Wow, this is all kinds of bad: a cruise ship caught fire in the Caribbean, forcing an early end of the cruise for 1500 people, some of whom are now about to be stranded in Jamaica with no place to stay until they can be flown home. A friend of mine was supposed to sail on this very ship on Sunday, with 200 of her family, for a reunion that’s been planned and booked for nearly a year. I can’t even imagine what they’re trying to figure out now – she left the office yesterday all happy about going on…
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Mike Shuster of National Public Radio filed the most comprehensive, and damning, timeline story to mark the 3-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. NPR : Iraq Three Years Later: The Path to War This week marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Mike Shuster tracks the events leading up to the U.S.-led invasion. These include Bush administration claims — since discredited — of ongoing Iraqi nuclear weapons development and links with al Qaeda. I was grateful to my local station, WBEZ, for not running their normal pledge drive schedule that morning – they just…
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Chicago Tribune | Bush Marks Anniversary, Never Says ‘War’ WASHINGTON — President Bush marked the anniversary of the Iraq war Sunday by touting the efforts to build democracy there and avoiding any mention of the daily violence that rages three years after he ordered an invasion. The president didn’t utter the word “war.” “We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq,” the president assured a public that is increasingly skeptical that he has a plan to end the fighting after the deaths of more than 2,300 U.S. troops. Bullshit, Mr Resident. Mission not accomplished. It’s an…
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This is just… sad. Eleven or so years ago, I was still living in Seattle – it was a somewhat lonely existence, as pretty much my life revolved around a few favorite television shows, my cat Studebaker, and occasionally going out with friends to hear live music. As it happened, there were several shows that I was more or less obsessed with, number one being Highlander, which started in 1992 and usually aired on Saturday nights. In the fall of 1994, a new show was about to premiere, and I decided to buy a VCR so I could tape the…
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Apparently I need to get Riley a Day-Runner so he can keep up with his exhausting Daily Schedule. It’s a hell of a thing when your cat has a busier social life than you do.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | US evangelicals warn Republicans Prominent leaders from the Christian right have warned Republicans they must do more to advance conservative values ahead of the US mid-term elections. I want to know why prominent progressive Christians and secular, non-religious political progressives aren’t contacting their Congresspersons to warn them they “must do better” in the struggle for the separation of church and state in this country. The story claims that about one-quarter of Americans self-identify as evangelical Christians. Of that number, how many are actually progressives, rather than conservatives? The way they run things in Washington, you’d…
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So I went back to work yesterday – wasn’t too sure about the weather, but I was feeling well enough to give it a shot and since I’m now on the antibiotics, I’m probably not too pestilential. It was a typically busy and frustrating first day back; it seems that my least favorite tasks were the ones that were stacked up in a holding pattern. I do wish that I’d had a little better “back-up” on one deal, which had been parked in my email rather than given to one of my backups. I have an issue with one cow-orker…
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Salon has posted an archive of Abu Ghraib photos. Boing Boing notes that no officer or CIA operative has ever been prosecuted or convicted – it’s just been the small fry in the photos. Also BB notes that Smartfilter would prevent viewing the archive due to “nudity.” This amounts to a worse kind of censorship than mere anti-prurient Puritanism.
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Bush’s Refrain on Iraq Joined by a Smaller and Smaller Chorus To illustrate the progress in Iraq, Bush ticked off statistics on the Iraqi security forces (200 operations in two weeks), the number of Iraqi battalions (more than 130, covering 30,000 square miles), the number of tips (4,000 in December), the number of weapons caches and bomb plants found (1,800), and the amount spent to defeat improvised explosives ($3.3 billion). He declared that the Iraqi police academy “will include many, many more Sunnis.” Wait a minute. This is The Shotgun Approach. The strategery by which poorly prepared college or post-collegiate…
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BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin gets around, finally, to making this observation: “We are being lied to.” Yep, we sure are. Finally, several days after I first heard part but not all of it, here is the link to This American Life’s Guantanamo report, “Habeas Schmabeas.” This is the one where part of it, in explanation of the origin of the legal concept of habeas corpus, entails a visit to Westminster Abbey. I was wrong about the guide, his name is Tony, and thus is not the same one we had when we visited the Abbey year before last. And remember, the…