factory farming. It's not gitmo. It's work. It's some guy that came and condescended and threatened for 90 minutes. Big deal. I think that and it registers. I get that perspective is important. But at the same time, I am wounded. I am wounded that my team has been threatened. Has been cajoled by someone that actually had the audacity to throw something at one of the street techs. I found out about that later, I didn't witness it. But the director actually physically threw something at a subordinate from another director's department. Mind blowing.

I guess there have been times when I have felt this way before. When I have seen animal abuse, or a child being abused or being exposed to a tragic event. I have had that jarring stab to the soul that sends me reeling for days. Finding out Paul was sick was one of those moments. Or my dad. Or when I had to put my dog down. Or 911. Or seeing dogs skinned alive. Soul shaking brutality. Stunning assaults to my sense of what's right and wrong, what's acceptable and what is not, what is expected and completely out of nowhere. I guess I am entitled to reel. I think it's my continuous wagging finger at self for not reacting in a way that I conceive is acceptable. A lot of times when I allow the emotional part of me to become the soul insurgent speaking out and ignoring the political suicide, later I cringe a bit. I think of other more effect courses that should have been taken, what would have been more productive. Maybe I am justified in reacting in a way that shows my indignation at the purposeful affront to my sense of justice and sense of righteousness. And I think it has been that honesty in my reaction, the fact that no one around me has to question what I am thinking or how I feel. No one has to guess about my motives. No one has to wonder where my loyalties lie. I am not self-promoting. I am not egocentric. I am team player. And even though I call things based on a personal belief system and I reference incidents of personal affront, I don't wish to speak for others. I don't claim to know how this particular meeting affected my coworkers. I only know how it affected me. But my feelings are intrinsically tied TO my coworkers. It matters to me that others attempt to disrespect them. It offends me when my coworkers are minimized or disregarded. It is not common human decency. I have this huge intolerance for it.

So that's where I am. Up and down. In and out of these feelings. Feeling ok and then thinking all is ok and then seeing some ridiculous slight or indiscretion or injustice that I would otherwise not even recognize and I get completely bent out of shape. I went off on some guy that threw a cigarette out the window. How many times did I do that when I was smoking? A million? Probably. Where do I get the balls to criticize someone for what I have done myself? What an asshole. But I know, I KNOW, it is residual anger from what I have not reconciled yet.

Sigh.

That's where I am.

2009-01-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

It has finally happened and I am so grateful.
Welcome, President Obama!

2009-01-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

No one EVER will convince me that elephants are happy, comfortable, well cared for, socially satiated while in captivity. I read an article recently where commenters were talking about the dangers to elephants in the wild. I opted to come from the position that, like people, most elephants would probably take their chances. I mean, really. I can get 3 square meals, medical treatment, exercise, a bed to sleep in and a roof over my head in prison but I think I would choose to sleep under a bridge before I chose that. It's a silly, nonsensical point of view that again, takes the approach that somehow animals just wouldn't survive or benefit without human involvement. It seems to me that the opposite is true.

End Elephant Incarcerations at Zoos and Circuses!

In Defense of Animals (IDA) Releases 2008 "Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants" List
List demonstrates AZA-accredited zoos are failing elephants nationwide

San Rafael, Calif. - The 2008 list of the Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants, released today by In Defense of Animals (IDA), comes just one month after the zoo world was stung by a scientific study condemning the deadly track record of zoos with elephants. In a groundbreaking peer-reviewed study published December 2008, the prestigious journal Science documented that elephants in zoos live dramatically shorter lives than their wild counterparts. The study should be the tipping point in local controversies over suffering captive elephants in cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
Based on nominations made by the public, IDA's 2008 list spotlights the perils that elephants face in zoos. At least half of the 10 elephant deaths in U.S. Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)-accredited zoos were related to birth complications, including two mothers and three calves. Birth complications are common and deadly in captivity, where tiny displays prevent the extensive movement elephants need to keep fit. For the second year in a row, a young elephant was lost to a deadly infectious disease that is striking captive elephants in zoos. Two-year-old Mac became the sixth elephant born at the Houston Zoo to die from the highly fatal elephant herpesvirus.
"Zoos can no longer claim they are conserving elephants when they are actually killing these endangered animals decades before their natural time," said IDA president Elliot M. Katz, DVM. "The Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants highlights the devastating effects of captivity on elephants, including birth complications, aberrant behaviors, lethal joint and foot disorders and premature death."
"Zoos must stop ignoring the science that reveals who elephants are, what they need, and how they suffer in zoo exhibits. It's time for mammoth changes in the housing and care of captive elephants in this country," Katz continued, urging zoos to follow the lead of the two U.S. elephant sanctuaries that provide elephants with hundreds to thousands of acres of natural habitat over which to roam and engage in more normal elephant behaviors.
"If zoos can't meet the vast physical and psychological needs of elephants, then they shouldn't have elephants at all," Katz concluded.

IDA's 2008 Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants List:

San Antonio Zoo (Texas) - No luck for Lucky The San Antonio Zoo continues to hold its only surviving Asian elephant, the woefully misnamed Lucky, in solitary confinement since the death of her companion, Alport, in November 2007. Elephants are intensely social animals who need companionship in order to thrive. Free-ranging elephants live in large matriarchal family groups in which females remain with their mothers for life. Unlucky Lucky has been alone for over a year, and without another Asian elephant since 2004. The zoo refuses to do right by Lucky and send her to a sanctuary where she can live in a spacious, natural environment with others of her species, even though San Antonio's plan is to replace Lucky with African elephants. Experience has shown that solitary elephants can turn into social butterflies in sanctuary settings, yet the San Antonio Zoo stubbornly continues to isolate Lucky in an outdated exhibit far too small to meet her natural needs. The San Antonio Zoo can change this sad elephant's luck by moving her to a sanctuary without delay. This is the zoo's second appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos list.
Houston Zoo (Texas) - Breeding ground for misery Elephants breed poorly in zoos, yet another indicator that zoo conditions are inadequate for the Earth's largest land mammals. But the Houston Zoo's Asian elephant breeding record is by far the worst in the country. Of 14 known elephant births, not one is alive today. To make matters worse, the zoo is a "hot spot" for the gruesome and highly fatal elephant herpesvirus. At the Houston Zoo, the deadly disease has killed six of eight live-born elephants, including two-year-old Mac last November, and may be associated with six stillbirths. Despite this grim history, the Houston Zoo continues to recklessly breed elephants, playing Russian roulette with the lives of these highly endangered animals. Mac's mother Shanti is again pregnant, potentially putting yet another young elephant at risk of a horrific death. The Houston Zoo claims that breeding must continue so the disease can be further studied, meaning that it knowingly is engaging in a grisly experiment in which 75% of the subjects have died. This is the Houston Zoo's second appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list.

Los Angeles Zoo (California) - Learn about the wild - spending, that is The Los Angeles Zoo has a terrible history with elephants. Of the 13 who died there since 1975, more than half did not live 20 years, about a third of an elephant's natural lifespan. The zoo's solitary elephant Billy incessantly bobs his head up and down, a sign of psychological distress. Yet the zoo wants to construct a $42 million exhibit that still won't provide the space and natural conditions elephants need to live longer and healthier lives. In the past 10 years, zoos around the globe have spent or committed an estimated $500 million to build or renovate displays for about 250 captive elephants, despite the gross lack of evidence that these changes will improve health or longevity. By contrast, the Kenya Wildlife Service protects tens of thousands of free-ranging elephants on an annual budget of only $20 million. Those free-ranging elephants, despite facing the elements, habitat loss, and poachers, live an average three times as long as their cousins held captive in zoos. Fortunately, the City of Los Angeles is questioning the logic of its staggeringly expensive elephant exhibit, and will vote in January on canceling the project and sending Billy to a large, natural-habitat sanctuary. The Los Angeles Zoo makes IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list for the fourth time, plus an additional time when it received our Dishonorable Mention.
Buffalo Zoo (New York) - The emperor's new clothes When you hear the zoo industry boast of the great number "expanded" elephant exhibits, just think of Buffalo Zoo and you"ll see that the emperor truly has no clothes. Like other zoos, Buffalo has made slight improvements in order to meet the AZA's very minimal standards that allow elephants to be held in outdoor spaces as small as 1,800 square feet (about the size of a three-car garage) and in 20x20 foot indoor stalls. The Buffalo Zoo spent over $1 million to bring the indoor quarters for its three elephants to the inadequate 1,800 square feet standard, in which they will spend the majority of their lives, including prolonged hours during Buffalo's frigid winters. By contrast, free-ranging elephants walk tens of miles a day and are active for 20 out of every 24 hours. While we're glad that Buki, Surapa and Jothi are no longer chained overnight, life has not meaningfully changed for these elephants who continue to live in a cramped display and are controlled by keepers who use cruel, circus-style training methods. What they really need is the space and natural conditions that can only be found at an elephant sanctuary. The Buffalo Zoo makes IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list for the second consecutive year.

