Category: politics, culture, society

Watch coverage of the Just $6 event at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Former Senators Bill Bradley (D-NJ) and Alan Simpson (R-WY) reached across the aisle to take an inside look at the impact of big money on our political system.

http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=1124

This reported today:

 INTERNATIONAL / AFRICA   | June 18, 2007
In Ethiopian Desert, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
At the epicenter of a war pitting nomads against one of the biggest armies in Africa, villagers said they had been brutalized by government troops.

Despite horrific rapes, torture, murder, cruelty, and terror by government troops, despite mass annihilation of political opposition and demonstrators, the Bush and Cheney adminstration openly supports the Ethiopian government, writing them blank checks for NON-HUMANITARIAN aid — miliatry support. That means, folks, that Bush and Cheney are using your tax dollars to underwrite the atrocities perpetuated by the Ethiopian military, its troops and leaders, sanctioned by the Ethiopian government.  And, by using your tax dollars to do this (billions of dollars per year, by the way), that means YOU (and I) are actually responsible for this perpetration of evil. 

Journalists who report these atrocities are jailed, run out of the country and permanently banned. 

Republican’s, you WONDER why the American people are angry with you who do nothing to stop Bush and Cheney, you who simply rubber stamp their any arrogant demand?

 This is NOT the America of my father and his father.  This is NOT my America. My America stands for justice and right, not depravity as perpetrated by this sadistically corrupt administration. 

Here’s the link in case the other one fails:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/world/africa/18ethiopia.html?ex=1182830400&en=8994ece855654c49&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Okay, so my blog is, what?, one day, maybe two days old.  And here comes the email!  Am I some sort of “bleeding heart liberal?”  Am I “one of those weird [expletive deleted] ungodly atheists?” Am I….

*Sigh*

Okay, FOR THE RECORD:

• I exercise my right to vote — regularly exercise it
• I vote my conscience, not some party affiliation
• I’m a U.S. citizen, could easily be a member of DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution, for the acronym-impaired) should I have chosen to join…and I was invited, yes.
• Believe in a woman’s right to CHOOSE
• Believe in the RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS, including handguns using hollow-point bullets
• Believe that “cunt power” — Feminists who promote reverse discrimination — should get a dose of what they preach fully and thoroughly applied until they figure out that EQUAL TREATMENT APPLIES TO EVERYONE, regardless of whether they have software or hardware.  Same goes for RACE, COLOR, RELIGION, and ANY OTHER DISTINCTION
• Believe that all things, both living and inert, deserve respect, own the basic right to exist, to self-determination, and to non-interference
• Rapists should be castrated and have their penis amputated
• Premeditated murderers should be at least incarcerated for life, and definitely executed if the act was heinous
• George Bush is the worst U.S. President in modern history, and, in all probability, because his actions had the farthest-reaching global ramifications, the worst U.S. President of all time
• I’m a Preservationist. That means I’m a tree-hugger, a Spotted-Owl lover, a crow lover, a raven lover, a condor lover, a grizzly lover (they scare me, though), a wolf lover, a rain forest lover, and, especially, an old growth forest lover…
• I believe in using Solar power.  I also believe in nuclear power.
• We should send our nuclear waste to the sun…provided that it isn’t going to destabilize it
• War should never happen.  Not ever. 
• We should consolidate humanity into small islands of well-planned, high-rise urban development, not allow suburban sprawl or the development of rural land and wilderness.
• Human population is the most critical factor driving the planet’s problems.  I’m for negative population growth.  We need to get the total population down under one billion, and keep it there.  How to do it?  Voluntary self-control.  (Of course, I know it’s impossible, but it’s the truth.) 
• Children should have two parents, the exception being when one parent is killed or incapacitated. 
• Parents have an obligation to raise their children to be productive, responsible, moral, ethical, and tolerant.

That’s enough, I think, for now. 

Interrogators threatened to send him to Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the lawsuit said, “where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”

NYTimes June 12, 2007, Judges Say U.S. Can’t Hold Man As ‘Combatant’By ADAM LIPTAK

Want to know what makes me, a patriot, a Constitutionalist, ashamed? That this sort of thing can even be conceived, much less carried out…and sanctioned by my America.  My America has turned into “his Amerika” — a Little Tyrant’s Personal Dictatorship. 

I’m ashamed to be an American — ASHAMED.  …No.  That’s not quite right.  Americans are all right, no worse and sometimes a lot better than people from other cultures and countries.  However, I am ashamed of some Americans — Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, and everyone who enabled them.  I’m certainly embarrassed that Americans have allowed our country’s most precious foundations to be abrogated on the insolent, logically erroneous, petulantly willful demands of an administration that used 911 as a personal stage to undermine what made us the greatest nation ever conceived by man — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Imagine a country that denies the right of Habeas Corpus.  That’s our America.  I shuddered.  The Patriot Act? I was in shock that Congress sanctioned this.  Preemptive war?  Aghast.  And “We, the People” allowed this, did nothing to stop it.

This is NOT my America.  Be ashamed.