The San Antonio Express news covered this march in a tiny 2 inch paragraph on page 8A.
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For a video of the NY march go here
A progressive liberal Grandma cooks and tries to find a job, after losing her job of 18 years. Can an older RN find full time work or enough part time work to satisfy her budget needs and help raise her grandkids? What can grannie cook for a family of 6 on a miserly budget? Can a knitter afford her yarn on unemployment?. This blog is morphing from its original content to reflect the realities of 2011.
Before a wildly enthusiastic crowd of hundreds at Faneuil Hall yesterday, US Senator John F. Kerry exhorted Americans to speak out against the war in Iraq, declaring that troops are dying because of what he called an inept and deceitful policy orchestrated by the Bush administration.
It was the 35th anniversary of the day Kerry, as a young Navy veteran returning from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, famously asking, ''How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Kerry's case yesterday was much the same: that Americans have a duty to speak out against a war that is sacrificing lives on the ''altar of stubborn pride."
''Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face or losing votes or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives," Kerry said, to a thunderous standing ovation.
And then the Republicans rear their ugly heads.
Matt Wylie, executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, dismissed Kerry's criticism.How in the world can the Repugnants even come up with this kind of crap? Why would speaking out against the war in Iraq be considered bizarre behavior? Gosh, guess if you don't agree with Bush you are open to be smeared any way they can do it. I say, thanks Kerry for speaking the truth.
''John Kerry has been acting bizarrely ever since he lost the election for president," Wylie said yesterday. ''Today's speech is another strange step in that direction. There has never been a time in our nation's history when so many people freely gave dissenting opinions about the nation's policies from both ends of the political spectrum. John Kerry should hop on the Internet, and he'll see there is a dialogue about all the positions going on in America today."
Pentagon officials apologized to members of Congress yesterday for generatingI don't believe a word of it! The Bush administration can't keep denying things and calling them "mistakes" or whatever, and expect the American public to continually buy this B.S.
fears about an unusual military experiment to detonate 700 tons of explosives in
the Nevada desert in June, and they said the test was not designed to simulate a
low-yield nuclear explosion, even though government budget documents had
described it that way.
This Saturday’s elections in New Orleans represent yet another element of the vast crime committed against Black America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly African American, strewn about the country in government-engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people.
This farcical exercise in faux democracy will no doubt be followed by corporate media declarations that New Orleans is returning to “normalcy” – the same term that the media bandied about when the city held a shrunken Mardi Gras, in February.
Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue.
The essential US conditions for a theocratic trend fell into place in the late 1980s and '90s with the growing mass of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity, expressed politically by the religious right; and the rise of the Republican Party as a powerful vehicle for religious policy-making and eventual erosion of the accepted degree of separation between church and state. This transformation was most vivid at the state level, where fifteen to twenty state Republican parties came under the control of the religious right, and party conventions in the South and West endorsed so-called "Christian nation" platforms. As yet nationally uncatalogued-a shortfall that cries out for a serious research project-these platforms set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, ranging from the Bible as the basis for domestic law to an emphasis on religious schools and women's subordination to men. The 2004 platform of the Texas Republican Party is a case in point.
The July exercise may have real-world consequences since Iran could interpret it as evidence the United States plans to attack, said Khalid al-Rodhan, an Iran expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Anything the U.S. will do in the region will be seen as further provocation," al-Rodhan said. "Given what's happening in Iraq, it's clear the Iranians are afraid of U.S. intentions."
In the meantime, the Pentagon is also collecting and interpreting photos and other intelligence data about Iran's facilities, developing weapons to attack hardened targets and laying the policy groundwork for a possible strike, Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said in recent congressional testimony.
Add to this the Divine Straker scenario with testing in June, and just when do you think we might invade Iraq? Well, at least before the 2006 elections, if not sooner. They (Bush & Co.) must rule us through fear, to get us to keep believing they will protect us. How better to up his lousy poll ratings?
The question remains, how amazingly stupid are the American people?
American frustrations with Iran were growing, and in early 1996 the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, publicly called for the overthrow of the Iranian government. He and the C.I.A. put together an $18 million package to undertake it.
The Iranian legislature responded with a $20 million initiative for its intelligence organizations to counter American influence in the region... Iranian agents began casing American embassies and other targets around the world. In June 1996, the Qods Force...arranged the bombing of an apartment building used by our Air Force in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans.
Response from the Clinton administration in published reports "suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran's intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased...In essence, both sides looked down the road of conflict and chose to avoid further hostilities...
Now, as in the mid-90's, any United States bombing campaign would simply begin a multi-move, escalatory process." This could cause oil prices to spike as high as $80 per barrell...Second and more likely, Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States.
Third, Iran is in a position to make our situation in Iraq far more difficult than it already is. The Badr Brigade and other Shiite militias in Iraq could launch a more deadly campaign against British and American troops. There is every reason to believe that Iran has such a retaliatory shock wave planned and ready...the question that would face American planners would be, "What's our next move?" How do we achieve so-called escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears responding because they know that the next round of American attacks would be too lethal for the regime to survive?... President Bush would most likely authorize wider and more intensive bombing...So how would bombing Iran serve American interests? In over a decade of looking at the question, no one has ever been able to provide a persuasive answer...But the current level of activity in the Pentagon suggests more than just standard contingency planning or tactical saber-rattling.
The parallels to the run-up to to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was "no war plan on my desk" despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion. Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.