Oklahoma Zoo - Stacking a deadly deck for elephants Asha and Chandra were born at the Dickerson Park Zoo (see their Hall of Shame listing below), where they were cruelly separated from their mothers at ages three (Asha) and two and a half (Chandra) and shipped to the Oklahoma City Zoo. Now Oklahoma has temporarily shipped both to the Tulsa Zoo for breeding while it expands its elephant exhibit. IDA has long denounced the standard but cruel practice of separating mothers and calves and shipping elephants from zoo to zoo, especially considering that in the wild female elephants remain with their mothers for life. The recent study in Science magazine proves that early maternal separation and inter-zoo transfers cut short the lives of elephants in zoos. If that weren't bad enough, the Oklahoma Zoo is recklessly breeding Chandra, despite the fact that she was one of a very few elephants to survive the highly fatal elephant herpesvirus and may be a carrier. Virtually nothing is known about the disease and its mechanisms for transmission and infection. Building on the tragic histories of Asha and Chandra, the Oklahoma City Zoo is stacking a deadly deck for these elephants and any unfortunate offspring. No exhibit improvements will compensate for these inhumane and deadly zoo practices. This is Oklahoma's first appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list.
Brec's Baton Rouge (Louisiana) - No oasis for elephants Brec's makes its first appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list for its woefully inadequate facilities and also for its handling of elephants - an archaic and cruel training method utilizing physical punishment. While the zoo's promo for its new "Elephant Oasis" boasts a shaded pavilion, sculpture, video displays and mister fans - all to "enhance the visitor experience," - the exhibit is more desert than "oasis" for Brec's two Asian elephants. Bozie and Judy share a tiny display yard, and are chained in their concrete-floored barn during cold or inclement weather. Forty-one-year-old Judy has suffered from arthritis since she was 16, and 33-year-old Bozie has frequent foot problems. A zoo manual warns keepers to maintain dominance over the elephants at all times, including the use of physical discipline. If punishment is exacted in public, keepers are advised to tell visitors that the zoo is "trying to assist in the conservation of an animal whose existence in the wild is in question." Apparently, conservation includes circus-style shows in which elephants stand on their heads and hind legs and sit on a stool. If visitors are to learn anything at this zoo, it should be about the need to rescue its two elephants and send them to a sanctuary.

(TIE) Woodland Park Zoo (Seattle, Washington) and National Zoo (Washington, DC) - Breed them and weep These zoos tied for the No. 6 spot because of their repeated efforts to artificially inseminate two breeding-age females, Woodland Park Zoo's Chai, age 30, and Shanthi, age 33, at the National Zoo, despite the known risks to mother and calf. Both elephants have lost calves to the deadly elephant herpesvirus, and the Woodland Park Zoo acknowledges that there is a greater than one-in-five chance that any calf produced by Chai would also be stricken with the fatal disease. In addition, both elephants are very near the age when female elephants in zoos are no longer bred due to a higher risk of birth complications. Since 2001, at least 21 elephant pregnancies in U.S. zoos have ended in stillbirths or other complications, resulting in 17 dead babies and six dead mothers. Zoos won't turn the tide on elephant welfare as long as they continue to treat these intelligent and complex individuals as little more than breeding machines to produce baby elephants at any cost. Both zoos are appearing on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos list for the third time. The Woodland Park Zoo also appeared once as a Dishonorable Mention.
Ft. Worth Zoo (Texas) - The secret misery of male elephants The Ft. Worth Zoo is often portrayed as having a model zoo elephant program. On closer inspection this facility is a sterling example of just how miserable life can be for male elephants in zoos. Ft. Worth holds two male elephants, Groucho and Casey, in small, separate outdoor yards where they display severe zoochotic behaviors such as repetitive head bobbing and swaying - abnormal behaviors not seen in wild elephants. Life is generally wretched for male elephants in zoos. Few zoos even attempt to hold males because they are more difficult and dangerous to handle than females and require specialized facilities and care. Those that do hold males usually relegate them to lives of isolation, despite their social nature (zoos often dishonestly portray male elephants as completely solitary). Other zoos stick their males in impoverished back areas, similar to Ft. Worth where the public can only sneak peeks of their forlorn existence. The plight of male elephants has long been a dirty zoo secret, and one that won't soon go away considering that half of all elephant births are males. This is the Ft. Worth Zoo's first appearance on IDAs Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list.

Dallas Zoo (Texas) - Global focus on a troubled elephant The Dallas Zoo received by far the most nominations from the public for the Ten Worst Zoos list due to its widely-publicized mishandling of its lone surviving elephant, Jenny. The zoo was blasted by elephant advocates from around the globe after it announced it would move this extremely traumatized elephant to a drive-thru safari park in Mexico, despite her serious aversion to noise and vehicles. Buckling under the fierce public outcry and intense media scrutiny, the zoo canceled the move but has resisted calls to send Jenny to an elephant sanctuary where she could live with other African elephants in a spacious, natural environment. Of all the zoos on this list, Dallas has the best chance to redeem itself by following through on a plan to build a new elephant complex for Jenny and other already captive elephants taken from worse conditions. With its southwestern climate and commitment to humane handling, Dallas could fill a pressing need for improved housing and care for captive U.S. elephants currently in severely deficient conditions, but only if the zoo provides maximum space and embraces a no breeding or importation policy. Time is of the essence for Jenny, who, at present, is still alone in a cramped and unnatural zoo exhibit. This is the Dallas Zoo's first appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list.

Lowry Park Zoo (Florida) - Bad deal for elephants Four of the elephants at the Lowry Park Zoo were imported from Swaziland to Lowry Park, where they are condemned to live in a barren 2.5-acre enclosure far different from their 18,000-square-acre home in the Hlane National Park in their native Africa. IDA suspected dirty dealing when the San Diego Zoo and Lowry Park Zoo imported 11 of Swaziland's fewer than 40 elephants, claiming they were saving the pachyderms from culling due to "overpopulation." Conveniently, the zoos and Swaziland ignored the availability of reserves in Africa where the elephants would have remained free. Now the architects of that import, Lowry Park Zoo director Lex Salisbury and director of collections Larry Killmar (formerly with San Diego Zoo), have been caught red-handed with some dirty dealing on the domestic side. Both men were suspended from the AZA and Salisbury was forced to resign from his zoo post after a Tampa city audit found they had illegally transferred animals from the zoo to Salisbury's privately-owned animal safari park. Lowry Park Zoo's first appearance on this list is timely as other zoos ponder importing elephants from their native lands. By paying cash-poor nations hundreds of thousands of dollars for elephants, these zoos are setting a terrible precedent for international conservation by promoting the commercial trade in this threatened species. This is Lowry Park's first appearance on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list.

Worst Zoos for Elephants - Hall of Shame
This year, IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list includes a special category for repeat offenders that have made little or no progress improving conditions for elephants. The first additions to the Hall of Shame are:

Dickerson Park Zoo (Missouri) This zoo has a terrible record with elephants. Of 10 elephants born at the zoo, only two are alive today. Five calves were stricken with the highly fatal elephant herpesvirus, with all but one dying from the deadly infection. Despite being a herpesvirus "hotspot," the zoo continued its breeding program for years, often transporting female elephants to and from other zoos and circuses. Only after the death of 16-month-old Nisha in December 2007 did the Dickerson Park Zoo put a temporary hold on elephant breeding. Meanwhile the four adult female Asian elephants at this zoo languish in a cramped one-acre exhibit and concrete-floored barn. Dickerson earns additional Hall of Shame stripes for its 2001 beating of the elephant named Chai, who lost 1000 pounds, and a history of painful foot problems, psychological problems, aggression and premature deaths that have plagued its elephants over the years.

El Paso Zoo (Texas) This zoo admitted that its three-quarter acre elephant exhibit was too small, yet the next year a new zoo director convinced the City of El Paso that the very same exhibit was acceptable for its two elephants, Juno and Savannah. The exhibit may comply with the AZA's pitifully minimal standards that allow elephants to be kept in an outdoor space about the size of a three-car garage and an indoor pen measuring only 20 feet by 20 feet, but it's far from adequate for the zoo's two elephants, who regularly display intensely repetitive, abnormal behaviors, such as swaying and rocking, a sign of serious psychological distress. This zoo also earns its place in the Hall of Shame due to its despicable history of elephant beatings.

St. Louis Zoo (Missouri) Elephants continue to suffer at this zoo, which has made repeated appearances on IDA's Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list. Asian elephant Clara was euthanized at age 54, after suffering for years from crippling arthritis and chronic foot disease, the result of decades spent in the zoo's tiny exhibit. Clara's companion Pearl continues to languish at the zoo, becoming increasingly debilitated. In 2007, Jade was born, but rejected by her mother, Rani. Another elephant, Sri, has survived despite her failure to expel a fetus that died in utero in November 2005. No significant change is on the horizon for St. Louis's seven elephants who are crammed into a half-acre or less of outdoor space and spend long stretches behind locked doors in concrete stalls at night and 24/7 during cold midwest winter days.

Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (California) This amusement park has a hideous history of elephant suffering and deaths, showing complete disregard for the health and well-being of the seven elephants forced to live in the shadow of roller coaster rides, amidst noisy, rowdy crowds. Nine elephants have died at the park since 1995. Five of those elephants were euthanized as a direct result of the same foot and joint disorders that afflict at least two elephants there currently, painful ailments caused by the cramped and barren exhibit. Six Flags forces elephants to perform in shows and give rides through coercion and physical punishment with a bullhook, a steel-tipped device similar to a fireplace poker used to poke, prod and beat elephants into compliance. Six Flags needs to acknowledge that forcing elephants to live in highly unnatural conditions that cause them to suffer and die prematurely is not entertaining or fun.

In Defense of Animals issues its Top Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants list annually. IDA is an international animal rescue and advocacy organization based in San Rafael, CA. For more information, visit www.helpelephants.com.

2009-01-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

No one has a right to say what should or should not exist on this earth. Whom is not smart enough, not clever enough, not enough. No one has the right to determine the quality of life for another being. A cow? A chicken? A pig? A mouse? All put here for a reason. Reasons that have nothing to do with us but with the grand scheme. It is not our responsibility to do anything but care for and comfort those that have been put in our care. This story is what my vision is all about. Because it is about a cow. A cow that did what every cow dreams of doing.
Just being a cow.

In Loving Memory :Cincinnati Freedom: A Farm Sanctuary Legend

“Escaped Cow Still on the Loose!”; “The World’s Fastest Cow!”; “Cow Becomes Local Hero!”; “Cow to Get Key to the City!” These are just a few of the news headlines that a snow white Charolais cow inspired in 2002 when she took a courageous leap of faith, cleared a 6-foot-high fence at a Cincinnati, Ohio slaughterhouse, and engaged citizens in a dramatic 11-day chase that gained national attention and still has people talking today.

As she resisted capture time and again, staying hidden in a park where she foraged and rested when she could, the courageous cow demonstrated an unbendable will, and her tremendous fight for survival resonated with the public. By the time of her capture, she had won the hearts of so many that calls for mercy poured into the city from all over the country. In the end, it was a plea from renowned artist Peter Max that brought the brave bovine safely to our New York Shelter, where she was named Cincinnati Freedom and given the liberty she always deserved.

Though one of our most elusive residents, choosing the company of cattle over people, Cinci nonetheless received countless visitors through the years, each one eager to catch a glimpse of the valiant cow they followed in the news. While sanctuary guests were unable to touch her, everyone who saw her was affected by Cinci all the same, as even her posture and gaze spoke of the intense life force burning within her and an acute awareness of the special place she inhabited in the world. Most were awed in Cinci’s presence, as she was a living testament to the desire for life we — human or animal — all share.

Cinci’s effect on members of the cattle herd was equally profound. Forming a natural bond with other famous slaughterhouse escapees who came to the shelter before and after her (including Queenie, Annie Dodge and Maxine), Cinci traveled with her strong, faithful female companions as an inseparable unit — the members of which moved gracefully and intuitively together as if all were of one body and one mind. But her spirit breathed life into the entire cattle herd, as well. While Cinci preferred that we humans keep a respectful distance, she connected with every cow and steer, treating each of them with the utmost tenderness and love.

The adoration and devotion the herd felt for Cinci in return was never more apparent than when she, after six years of living among dear friends at the sanctuary, suddenly lost use of her back legs and became immobile. As we anxiously awaited results of veterinary diagnostics, Cinci’s friends, Maxine and Robin, stayed by her side — and remained there constantly through that first difficult night. The next morning, we received the tragic news that Cinci had spinal cancer, a terminal illness that often progresses quickly in cattle and only becomes apparent when the size of the tumor increases and causes sudden pressure on the animal’s spine. With heavy hearts, we also learned that this cancer could not be kept at bay.

When it came time to say goodbye to Cinci, the herd gathered close around her. One of the eldest steers, Kevin, stepped forward to lick her face, while Iris, an older female, licked her back, soothing and keeping her calm up until she took her final breath. After our beautiful girl passed, every member of the herd approached to say goodbye, each one sharing with Cinci one last moment of affection. Though heartbreaking, the herd’s mourning ritual was also beautiful and comforting, as there was no doubt that Cinci not only lived, but also died knowing that she was cherished by all.

The brilliant light that radiated from Cinci burned out too soon, leaving a void that won’t be easily filled. Though it is difficult to reconcile the loss of one who lived so passionately, we are heartened by the lessons she taught all of us while she was alive. Most of all, we are grateful for the life Cinci led when courage and compassion set her free, allowing her not only to live, but to love with all her heart and be loved so fully in return.

2008-12-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

I know that there have been other stories that have captured the interest of the media and the public but this is an important story. The fact that millions of pounds of toxic waste have been dumped into East Tennessee demonstrates the danger of coal and its usage. When those that come in contact with this stuff and inevitably develop cancer and other ailments, they will have to manage alone through private healthcare and sit through years of legal wranglings.
Pathetic. We need clean energy.
This is but one reason why.

From the New York Times
December 30, 2008
At Plant in Coal Ash Spill, Toxic Deposits by the Ton
By SHAILA DEWAN
In a single year, a coal-fired electric plant deposited more than 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials in a holding pond that failed last week, flooding 300 acres in East Tennessee, according to a 2007 inventory filed with the Environmental Protection Agency.
The inventory, disclosed by the Tennessee Valley Authority on Monday at the request of The New York Times, showed that in just one year, the plant’s byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems.
And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a T.V.A. plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades’ worth of these deposits.
For days, authority officials have maintained that the sludge released in the spill is not toxic, though coal ash has long been known to contain dangerous concentrations of heavy metals. On Monday, a week after the spill, the authority issued a joint statement with the E.P.A. and other agencies recommending that direct contact with the ash be avoided and that pets and children should be kept away from affected areas.
Residents complained that the authority had been slow to issue information about the contents of the ash and the water, soil and sediment samples taken in and around the spill.
“They think that the public is stupid, that they can’t put two and two together,” said Sandy Gupton, a registered nurse who hired an independent firm to test the spring water on her family’s 300-acre farm, now sullied by sludge from the spill. “It took five days for the T.V.A. to respond to us.”
Richard W. Moore, the inspector general of the authority, said he would open an investigation into the cause of the spill, the adequacy of the response, and how to prevent spills from similar landfills at other authority plants, according to a report in The Knoxville News Sentinel.
Elevated levels of lead and thallium and what the Environmental Protection Agency called “very high” levels of arsenic have been found in water samples taken near the site of the spill.
Though the E.P.A., the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the authority have spoken daily about their efforts to monitor air, soil and water quality, complete results have been released for only two samples, both taken from a drinking water intake site that is upstream of the spill. The water there met drinking standards.
A test for heavy metals in water, soil or sediment should take two to eight hours, said Peter Schulert, the chief executive of the Environmental Science Corporation, an environmental laboratory near Nashville. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t have the results within a day,” Mr. Schulert said.
The data on the toxic compounds produced by the plant was filed with the E.P.A. this year, said Barbara Martocci, a spokeswoman for the power authority. It was posted on the authority’s Web site only in a section labeled “air quality.”
At full strength, the plant uses 14,000 tons of coal a day and supplies enough electricity for 670,000 households. Its refuse, the ash, rose 55 feet above the banks of the Emory River, which flows into the Clinch River and then the Tennessee.
Early last Monday, after a period of heavy rain, the earthen dike that contained the ash breached and 5.4 million cubic yards slid away, covering 300 acres in muck and knocking a nearby home off its foundation, according to the T.V.A.’s estimates. Mike Farmer, the Roane County executive, said three houses were left uninhabitable and 36 more residential properties had sustained damage.
The authority has been using backhoes and heavy equipment to clean up the ash and is building weirs, or underwater dams, to try to keep it from traveling downstream. Officials do not have an estimate of the cost of the cleanup or how long it will take, said a spokeswoman, Catherine Mackey.
The spill has reignited a debate over whether coal ash should be regulated as a hazardous waste. In 2000, the E.P.A. backed away from its recommendation to do so in the face of industry opposition, promising instead to issue national guidelines for proper ash disposal, though it never did.
Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit policy group based in Knoxville, criticized the T.V.A. for not providing more information to residents, including the sample results.
Mr. Smith also criticized the agency for increasing the flow of the Tennessee River to keep the ash from approaching the drinking water intake for Kingston, a town a half-mile up from the confluence of the Clinch and the Tennessee.
“They’re actually moving the stuff further downstream, in order to protect the drinking supply at Kingston,” he said.

2008-12-30T07:03:00.000-08:00

I have a deep love for animals..I guess that really goes without saying. But I have favorites. One is the elephant. I suppose their massive size, their intellect and their strong sense of family and community has something to do with it as well as the horrific abuse they have endured. Circuses that use exotic animals have to be a thing of the past. Period. There is no way to train the largest land mammal on the planet without violence. Please support the actions below:

Federal Lawsuit against Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus for Elephant Abuse goes to Trial

More than eight years ago, the Animal Welfare Institute, former Ringling Bros. employee, Tom Rider, and three other national animal welfare organizations first filed suit against Ringling Bros. and its parent company, Feld Entertainment, for the mistreatment of Asian elephants under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Following countless legal challenges by the defendants, this groundbreaking lawsuit is finally going to trial on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 in federal court for the District of Columbia.
The ESA prohibits any activity that "takes" a species listed as endangered. This includes any acts that "harm, wound, injure, harass, or kill" an endangered species—both those in the wild and in captivity.
Asian elephants, the only elephant species used by Ringling Bros., are currently listed by the ESA as endangered. Our lawsuit alleges that a number of routine practices by Ringling Bros. violate the Act, including: (1) the forceful use of bull hooks to control, train and "discipline" the elephants and (2) the chaining of the elephants for most of the day and night.
We have amassed a wealth of evidence to support our claims, including video footage, photographs, eyewitness accounts, internal Ringling Bros. documents and investigative reports from the United States Department of Agriculture. Three former Ringling Bros. employees will testify at trial about the elephant abuse they observed firsthand while working for the circus, and top experts in the field of elephant behavior from around the world will be on hand to testify on our behalf as well.
In addition to demonstrating how Ringling Bros. mistreats its Asian elephants, we will also present evidence involving the deaths of at least four baby elephants who have died in the care of Ringling Bros. over the past few years: Two-year-old Benjamin died when his trainer came after him with a bull hook, four-year-old Kenny was made to perform in three shows when he was extremely ill, eight-month-old Riccardo mysteriously broke both of his hind legs while "climbing on a round platform 19 inches high," and eleven-day-old Bertha died in the summer of 2005, her birth and death never even announced by Ringling Bros.