Further explained in the article as: DIVINE STRAKE is one of several "DIVINE" efforts under the Hard and Deeply Buried Target Defeat (HDBTD) program. DIVINE WARHAWK consists of deep underground operational tunnel facility defeat demonstrations using advanced weapons at the White Sands Missile Range. DIVINE HELCAT was a 2004 reconstitution exercise to determine reconstitution time for the C3I tunnel facility at Nevada Test Site (NTS). Also in 2004 planning began for DIVINE HATES, which is a WMD production and storage tunnel complex functional defeat effort.
Firefighters stumble on basement marijuana farm
Associated Press in Ohio
Tuesday April 18, 2006
The Guardian
US firefighters tackling a blaze in an attic were confused when the man they had thought was the owner of the house suddenly left - until they found $700,000 (£400,000) worth of marijuana plants in the basement.
"If it were my home burning, I'd want to be there," said Fire Chief Ralph Copley of Wadsworth, Ohio. After extinguishing the fire early on Friday, officers found 239 marijuana plants filling a quarter of the basement.
Investigators from the federal drug enforcement administration were trying to find two people who left the house. The cause of the fire was unknown.
Another example of the way in which our country is being manipulated by religious whackos and neocons, each with their own scary agenda.
A Marine reservist returning home after eight months in Iraq was told he couldn't board a plane to Minneapolis because his name appeared on a watch list as a possible terrorist.
Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown, who was in uniform and returning from the war Tuesday with 26 other Marine military police reservists, was delayed briefly in Los Angeles until the issue was cleared up.
The other reservists arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as scheduled, but instead of immediately meeting their families, they waited on a bus for Brown.
"We don't leave anybody behind," 1st Sgt. Drew Benson said. "We start together, and we finish together."
Brown, 32, arrived more than an hour later. He had also had airport trouble when he was trying to go to Iraq — and he missed his plane then as well.
"A guy goes over and serves his country fighting for eight or nine months, and then we come home and put up with this?" he asked.
Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, said Wednesday he could not confirm or deny whether someone was on a watch list. He said Brown's case should have been fairly easy for the airline to clear up in Los Angeles.
"It should have taken 10 minutes," he said. "We do regret that an American hero was inconvenienced."
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Legality issue
There is also the question of legality to be considered.
Any attack would be hard to justify. Jack Straw told reporters recently: "I don't happen to believe that military action has a role to play in any event. We could not justify it under Article 51 of the UN charter which permits self-defence."
In the absence of Security Council approval, the US might argue that its interests in the Gulf were at stake and that its ally Israel was at risk.
Leading scientists have warned against the teaching of creationism in schools, saying pupils must be clear that science backs the theory of evolution.
The Royal Society's statement said some pupils may wish to "explore the compatibility, or otherwise, of science with various beliefs, and they should be encouraged to do so".
"However young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs."
The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Central Florida was arrested late Tuesday after exposing himself to a 16-year-old girl, according to Orlando police. Frank Figueroa, head of ICE's Tampa office, began fondling himself after catching the teen's eye in the upscale Millenia Mall an arrest report states. "The nature of Figueroa's actions do corrupt the public morals and outrage the sense of public decency," the report states. "Due to the small children in the area...Figueroa's actions did create a threat to the safety and well being of others." Charged with exposure of sexual organs and disorderly conduct...
At a press conference on the steps of the Sugar Land city hall, where Nick Lampson called on Tom DeLay to resign so a May 13th special election can be held to fill his seat, DeLay's goons showed up to harass, assault, and intimidate. A number of female Lampson supporters, including Marsha Rovai, a 69 year-old woman from Richmond, reported being pushed and shoved by belligerent DeLay goons at the event.link
Said Marsha Rovai, "I can't believe my Congressman, Tom DeLay, would organize this type of assault. I was assaulted by two different people. One of the men hit me and another shoved his sign into my face, and then when I pushed his sign away he violently pulled my hat down over my eyes and pushed me. I'm considering filing an assault charge. This is just very upsetting and I'm so disappointed in Tom Delay for organizing this attack."
Please stand with Marsha, and all the residents of TX-22, in demanding that Tom DeLay and his goons stop their campaign of intimidation.
“This week, radio commentator Rick Scarborough convened a two-day conference in Washington on the "War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006." The opening session was devoted to "reports from the frontlines" on "persecution" of Christians in the United States and Canada, including an artist whose paintings were barred from a municipal art show in Deltona, Fla., because they contained religious themes.”
“Among the conference's speakers were former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) as well as conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes.”
“DeLay discussed the "chattering classes" who think there is no war on Christians.
"We are after all a society that abides abortion on demand, that has killed millions of innocent children, that degrades the institution of marriage and often treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition. Seen from this perspective, of course there is a war on Cristianity," he said.”
The poverty rate in 2003 rose to 12.5%, up from 12.1% in 2002. About 35.9 million people were poor in 2003, 1.3 million more than in 2002. Both the number and rate have risen for three consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3% in 2000, to 35.9 million and 12.5% in 2003.link
A lot of folks wonder why the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. seems to stand for nothing. Is it because the party is beholden to corporate interests? In many instances, yes. Is it because leaders in Washington of both parties are, by and large, wholly disconnected from the real world? That's a big part, too. But still, the lack of principles that wafts from the party in Washington is just too widespread for it to be some random, organic phenomenon. Put another way, there must be some organized, well-crafted strategy being implemented that keeps the Democrats' few voices of true opposition muted, and keeps the party as a whole stuck in the convictionless muck.
Now, I am no conspiracy theorist, and I tend to be suspicious of those who imply that a close-knit cabal of Democratic Party insiders in Washington have all sorts of secret plans. But if you look carefully at the public statements of many of the key players in this cabal, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that, in fact, gutting the party's conviction-based soul is a deliberate, calculated strategy emanating from the nation's capital.