Bull Hook
A "bull hook" or "ankus" is a two- to three-foot-long club or stick with a sharp metal or steel hook attached to the top. Ringling Bros. uses the bull hook repeatedly to beat, hit, stab and poke the elephants—especially when they are young—to control and "break" them so they perform as required. Although elephants are thought to have strong hides, their skin is extremely sensitive, particularly around the ears, face, trunk and head—places where they are most often struck with the bull hook. Elephant skin is so sensitive that these animals often throw dust or mud on their backs in the wild to protect themselves from sunburn. Once the elephants have been repeatedly abused with the bull hook for long periods of time, just showing them the instrument often causes them enough distress to make them perform as desired.
We have substantial evidence establishing that Ringling Bros. abuses its elephants with bull hooks, including eye-witness accounts of former Ringling Bros. employees who have witnessed vicious bull hook beatings of elephants and the daily hitting and hooking of these animals to make them stay in line, move in a particular direction or perform on cue. We also have hours of video footage showing Ringling Bros. handlers hitting and hooking elephants with bull hooks, not to mention internal Ringling Bros. documents illustrating the abuse. In one such document, a Ringling Bros. animal behaviorist reported "an elephant dripping blood all over the arena floor during the show from being hooked."

Chaining
Ringling Bros. keeps the elephants in large, heavy-duty chains for most of their lives. One of the only times the elephants are not in chains is when they are displayed to the public, such as during the "Open House" and the actual performances. This has been confirmed by several former Ringling Bros. employees who say the elephants are not only chained continuously, but spend much of this time standing in their own feces and urine.
Internal Ringling Bros. train records show that the elephants are chained in boxcars for an average of more than 26 consecutive hours. When the circus travels from city to city, elephants are often chained for 60 to 70 hours at a time, with records showing some cases where the duration reaches 90 to 100 hours.

Should you wish to make a donation to help us with our mounting legal bills, please send a check made payable to the Animal Welfare Institute and mail it to:
Animal Welfare Institute
P.O. Box 3650
Washington, D.C. 20027
Note on check: Ringling Bros. Lawsuit

They also accept donations made by credit card (Visa or MasterCard). Should you wish to make a donation in this manner, please call the Animal Welfare Institute at 703-836-4300 and ask for Tracy Silverman

2008-12-19T08:26:00.001-08:00

Animal Rights Musings

It appears that Britney has made a comeback with an album titled circus that came in at number one. I have nothing against Britney, in fact, I wanted her to get her life together as I know how much two little guys desperately need their mom.

But then I see the video.

I know the innocent, clueless demeanor is her "thing" but using wild animals in a video? Really?

For all the information out there, there is no excuse to not know what is going on. Reports have come out now that show documented evidence that elephants in captivity - zoos, circuses and other places - live 1/3 as long as elephants in the wild. That's accounting FOR poaching. Why?

I guess it might have something to do with torture and stress. Every facility that harbors elephants uses some form of punishment - bullhooks, electrocution, etc. - as these are the largest land mammals on the planet and it is hard to get them to stand on those little tiny stools or do other unnatural acts without the presence of fear.

And that is what it is all about.

Fear.

When one lives with that sort of stress, the constant threat of violence as well as being taken from their normal and necessary family structures, it is inevitable that it would take it's toll.

How do you think they get those animals to do those things?

Honestly?

I suppose it is just human nature to overlook the background of things, the inner workings and just look at the end result.

It's easier.

Once we know that these huge animals that form complex social hierarchies and relationships that migrate in the wild hundreds of miles are systematically beaten bloody with baton-like clubs with metal hooks on the end until they scream, the fact that they are balancing on two front legs and their trunk doesn't seem all that appealing anymore.

Who wants to see the result of torture?

Because that's what it is.

Animals that are used to moving, being chained in one place for hours, days on end. Sensitive skin ripped by abuse for tricks to show a paying audience. Have you ever heard an elephant scream? It will pull your heart out of your chest. Especially, ESPECIALLY, when it is a baby.

And then we move to the buyer beware portion of our animal awareness diatribe. If you wear fur, leather, sheered wool, or other animal products, then you owe it to the animals to watch what they endure to bring you those products. And if you wear "faux" fur, you need to be very, VERY careful because fur from China and other places is not labeled as being fur. Tests have proven repeatedly that the fur from dogs usually stolen from homes are labeled as faux. There is some loophole that allows any material under a certain percentage of the entire product to be labeled as faux or not labeled at all. Go to "Youtube" and then search "who's skin are you in?". It is a comprehensive look at all the different products that we use.

Did you know that most fur bearing animals are anally electrocuted to maintain the coat?

Did you know that dogs and cats are stolen habitually from homes, shoved into wire cages until they literally cannot move, loaded onto trucks, tossed from the trucks and one by one removed, hung upside down on a crude wire, and while they struggle the knife rips into their skin and is torn from their bodies as they scream. Once it is removed, they are dropped from the wire and tossed into a pile of writhing, living animals until they die an excruciating death of exposure. Can you fathom that sort of inhumanity?

I know we all want to believe that little bunnies are kept in a happy place and are gently euthanized as their little heads are stroked. It is in our nature that we want to believe that the animals that die for us are humanely treated. But it simply is not the case. It is NEVER the case. If you are wearing fur, you are wearing the skin of an animal that was kept in a filthy, tiny wire cage, stacked on top of other cages to the ceiling. It was given water and minimal food and left in an ammonia filled building standing on wire with no exposure to the outdoors. It was cage crazy - circling endlessly, chewing their legs down to the bone out of sheer boredom. It was terrified by the noise, the sound of the people that offer nothing but fear. Day and night, 24/7/365 they are in those cages, in the dark, choking on the smell of excrement and urine, in pain, in fear. Until the end of their miserable lives when they are pulled from their filth by the scruff of their neck and an anal device is inserted and they are electrocuted to death.

That's what your fur coat is. Fear, torture and death.

Watch the video. I know it's hard to watch. But you don't know what you are contributing to when you buy leather, fur, and other animal products. I understand that ignorance is bliss but it's not just the dying. It's the way these animals are treated day in day out that will change your mind. It is the cruelty with which these animals are handled that will break your heart. Sure, we have all seen the baby seals being bashed over the head by the sealer (yeah, that's STILL going on). But what you don't see is the single bash, and then the sinking of the spike into the body of the live two month old pup as the sealer drags the pup across the ice to the pile and leaves it there...suffering....still alive. Seeing that pup desperately trying to drag its little body to safety will make you realize how cruel the entire industry is. Seeing these dogs stuffed into a wire cage like sardines, dogs that look like anyone's pet, some with collars, knowing that they will suffer one of the most horrendous acts of physical violence a man can inflict on an animal. It has to change you.

It has to inform you.

It has to enlighten you to the fact that your idea of the reality is just that - an idea.

It has no basis in fact.

None.

The dog that you brush, pamper, feed and walk, love and nurture has a cousin that is being tortured for trim on a jacket. Or boots. Or gloves. There are so many alternatives out there. Please PLEASE watch the video.

If you can't bring yourself to watch, then stop wearing animal products until you do.

It's the least you can do for the animals that are suffering for fashion.

2008-12-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Cody Homecoming 08

Josh Senior Year

2008-12-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

Pretty happy this morning for reasons I will explain later. Got to work and put my lunch in the frig. Went to the ladies room.
Something that I have started doing is covering the toilet seat. Not sure why, I just do. If there aren't covers, I'll lay toilet paper in strips around the seat.
Cozy.
Anyway, did that whole o/c ritual, washed hands and left.
Grabbed my tea and as I was headed back to my office someone came up and said there was someone outside who had a meeting with our director at 7:30. It was now quarter to eight so I thought the least I could do was get him in out of the cold and have him sit inside. I went and fetched him, led him to the kitchen for a cup o'java because that's how I roll. Led him to a seat in the foyer as he strode behind me talking about being an engineer for some unfamiliar firm. I sat him down, turned and went into my office. The admin asst, Grace, came in and told the guy (and me) that the meeting was in a different place. I led him again to the kitchen for a travel cup and sent him on his way.
I stopped by Grace's desk to chat a bit and as I walked away she said 'what is that sticking out of your shirt in the back?" I did the dance of the foolish trying to see what she was talking about and grasped the offending intruder.
A piece of toilet paper.
Draped over the band of my pants like a tail.
Fabulous.
That engineer will never forget me.

Yesterday after going through the torture that is jury duty, I ran around getting groceries, making dinner, picking up wayward soccer players from practice, delivering ConLaw and Interp performers at school, the usual stuff.
Lance and I left Cody to do his homework at home and we went to watch Josh perform his duet piece for Interp. This was the first time in the two years that he has been truly involved in Speech and Debate that I have ever seen him perform as he usually only allows others to see at tournaments. He tried to get me to abandon the notion of coming but there was no hope in Hades of THAT happening.
Sometimes my kids take my breath away. I know Josh is smart and creative. A true out of the box thinker. But his performance went so far beyond my expectations. It was fantastic.
We watched the others and left for home around 9, stopping to check mail. In it, a letter from a college.
Josh has been accepted to St. John's University in Queens New York on a Presidential Scholarship, four year, full ride. Holy CRAP! What a relief that is He still wants to go to UT but we will be visiting the SJ campus to see if it's a possibility.
I of course called everyone that would pick up their phone.
Cody came down and handed me an essay. It was a character and theme analysis of Lord of the Flies with a sprinkling of symbolism evaluation. Now Cody is a smart kid. Really smart. But his focus has always been on the social and athletic angle of school as opposed to the academic. I read the essay spellbound not just by the insight but also by the fact that that kid has spent the past two hours working on a two page, single spaced, typed essay that was really spectacular instead of watching MTV Cribs, playing Halo and texting..all...at...the...same.....time :/.
Like I said, sometimes, they take my breath away.
It was a phenomenal day.

2008-12-06T07:04:00.000-08:00

There's something amazing about satisfaction. I am finding that cool, calm, balanced place is a wonderful residence. There's the euphoria of joy, the exhilaration of falling in love, the sweeping blackness of sadness. Those ups and downs have always been a place I haven't minded residing. But I have found a wonderful place called satisfaction. Where I feel an overwhelming sense that all is right with my world. Normally this would be a temporary time, a day where all that I wanted to accomplish, do, see, be would come together. That, in the past, is how that has always been. But recently I have found that what I have accomplished in a day, is as much as I wanted to accomplish. What I have seen, what I have done, what I have been has been enough. I love my job. I love my family. My husband is my best friend and the love of my life. My children are the light of my life. My best girl friend has found love. That had been an obstacle to the destination of satisfaction for me that I didn't fully realize. I couldn't be truly happy until the important people in my life had what I have. And now she has it, and I am awash in a warmth and peace that was always been fleeting.

It's a good place.

It's a place I think I have been searching for all my life.

Whatever situation.

Whatever substance.

Whatever person.

Whatever brought that beautiful place into my realm brought it temporarily, leading me to believe that it was only achievable by external intervention.

Now I realize that is not the truth.

The truth is that it is inside me.

Inside you.

It is achievable by finding what makes you tick.

What makes you happy.

What the things are inside of you that you need to fulfill.

It's different for everyone.

The little things.

The big things.

The easy things.

The difficult things.

The seemingly unattainable things.

It really seems that since my brother died, my life has taken a dramatic turn. I believe to the core of my being that my brother has been guiding my life. He hated to see me struggle. He wanted to see my life ease. I know that. He saw me constantly battling, constantly treading water while more and more was heaped onto my shoulders while I struggled to stay afloat. I watch programs about orphans in Africa and think that even at the worst periods in my life I have been so very blessed. But we all have our struggles that are enough to make us feel that we are on the verge of complete destitution. There is no minimizing that. I feel my brother has helped me, has guided me, has made things happen for me that have changed my life.

Changed me.

And I am grateful.

2008-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

My son finds Thanksgiving confounding. Why do we celebrate a event which led to the decimation of indigenous people? It's one thing to celebrate something before you truly acknowledge the actual incident. I grew up with the whitewashed version of history - very little Hispanic, African, Indigenous influence. I got the whole happy Indians helping out the white folk version...with very little background on what was the standard operating procedures for Euro-Adventurers. For a very prestigious school, I got a very skewed version of history. Thinking about it though, it is in keeping with how few minorities were allowed in...that weren't part of the staff.

But now that we know what Thanksgiving really symbolizes, shouldn't we modify? I know we try to paint it as a great opportunity to count our blessings and such. But shouldn't we do that on a more regular basis anyway? I mean, shouldn't we be thankful for the supportive people in our lives, the love we get from our families and friends, the blessings of health and abilities? Should we be thankful for all the freedoms we have on at least a monthly basis? I mean, shouldn't we just sit and reflect occasionally about the many fabulous things we get to experience, the wondrous miracles that present themselves into our life unprovoked?

I remember when my boys were really little, like toddler little. They were thirteen months apart and I was wiped most of the time. I remember how I would be so frazzled and exhausted. It was just an endless stream of diapers, feeding, wiping, monitoring, entertaining, teaching, being on alert. Regardless of how bad the day was, how stressed I was, there would be one thing, one single moment when I would get a look that only someone who adores you can give, one little hand reaching for mine, one tiny little body climbing up into my lap to get as close to me as possible because he was he and I was his. In those spectacular moments, my entire day would change. Everything was worth it. Everything faded to black and the light would shine from my heart to his. I can still bring those moments up from my memory banks. I can still feel the overwhelming, cup runneth over emotions. There were so many of those moments that I can close my eyes and like a playlist on my Ipod, scroll through all the options and choose the perfect incident.

I am so grateful every day for the opportunity to be a part of these two precious lives. For all their weirdness and teen boy angst, they are the perfect angels that would reach up to be carried, look to me for guidance and allow me to hold their hands on their life journey. What an incredible honor.

So I don't need a day of thanks. I love the idea of getting together with my people and celebrating our relationship. That appeals to me. But I don't need to have a day to give thanks. Much like I don't need a mandated day of love. I get that some people need a day - a father's day, a mother's day, a valentine's day to remind them that the people so instrumental in making the world a brighter world with unconditional love should be valued....at least once a year. I think it should be part of the lessons we teach our kids. Valuing those that impact us. Appreciating those that brighten our day, are a shoulder to lean on. Randomly. Not orchestrated by society or commercial entities. But inspired by genuine love.

That is the Thanksgiving lesson that I hope to give to my boys. That they demonstrate their love for others, the appreciation for those that give to them unselfishly, joy for the friendships they have found, for the those that love them regardless of their errors, mistakes, shortcomings.

2008-11-26T13:51:00.000-08:00

I saw the most recent video taken in one of the many nondescript places where they slaughter turkeys. I saw it about a week ago but I am still having nightmares about it. How do you stomp, repeatedly, on the head of a defenseless animal, over and over again, turn away while it desperately tries to right it self, how do you insert a rod into the anus of an animal in your care and rupture its bowel...and then go home at night, cuddle your kids, pet your dog and sleep peacefully?

How do people get so desensitized?

I would think that you are around all this noise, this terribly stifling ammonia saturated, unventilated building with wards that flap and run and squawk and resist, I would think that if you do this for any length of time, it wears you down to the point that you don't care anymore. You not only don't care.

You hate.

You hate where you are.

You hate how little money you make.

You hate how you smell.

You hate how you feel.

And the only ones that you can take all this hostility and aggression out on are the ones dependent on your grace.

But who has shown you grace?

Who has cared about your family, your living situation, your troubles?

Who is empathetic about the despondency that overtakes you every morning when you awaken to the fact that you have to go back and work in a foul smelling, desperate environment for minimum wage, no benefits and horrific conditions?

You work sick, you work injured, you work regardless of personal need.

I can only imagine the desperation.

But even though I feel such deep sorrow for the plight of the factory farm worker, I cannot begin to understand how one can inflict such terrible abuse on defenseless beings.

How does it change you?

Does it tag along behind you, like a shadow, this deep darkness?

Does it taint everything you think and feel?

Does it make you strike out at those children that refuse to listen?

Does it make you slap down the significant other that will not get off your back?

Does it propel you to kick at that mewing kitty or barking dog?

How do you dislodge the tentacles of this persistent octopus?

How do you free yourself, separate work that you do for forty, fifty, sixty, up to seventy hours a week from your personal time?

How does it not become a part of you?

This is where the fact that all things are connected comes into play. That guy that picks up that turkey and repeatedly slams it against a wall, drops it and kicks it across the room....while it hangs on to life, cannot possibly let go of that sort of violence, that sort of raging demon that would allow him to see a defenseless animal as a legitimate target for his anger. It is there, lurking, waiting for a break in patience, a time out in tolerance, a sliver in the sleep cycle. It is waiting to come roaring back because it cannot go. It has no place to go. Those that experience this sort of soul changing conditions do not have the means to lift themselves and their families to a better place, to work through it in therapy, to power it out at the gym. Those that are remanded to this sort of labor are stuck. And there is nothing in this world more defeating than being stuck.

We have to get to a place, as a society, of balance. Where we raise animals, if we cannot break the addiction, in a natural environment, with compassion and kindness, with gratitude for the sacrifice the animal is making for us. And when the supply is depleted, it is done. No more mass production, hormones and antibiotics. No more warehousing of sensitive souls in deplorable conditions. Respecting what has been given to us, much as we should be respecting the seas and the lands and the air that exists for us. We have progressed. We have evolved to a point that we should be doing so much better for those dependent on us.

If you are eating turkey for Thanksgiving, there is no excuse to not watch the latest video of what they must endure for you.

It'll upset you?

Too bad.

If you can chow down on these animals you damn well better get the fortitude to endure a witness position to their plight.

It is the least you can do.

Search "Peta Turkey Abuse"

2008-11-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Pre-Thanksgiving

What am I thankful for...not just today, but what do I think about on a fairly consecutive basis that fills me with gratitude?

That I don't smoke anymore. I have to say, I am so thankful on a regular basis that I was able to kick that habit. The control over everything I did was staggering, looking back. I am grateful.
That I exercise daily - yoga changed my life. Running and then doing self paced yoga centers me and makes me calm. It is terribly obvious when I have skipped a day.
That I found the love of my life. Lance may have some shortcomings but he puts up with mine, and for that I am eternally grateful.
That I was able to experience the joy, the stress, the roller coaster that is motherhood. I adore my boys. I am stunned by their beauty, their brilliance, their gifts and their very kind souls.
That I have a good relationship with my immediate family. That's nothing to scoff at. A lot of people hate their siblings and parents. I look forward to being with them and miss those that are not with me.
That I have a job that intrigues me. That I am part of a team that gets along, that is straight up, and that has my back. I look forward to going to work and I literally have to be dragged out of there in the evening. It is challenging so it is never dull.
That my husband and I have reached a place where we are comfortable and are not stressing over money.
That my husband has found a job with people that appreciate his abilities, that positively reinforce him and make him feel valued.
That I am healthy.
That I have some of the best friends anyone could have. Seriously, I have always envied those "girl relationships" that have been so evasive for me. I always thought of myself as a friend that was lacking...primarily because those that I had been friends with made me feel that way. Now I realize that it wasn't me. It was them. The friends I have now don't have a secret checklist by which they evaluate my behavior. I have had that so often, being held to some standard of which I was unaware only to have the grenades tossed out during a conflict in order to blow me to pieces. I have never understood it, but it happened so often that it was impossible to believe that it was everyone else. But what was happening was I was selecting the same kind of person over and over again. Those that seemed really "into" me, but who would also become extremely disappointed when I didn't live up to the standard they were expecting. Regardless, I have great friends now. I am so grateful.
That I am still optimistic. That might seem weird, but I am thankful that the experiences I have had have not made me bitter.
That Obama will be our next president. Succeed or fail, I feel like my country really stepped up and showed who we are. Not the stereotypical racist majority. But good, solid people that want to work for what they get and want to care for all in society. At least, that's who I am hoping we are.
That my brother is watching over me.
That he is with my dad watching over me.
That I am who I am. Flawed as all humans but willing to change and grow. I am grateful that I am still willing to recognize the things that need improvement and appreciate the things that are good about myself.
That my family loves me.
That my husband is faithful.
That my sister misses me and wants me to visit.
That my boys, my husband and I will have our dream ski trip before Josh graduates.
That my hair will grow after my most recent haircut that is waaaaayyyyyy too short! :)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Please consider NOT eating turkey or anything else that will be eternally grateful for your decision to go vegetarian or better yet, vegan.

2008-11-25T08:13:00.001-08:00

My friend, my best friend besides my husband, my mom and sister, is in love. I see it in her eyes, on her face, in the way she carries herself and in her energy. It is a soul inspiring thing. Especially when you are able to catch that buzz and extend it to your own relationship. I have known Lance for almost 16 years and we are on year ten of marriage. And I still adore him. He still takes my breath away. Still makes me laugh so hard I have to tell him to stop. Still get tingles up the back of my neck when I see him. Still feel the tightness in my chest when I think of him. Still feel the rush. I can totally relate to my dear friend. It is the best feeling in the world. It's why people are always searching for it. It is a feeling of completion. A feeling of high without drugs or alcohol. And when it's reciprocated. Wow. It's the most magical, most euphoric sense one can ever hope to achieve.
I am so happy for her. She deserves all the happiness in the world.

2008-11-20T05:47:00.000-08:00

Thank you to the reader that made me aware that chaining dogs in Texas is illegal! Where the heck have I been?
House Bill 1411 states

(4) "Restraint" means a chain, rope, tether, leash,
cable, or other device that attaches a dog to a stationary object
or trolley system.
Sec. 821.077. UNLAWFUL RESTRAINT OF DOG. (a) An owner may
not leave a dog outside and unattended by use of a restraint that
unreasonably limits the dog's movement:
(1) between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.;
(2) within 500 feet of the premises of a school; or
(3) in the case of extreme weather conditions,
including conditions in which:
(A) the actual or effective outdoor temperature
is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit;
(B) a heat advisory has been issued by a local or
state authority or jurisdiction; or
(C) a hurricane, tropical storm, or tornado
warning has been issued for the jurisdiction by the National
Weather Service.

In my previous post I didn't state that I have been seeing a red colored dog chained to a tree for a while now. Hurricane Ike blew through and exposed the misery of this animal by tearing away the fence safeguarding the owner's cruelty. Tethered to a tree it sits there day in day out with a ridiculously large chain attached to its collar. I found out from Animal Control that the owners have other dogs that they allow in the house...only that one sits alone exposed to the elements all day and night. Why have it? Why have an animal that is merely yard decor? Get a statue and give the dog to someone that will take it for a walk, feed it, stroke and love it. Why torture an animal that is completely dependent on you? Why completely screw it up emotionally, making it aggressive and unsocialized? You hear about people who victimize one of their children..while the other go about their lives as if nothing is happening. While one is tortured beyond comprehension. I don't know what snaps in people. Why they would focus all their aggression and frustration and psychosis on a single individual but it is up to us, it is up to society to keep our eyes open. To notice. To pay attention. We have to stop abuse whenever it occurs. Seeing someone belt their kid in the store cannot go without comment and action.
Witnessing unlawful behavior, we must act. We must step up. It is imperative. Most think that the demise of our society has something to do with God being taken out of the schools and a lack of moral teaching. I believe it is something different. I believe it is a lack of empathy. Sometimes that needs to be taught. Once you have empathy for others, you can't hurt them. You can't physically torture. You can't neglect. Because you feel their pain. You experience the misery. We as a society have to start putting ourselves into the position of those that are dependent on our benevolence.
When you see a kid being bullied, step in.
When you see a parent slapping the little body of a child, step in.
When you see a child hurt an animal, step in.
When you see an adult behaving cruelly, step in.
And in Texas, if you see a tethered dog, report it, citing the House Bill (which is now an Act) 1411 making that action illegal.
We owe it to those dependent upon our goodness.

2008-11-20T05:24:00.000-08:00

I used to go to the gym at five in the morning to work out on the eliptical and rowing machines. It was nice to get it over with. Later, in the evening, I would go back to the gym to do yoga. We ended our gym membership mostly because I freakin' hate gyms (but that's another story) and it was m0ney down the drain for my family that rarely used the membership to its fullest potential. I struggled with motivation for a while and not being able to find the right balance.
But I have finally found it.
I run two miles in the evenings with one of the dogs, come home and head straight upstairs. I shut the door to the master bedroom, dim the lights, put a new agey, spa station on XM, grab my mat and start my yoga. Not listening to others grunt, inevitably yak, or the instructions of the leader has been more than I ever imagined. Taking my time with poses, focusing in the areas I want to focus in on, breathing, pushing myself, it really has been cathartic.
The run starts out stiff and why the heck am I doing this-ish. But as my poor knees loosen up, and I get into a rhythm, I inevitably go where the music on my IPOD takes me. I understand the runner's high, although I don't think I have attained the level by any stretch of the imagination that mini or full marathon runners achieve. But I understand it. Once your mind realize that no amount of negative signals is going to stop you on your quest, it resigns itself to be as far removed as possible. I have literally had an argument with myself about that pain possibly being something serious and worth stopping for. But once that is done, it becomes automatic and you can wander off some place a lot nicer and more comfortable.

It's hard resuming if you stop. I stopped for a bit and found that my energy diminished so significantly I thought there was something wrong with me...like a disease or something. Everything was an effort. I found myself falling asleep in my chair before nine o'clock at night. I started back by taking the dogs for a walk. Three separate walks equalling about five miles. Brisk walks that started leisurely.
Then I got a gift card for my involvement in the Wellness Program at work. I immediately went out and bought running shoes. That was crucial. It's shocking what a difference shoes make. I got lightweight, supportive shoes that are a dream to run in. I actually look forward to my little run now. It is dark and cool. I realized also that I hate running in the heat. In my area, that's pretty much all the time except for now. So, I will have to figure out what time of night or early morning is coolest because I want to keep this up.
I realize now that there is a reason they call those that sit around watching TV all day "couch potatoes". Your flesh begins to look a lot like mashed potatoes if you don't exercise enough. It's not pleasant. I am fortunate in that being vegan helps keep my weight down but that doesn't do jack for the tone of muscles. That takes exercise.
All I can say is, do yourself a favor and start moving. Put on some headphones, put on your favorite song and dance like a crazy person. Jump. Kick. Punch. Walk. Stretch. Lift your arms over your head and reach for the sky. You will feel so much better. And your body will thank you. Not initially. It will hurt you initially. But once it realizes that you mean business, it will be surprising cooperative and capable.

2008-11-19T11:40:00.001-08:00

It's funny how easy it is to minimize things that we don't really want to take the time to investigate and analyze. We are all busy in our lives. Parents running around working full time, grocery shopping, carting kids here and there, picking up last minute supplies, meeting with teachers, maintaining the home and transportation. Single people doing the same thing...just not multiplied by as much. They have to endure the stress of (gasp) dating, which I can't even fathom having to find the energy for.
So when we drive by a house and see a dog chained to a tree with a bowl and little else, it is easy to think that it has access to water and the shelter of the tree...surely it must be fine.

But I ask you to stop and think about it for a moment. The length of that tether determines the the amount of world that animal will experience. 3 ft? 4? 6? 8? An eight foot radius. In which to sleep.
Eat.
Defecate.
Urinate.
Eight feet suddenly doesn't seem like much.
It's beginning to turn chilly in our area.
Down to 45 degrees last night.
That dog is still chained to that tree.
In that cold and on that cold ground.
The tree does not offer warmth.
If it rains it will offer little shelter.
Often dogs that are chained have painful sores where the collar rubs. Dogs that are chained are rarely cared for properly. They are ignored for the most part with sporadic feeding, overturned water bowls, and even less interaction with people or other animals. They often become aggressive primarily from the stress of isolation but also because their world is that radius and it's all they have.
What did that dog do to be remanded into isolation?
What happened to make someone think that leaving a living creature chained alone and exposed is ok?

I read an interesting article at the link below. I think the contest should run nationwide. We would see a huge, sweeping change in how we view chained dogs.
The next time you pass a dog on a chain,, think.
Think about the life that dog is experiencing.
I will guarantee you that it did nothing to deserve that sentence.
And if you are moved, file a report with animal control.
Ask that they talk to the owner.
Cities all across America are waking up to this terrible habit and banning dog chaining.
It is about time.
http://www.hsus.org/pets/pets_related_news_and_events/chain_off_2006.html

2008-11-18T06:07:00.000-08:00

I did a search "what do gays want"...primarily because there's a lot of false information presented to look like fact.
I think....what's the big deal?
I mean there are a lot of people that don't believe in marriage.
It's a legal thing anyway.
Legitimizing the responsibilities in a legal sense.
So, why do gays want it?
It makes it way harder to leave.
Suddenly you're in court splitting things, dividing time for the children, like so much pumpkin pie.
One piece for you, one for me. Your piece is bigger!
You get the picture.
It's never pretty.
So why not just cohab?

And then I read the following. (http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-02-24/news/i-d-leave-the-country-but-my-wife-won-t-let-me/1)

Here are some excerpts...
I want to be a full citizen, with this woman [her partner, Sarah], today. I want to do whatever it takes, sacrifice whatever is necessary, go wherever I have to, for that to be so.
I want to be taxed equally. I want my Social Security benefits to go somewhere besides down the drain. I want the Fifth Amendment right not to testify against Sarah, and to protect our private correspondence from subpoena, the same as other spouses. Couples like us don't have that right.
Surprised?
Rosie O'Donnell and her wife were, when the lawyers came after them.
I want our politicians and religious leaders to stop going on television and suggesting that legalizing marriage for us would be like legalizing sex with dogs.
My wife, in my arms?
They are talking about my wife, in my arms.
Do they know, do they care, how much that hurts?
Where must we run to be safe from them?
I want my wife not to feel such pressure and fear that she curls up in bed at night and cries.
On the night of Wednesday, February 25, a woman in Brooklyn lay crying because she can't understand why people would hate her so, why they'd have to denigrate a beautiful and private part of her life with the most heinous rhetoric.
Think about that.
My wife lay in tears because strangers are clamoring for the power to decide whether she belongs, whether the American promise should hold true for her — as if there were any question which way they'd vote.
What stands between us and them?
A couple dozen senators, and some of those are on the fence.
Where is our right to a meaningful marriage, to the honest pursuit of happiness?
We want our justice and "domestic tranquility."
Whose country is this, anymore? Someone tell me.
I get the feeling it's no longer mine.

I found that to be so poignant.

And then I read this from here (http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm)

Why This Is A Serious Civil Rights Issue
When gay people say that this is a civil rights issue, we are referring to matters of civil justice, which often can be quite serious - and can have life-damaging, even life-threatening consequences.
One of these is the fact that in most states, we cannot make medical decisions for our partners in in emergency.
Instead, the hospitals are usually forced by state laws to go to the families who may have been estranged from us for decades, who are often hostile to us, and can and frequently do, totally ignore our wishes regarding the treatment of our partners. If a hostile family wishes to exclude us from the hospital room, they may legally do so in most states. It is even not uncommon for hostile families to make decisions based on their hostility -- with results consciously intended to be as inimical to the interests of the patient as possible!
Is this fair?

Upon death, in many cases, even very carefully drawn wills and durable powers of attorney have proven to not be enough if a family wishes to challenge a will, overturn a custody decision, or exclude us from a funeral or deny us the right to visit a partner's hospital bed or grave.

As survivors, estranged families can, in nearly all states, even seize a real estate property that a gay couple may have been buying together for many years, quickly sell it at the largest possible loss, and stick the surviving partner with all the remaining mortgage obligations on a property that partner no longer owns, leaving him out on the street, penniless. There are hundreds of examples of this, even in many cases where the gay couple had been extremely careful to do everything right under current law, in a determined effort to protect their rights.
Is this fair?

If our partners are arrested, we can be compelled to testify against them or provide evidence against them, which legally married couples are not forced to do. In court cases, a partner's testimony can be simply ruled irrelevant as heresay by a hostile judge, having no more weight in law than the testimony of a complete stranger. If a partner is jailed or imprisoned, visitation rights by the partner can, in most cases, can be denied on the whim of a hostile family and the cooperation of a homophobic judge, unrestrained by any law or precedent. Conjugal visits, a well-established right of heterosexual married couples in some settings, are simply not available to gay couples.
Is this fair?

These are far from being just theoretical issues; they happen with surprising frequency. Almost any older gay couple can tell you numerous horror stories of friends and acquaintances who have been victimized in such ways. One couple I know uses the following line in the "sig" lines on their email: "...partners and lovers for 40 years, yet still strangers before the law." Why, as a supposedly advanced society, should we continue to tolerate this kind of injustice?

These are all civil rights issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ecclesiastical origins of marriage; they are matters that have become enshrined in state laws by legislation or court precedent over the years in many ways that exclude us from the rights that legally married couples enjoy and even consider their constitutional right.

This is why we say it is very much a serious civil rights issue; it has nothing to do with who performs the ceremony, whether it is performed in a church or courthouse or the local country club, or whether an announcement about it is accepted for publication in the local newspaper.

Much of the argument against has no basis in reality.
"You can leave money to whomever you want!"
"You can award benefits to your dog...didn't you hear about that woman that left all her money to her cats? "
"They just want their abhorrent behavior recognized by the legal system! They are imposing their beliefs on us!"
Isn't that strange? I have found that most baseless arguments involved projection - blaming others for what you are actually doing. We are imposing OUR beliefs on THEM. They are trying to legitimize their relationships not for approval, not so that it can be taught in school, but so their families are cared for when they pass, so that they can care for each other should one become incapacitated.
Shudder.
How awful!

It will happen.
It is inevitable.
But I understand their impatience.
They deserve to have the rights of everyone else.
It IS a big deal. It does matter.

2008-11-14T06:25:00.000-08:00

I guess it's pretty well known now that something like 80+ churches decided to defy the separation of church and state with political sermons before the election.
Their tax exempt status was not revoked.
Now we have pastors, priests, preachers and other folks of said cloth wagging their fingers at parishioners for their possible votes for Obama. He is pro-choice...or rather as those that like to incite "pro-abortion" and therefore, doomed to eternal damnation and fast feet hot coal dancing.

Who's "pro-abortion"?
Seriously?
Who?
Who goes out and says I want to get pregnant so that I can live the joy of having a fetus sucked from my uterus?
And of course the implication with the alternative to "pro-life" is...anti-life? Pro-death?
Those hysterical frenzied masses that love to toss out the innocent baby images have no interest in solving the problem.
The problem being: unwanted pregnancies.
If they were interested in solving this problem, they would back the mass distribution of the "morning after pill". This way no conception occurs and no fetus develops. They don't want this available. It goes to the whole "personal responsibility" and abstinence until marriage creed they cling to. It just seems to me that this is counter to what God intends. If he wanted everyone to stay virginal until marriage...was he honestly expecting people to marry at 9,10,11...with the onset of puberty? Because isn't that what puberty is all about? Being able to procreate?
This is the contradiction that kids are facing today.
They are bombarded with images and content about sex and sexuality.
They are equally bombarded by church and parents (ESPECIALLY in the south!) about abstinence and virginity until marriage.
AND they are pushed to wait to get married until they are out of college and independent.
?
So what are talking about here?
23?
24?
Before you have sex?
Easily TEN YEARS after hitting puberty?
Why does God make men sexually peak at 18?
So they will be completely disinterested by the time they're married?
It's a bunch of human bullshit dabbling in stuff they know nothing about.
I have no issue with safe sex.
I don't.
And if something happened and one my boys came to me about a broken condom and worries about pregnancy, I would make sure that I got a morning after pill for the girl in question.
Because as lovely and wonderful and blessed children are, they are a huge responsibility. AND they deserve to be born into an environment of love and compassion and nurturing and maturity. You will rarely find that with a 17 year old.
I don't want churches preaching to my kids or to me that a vote for a certain candidate threatens my place in heaven. it is absolutely against the law of God. My place is secure. Regardless of when my kids have sex, regardless of my voting record.
It is time to get away from the unsolvable problem of abortion and get on the real solution - sex education, safe sex practices, free sexual health checkups and birth control.

2008-11-14T05:27:00.000-08:00

In homage to those again denied their basic rights, hang in there. People will acquiesce. It is now a matter of time. Public opinion is changing. It's impossible, I know. Like seeing a child in an abusive situation until the paperwork is done for CPS. Or waiting for people to care about the plight of animals. It's heartbreaking. It's not fair. It's painful. But it will change. If we can finally elect a minority to run the country, there is hope.
You will get the rights you deserve.

Why Can't I Own a Canadian?
October 2002
Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a east coast resident, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15:19- 24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? - Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted fan,
Jim

2008-11-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

There are nights that for the life of me I cannot close my eyes. I am not a "worrier", at least not in the same category as my mother and sister. I do worry about things but not compulsively. I don't look for things to worry about.
I do have a tendency for "continued education" which to me is refreshing my passion for animal rights through video. There are many people that I know that cannot do it. They cannot bring themselves to watch the videos that show the plight of elephants & tigers in circuses or zoos, turkeys and chickens in factory farms, cows and pigs in slaughterhouses.
It haunts them.
It scars them.
I understand this.
But to be honest, it scars the animals a helluva lot more than it can ever scar us.
So many people that I know think I am so principled. I find that counfounding. I don't consider myself excessively principled.
I am, however, excessively haunted.
Every video stays with me. And every time I see a burger, bacon, cheese, eggs, those videos revisit me. Everytime I see the signs go up for the rodeo and the circus or the local zoo, I see the images that are burned into my consciousness.

Abuse of dependent beings is the hot button issue for me. There is no defense of it. You cannot give me a reason I will accept. Hitting children, bullhooking elephants, whipping tigers, smashing piglets onto a concrete floor, sodomizing turkeys...just not defensible.

So when I saw that yet another elephant had died in captivity in a zoo, it brought up all those images I have of "training" videos.
The gut wrenching, soul destroying "breaking" of baby elephants by being tied down and beaten bloody for days.
The screaming of captive elephants at the hands of their 'trainers".
The wild look in their eyes as a "trainer" approaches with a weapon of discipline in their hand.
Seeing the video of little Mac as he lifted his little leg at the "request" of his trainers makes my heart ache. I know what an elephant must endure in order to master that feat. He must endure screaming and beatings and relentless sadistic actions. To do something that is unnatural to an animal it takes a great deal of fear. Terror actually. The ironic part is that those in the crowd watching, see an animal - like an elephant or a dolphin - with what appears to be a smile - as if the animal is enjoying the fun game.
They do not.
I often wonder if people even think where the dolphins that jump through the rings, the tigers that hurl themselves through the fire, the elephants that mount each others' backs in a ghasty display...I wonder if anyone every thinks about where these animals come from, where they stay when they aren't performing, how they are treated.
I see videos to keep myself aware.
The dolphin round ups in the coves of Japan where the water is turned red with blood as these terrified animals are trapped in the most horrifying display you will ever witness.
The relentless bloodying of elephants to ensure they remain petrified at all times.
The greyhound dogs that are raced and then beaten, abused and neglected.
The circus ponies punched in the face for no reason.
I see what men do to animals.
From the skinning of live dogs in China for unlabeled fur trim on American coats to the ripping off of wings and legs that are caught in the cages at the slaugherhouse.
I have seen it. It is with me everyday.
Every second of everyday.
It is not hard being vegan.
As I would think it would not be hard not being a Nazi.
Or a slave owner.
Seeing and hearing how some are treated at the hands of others...it makes it easy.
Tempting? Sure.
But the guilt is not worth it.
Knowing that the piece of chocolate that will satisfy a craving for 15 seconds does not justify the hell that baby calf had to go through - being ripped from its mother, tossed into a box to become veal or ground up for 99 cent burgers.
I understand how the out of sight, out of mind theory works for most people.
I also understand how wounding a video showing what animals must go through is to most people.
My question is - how do you justify consuming animals yet not give them the respect of witnessing what they go through for you?

Mac is in a better place now. I only wish he could have lived as he was intended to live while on this earth - with a loving family, with the grass and dirt and trees around him, running for his life, learning from his family how to fend for himself and to be part of a family unit. My heart is made up of miniscule pieces, shattered endlessly by man's inhumanity yet pieced back together by those that are willing to give of themselves to make life better for the dependent beings placed in our care.

Watch Whale Wars on Animal Planet on Friday nights. It is the story of the organization Sea Shepherd Conservation Society started by Paul Watson, one of the original members of Greenpeace. I have been giving to this organization on a monthly basis for close to a year now because they go and stand in between our fellow mammals of the sea and the hunters. It is so much better than the (gag) Deadliest Catch because this it is all about the sparing of life and those willing to throw themselves into harm's way for the benefit of others.

I find that to be as close to what Jesus asked us to do than almost anything else.

2008-11-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

When Palin was tapped to be the republican VP, I did a little research. Just beneath the fluff, there were stories about her refusal to be briefed. She had no patience for coaching or training, choosing to be off the cuff and more natural. Which I do understand, in all honesty. No one wants to sound like a robot repeating factoids in rote fashion.
But when one enters a new realm, especially one with so much exposure, so much scrutiny, I would think that anyone would defer to those that have experience and follow their directions. Palin, it appears, refused to do so. She balked at any training or instruction which led to her catastrophic interviews. She didn't know that Africa is a continent...not a country. She didn't know the countries involved in NAFTA. I don't think knowledge thwarts one's personal style. I believe that you can deliver thoughts and knowledge with a personal flair that separates you from everyone else. That's why Obama was such a phenomenon. His intellect was only highlighted by his ability to inspire. No one wants to sit and listen to a monotone drone. We want to hear the personal, see the individual. But we want substance. Cutsy, folksy is fine if you have something to say that's relevant, insightful and knowledgeable. It is annoying when it is merely a cover for a lack of those vital ingredients.
It's funny to me that Obama was continuously cast as arrogant and an elitist, when someone who knew so little coming in refused to be tutored or informed believing that she could get by on her wits. You can do that on a small stage but on the national stage you will be eaten up.
Which is exactly what happened.
She flew like a meteor from the convention, and just as quickly, within a couple of weeks, burned out and became a joke.
Boy. I sure hope she's the face of the future republican party.
It would be a lock for the democrats for at least another four years.

2008-11-05T09:23:00.000-08:00

I guess the Evangelical Christians were right. God does pick the president.
Glory, glory, glory! Lord God Almighty!
Obama is our president elect.
I am euphorically soaking in the honeymoon vibes.
Let the changing begin!

2008-11-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

And so it begins...
News like this will begin as a trickle...ending in a torrent of negatives under the Palin column.

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family--clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

2008-10-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

My contribution to election commentary at the Houston Chronicle, Politics, Blue Team:

http://www.chron.com/politics/commons/blueteam.html?plckBlogId=Blog%3a6c91dd24-fc49-402f-a658-f44bff

2008-10-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

Get out the vote!
Innovation and humor, that's why Barack is ahead.

My cousin sent this to me in the customized format and I laughed out loud. Check it out, customize it and send it to your peeps.

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/taf.shtml?id=&nid=CARKuUQhAb3tZ229z3aCaTMxOTQzMTg-

2008-10-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

ONE MORE WEEK!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc56ySnsIek

2008-10-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

Newspapers
Publications circulations are down, all across the country. Some say that it is because of the liberal swing, the media bias towards Obama.
This is a stretch. The trend has been a move away from print publications for a while now because almost everyone has access to the internet where all major and minor news sources live. One need not blacken her fingers in an attempt to sure up awareness on current events. No! Now we need only click a link to gain access to the writings of left and right leaning contributors to all publications. And what a glorious thing it is! Now I can go to Al Jazeera, Wapo, CNN, Fox, BBC, NYT, as well as local sites, and tap into the views of other global occupants. I wonder what the numbers are for traffic to news sites. I guarantee that especially during this election season that they are multiplying exponentially.
There's also the fantastic additional benefit that we are saving trees by reducing the number of print news sources. Going online, going paperless is a green move, and everyone can feel good about it.
So, I am all for the demise of the newspaper. I believe they served their purpose but their time has come.

2008-10-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., maintained last week that, "Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish and achieve."
Such notions get traction quickly in today's age of instant communication. Walk around Durango High School, where the crowd was waiting for a McCain rally to start, and people spoke glowingly of the Vietnam hero's kinship with "real America."
"It's something Barack Obama can't possibly know, because he's not one of us. It's like the way (Richard) Nixon was able to talk to the hard hats," said Jim Wilson, a district attorney.
Reese Resnick, a Durango oil and gas industry salesman, grew up in a small Texas town, the only son in a family of seven.
"I had to work for everything I got. That's what I was taught, and Sarah Palin understands that," he said. "People like Obama, they get driven in vans all over Washington. Palin's a working mom."

It's the craziest catch 22.

If black people are successful, they are latte sipping, cocktail party attending, Volvo driving, elitists that "don't get it".

Otherwise they are out there selling drugs, knocking up girls leaving them to raise babies on the taxpayer dime.

Do nothings that don't have the American grit and determination to abide by societies rules and standards of success.

But to say that about an American citizen - that he/she is not one of us.

I cannot begin to articulate the depth of sadness and despair that leaves with me.

I want to think that a lot of people have been fed bad information - like that woman that called Obama an Arab. She got that information from the McCain headquarters in her area.

That maybe once Obama is in office, they will come to see that he is good man, that wants what's best for the country.

I want to say that the people that scream venomous, spiteful, scathing commentary about Barack being a Muslim, anti-American, a terrorist, not a citizen, on and on.

I want to think that they are fearful.

Fearful of change.

Fearful of losing power.

Fearful of the unknown.

I want to think that but my experience tells me something different.

Is the throbbing undercurrent, that which lives just below our consciousness, out of our collective sight as members of the majority, but that which the minorities experience every second of their lives bubbling to the surface?

The off color joke or comment.

The dismissive or cautionary look.

The constant non verbal reminders that control is not in your hands.

It is there.

Holding up a curious George doll with an Obama sticker attached.

In the terror filled shouts of those trying to get those that refuse to listen to understand that this is a terrible, terrible mistake.

Obama is a terrible terrible mistake.

Don't let him sweet talk you.

Don't let him lie and get away with it.

They are desperate for us to hear them.

But we don't.

It is there but we will not allow it to change the course that we know, we know, is the right course for our country.

We are done listening to republicans.

Done being told that it's for our national "interest" or "security" or for the betterment of the country.

Everything they said was a lie.

They took us into a war that was categorically illegal and morally wrong.

They padded the bank accounts of their friends and allies and turned around and pointed the finger at democrats.

They twist our words and call us unpatriotic.

They tell us our tolerance and acceptance of others sexual orientation, religious affiliations and ethnicity aid and abet the enemy, promote promiscuity.

But we are done.

Done with the underlying racism.

Done with the twisting.

Done with the undercutting.

Done with the lies.

Done with it all.

We are listening to what we know is right, what we know is true, what we know our country needs.

We are trusting ourselves.

We are trusting our research.

We are trusting our choice.

2008-10-20T14:12:00.001-07:00

Just so we are clear
There seems to be some confusion or rather, stubborn-ness, on the right in regards to this whole ACORN thing.
It is not voter fraud.
It is "possible" registration fraud.
Which was brought to light by those that review the registration forms, fact check, ensure that the information is correct, and then submit those forms to the appropriate authorities to register a voter.
Voter fraud would be someone coming in and voting under Albert Einstein with ID that said he was Albert Einstein and then returning to vote as Benjamin Franklin with an ID that said he was Benjamin Franklin.
The ridiculous way that the right, mostly the very far neocon territory right are the ones that keep repeating this false information. Of course, not acknowledging voting machine tampering in 2000 or 2006, voter records expunged, intimidation and threats, nor will the acknowledge that a republican was busted for registration fraud in California.
ACORN has been a great organization that registers poor people and minorities to vote. That is their crime. That is why they are a target. It's pathetic but this is what happens when people get desperate. They start swinging wildly. Kind of like a drowning person. Every lifeguard is trained to expect the victim to grasp, punch, tear, etc. at them as they are in survival mode. That is what is going on here.
They see the train coming and they cannot get off the tracks. They are trying but they cannot. They are about to be hit hard and they are grasping at every conceivable straw, every available lifeline.
They will not find one.
The moderates of their party have decided to send them a message. Give us our party back. You ran us into the ground. We are done with you calling all the shots. Take your medicine and let the grownups take charge.
Step aside.