Pretty Brutal, indeed.

Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys!

say it loud

edward feingold 11.24.1911-10.29.1982

Awwww!

No one is obligated anymore to deal politely with this guy.
All across the world people have seen what's going on here more clearly than we have.

More Bad Words

Wonderful satire...?
- or Is peace still a joking matter?

Come on, Al !! Recount starts today.

Two weeks after the closest U.S. Senate election
in Minnesota history,




a massive hand recount of all 2.9 million votes
gets underway today,with local officials working under the scrutiny of top lawyers brought in by both candidates.


At stake is possible control of the Senate, where Democrats are within a few seats of a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, putting intense pressure on county auditors who now find they may have to explain every decision they made in the closest race in the country.





imagine how much fun the Senate would be...






everyone would start watching CSPAN!

Pick a card, any card

like to gamble?
how about with human lives?

here's a fun way to see who really hits the jackpot!









http://www.ruckus.org/warprofiteers/cards/index.html

Excellent article about economic coup

There is no way to reconcile the public's vote for change with the market's foot-stomping for more of the same. Any and all moves to change course will be met with short-term market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear that the new rules will be applied across the board and with fairness, the market will stabilize and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence has never been better.

Over the past three months, we've been shocked so frequently that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that clearly predates him, or fault him for honoring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories fade.


for the rest of this excellent article:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/klein


Those looking for ideology in the White House
should consider this:
For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people. ---Naomi Klein

A FRANK Discussion about Colin Powell

from 5.17.04:

Appearing on Meet the Press, Powell acknowledged--finally!--that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war. Specifically, he said that he was wrong when he appeared before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, and alleged that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons. That was one of the more dramatic claims he and the administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq. (Remember the drawings he displayed.) Yet Powell said on MTP, "it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading." Powell did not spell it out, but the main source for this claim was an engineer linked to the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, who is now part of the Iraqi Governing Council.

and this is some good reading, here...



Ray McGovern: Out Damn Blot: A Letter to Colin Powell

Don't Miss This!

"Mama Africa" dies

Miriam Makeba has died at 76.

She had just taken part in a concert near the southern town of Caserta in Italy and died of a heart attack.

She appeared on Paul Simon's Graceland tour in 1987 and in 1992 had a leading role in the film Sarafina!

She was born in Johannesburg on 4 March 1932 and was a leading symbol in the struggle against apartheid.

Her singing career started in the 1950s as she mixed jazz with traditional South African songs.

She came to international attention in 1959 during a tour of the United States with South African group the Manhattan Brothers.

She was forced into exile soon after when her passport was revoked after starring in an anti-apartheid documentary and did not return to her native country until after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990.

Makeba was the first black African woman to win a Grammy Award, which she shared with Harry Belafonte in 1965.

Frank, frankly, "nucular" waste safety still seems to be ???

Here's an ad from the campaign discussing Yucca mountain storage site - oh, yes it is an Obama ad(!) - just for laffs.




and an interesting interview with nuclear physicist Dr. FRANK Von Hipple
- seems we won't be doing any reprocessing here.
It sounds to me there are still volatile stages in the storage process and much room for human error.





It looks like some people aren't too thrilled with the situation in France/Germany either.

This happened in July.

Contamination fears after leak from French nuclear waste plant

By Matthew Kay in Paris
Thursday, 10 July 2008

Nuclear authorities in France were scrambling to calm fears yesterday following a radioactive leak from a nuclear waste processing facility near the town of Bollène, in the Rhône valley.

Officials immediately enforced an emergency contingency plan in three villages surrounding the plant. A ban was placed on drinking water from private wells, swimming in rivers and irrigating fields. Eating fish caught in rivers has also been outlawed.

- this is from last weekend:



Police wielding truncheons beat back environmentalists Sunday trying to block a train carrying highly radioactive nuclear waste from western France to a dump in Germany, authorities said.

In the largest and most violent anti-nuclear protests since 2001 in Germany, activists set fire to barricades on the tracks in the north of the country, which police extinguished with water cannon.

Railroad crews scrambled to repair the damage overnight to allow the shipment the 23 tonnes of treated, but still extremely toxic, nuclear waste to continue on to the Gorleben disposal centre.

The train had resumed its journey after being stopped for nearly 12 hours Saturday near the border by three protesters, German police said.

About 15,000 demonstrators rallied along the tracks, most of them in the Gorleben region, joined by a caravan of 300 tractors festooned with anti-nuclear banners.

Some 16,000 police were deployed across Germany to ensure the load reached the dump safely.

Anti-nuclear group x-tausendmal quer, which organised the demonstrations, argues that the shipments are dangerous and that Germany has not found any permanent solution concerning what to do with the waste from its nuclear reactors.

"This is a strong sign of the renaissance of the anti-nuclear movement," group spokesman Jochen Stay said of the weekend protests.

The organisation calls for the quick phase-out of the country's nuclear power plants.

The German government has approved plans to mothball the last of its 17 reactors by about 2020.

But Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for slowing down the process over fears it will be impossible to slash greenhouse gas emissions without nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide and produces a quarter of the country's electricity.

The opposition Greens and the far-left Die Linke party called on their members to join the protests.

Polls show most Germans oppose nuclear power but skyrocketing energy costs have sparked the calls to reconsider the phase-out.

The waste's odyssey began Friday at the nuclear waste retreatment plant at La Hague in Normandy. The trainload is the 11th of its kind to date.

The cargo was halted Saturday for half the day on the French side of the frontier at the station in Lauterbourg when three German militants, two men and a woman, jammed their arms into a block of concrete hidden under the track.

Police eventually managed to dislodge them.

About 500 demonstrators took part in a sit-in Saturday night at the site. Police reported finding fire accelerant and damage at signal stations which hindered other rail traffic.

The shipment was to reach the northern city of Lueneburg late Sunday, 12 hours behind schedule.

The cargo will be offloaded onto trucks in the town of Dannenberg 50 kilometre (30 miles) away and is expected to finish the last 20 kilometres of the journey to Gorleben Monday.

Message to Obama

http://www.obamafamilydog.com/
http://www.dogsavers.org/
http://www.poomixrescue.com/doodles.html#labradoodles/





Our best friend, Chauncey, came from
http://www.petfinder.com/shelters/plutorescue.html

this one's for you, Frankie!

This is the unveiling of a new segment here on the OldDogMom blog.

It will be called
"FRANK DISCUSSIONS"
in honor of my dear friend, Frank,
(from the dog run I frequent)
who, on occasion, may need to seek out more sources of information
and do a little fact-checking
(don't we all, sometimes?!)

This was a discussion we were having just before the election about what was actually said by the two candidates on the subject of "clean coal".


Here are some of your favorite "news" people weighing in as an extra bonus.

Enjoy!





On this rare occasion I agree with McCain!
- and once again here is the text of what Obama said:


"What I've said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's out there. I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter.... So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches. The only thing I've said with respect to coal, I haven't been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as an ideological matter, as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it."

If you really want it - an EXCELLENT source of more information (about many issues) can be found by watching Amy Goodman on DEMOCRACY NOW.
Below is an informed debate about the realities of "clean" coal technology
(better than the debate in the dog run, I promise!)







coming right up: a FRANK discussion about nuclear waste
and the French - au revoir!


see you soon, Chauncey.
I'll bring the frisbee.
love, Sasha

Why we support Obama

AMY GOODMAN: What about these third party candidates? You supported Nader in 2000. There’s Bob Barr right now, as well as Nader. There’s Cynthia McKinney. Are you encouraging them all to run as hard as they can, even in these last few days and with the stakes the way they are?

MICHAEL MOORE:

Yes, I think it’s good that there are different people running. But in this election I’m voting for Barack Obama. We don’t have the proper setup to where these other parties have a chance. They should have a chance. We should have a different system, so that people could have their voices heard and people who want to vote for these candidates have a chance to legitimately do that and have a legitimate—some form of representation or proportional representation where their voices are heard in Congress.

I mean, that just seems to me common sense—doesn’t it?—to anybody who really believes in democracy, that if ten percent of the country, you know, supported the Green Party, that ten percent of our Congress should be Green Party members. If ten percent were Libertarian, then ten percent should be Libertarian, or whatever the percentages are. But in this election, you know, we’re all too beaten down at this point to take it any longer, and we have to stop what the Republicans have done to this country for the last twenty of the twenty-eight years. I don’t think there’s many of us that are under any sort of delusion that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are going to take us all the way to the promised land, but they are going to stop—they’re the tourniquet that’s going to stop the bleeding.

I’m also hoping that Senator Obama is like all politicians: they don’t always keep their campaign promises, right? I mean, it’s not unusual. It’s certainly not unexpected. They just don’t always keep their campaign promises. So, somehow I’ve told myself that those campaign promises that he will not keep are expanding the war in Afghanistan and pushing a healthcare plan that leaves the profit-making health insurance companies in charge of the plan.

Wake up, sheeple!!

while we're quibbling about what she's saying/wearing
in several states machines used in early voting are flipping votes!!
For 8 years this administration's policies have been killing and robbing us, raping our environment and poisoning our food supply right before our eyes -
now, the voting machines we've known to be defective (at best)
are flipping votes AS WE'RE VOTING! How long can we afford to ignore these things??
Right before our eyes, sheeple!
Take your video cam with you when you vote!



It has been widely reported in the media over the past week of early voting that Direct Recording Election (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines made by ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic have been flipping votes, predominantly from Democratic candidates to Republican candidates, but in some reported cases, just the opposite.

These vote flips were first reported in West Virginia and the elections official there quickly ordered the recalibration of some machines, but video has shown that recalibration does not correct the problem and the flips continue. (See: http://www.velvetrevolution.us/electionstrikeforce/2008/10/video_the_vote_captures_video.html)

Vote flipping has also now reported to have occurred in Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia and elsewhere.


Now this!

Mike Connell may have been threatened by Karl Rove
should the GOP's
"high IQ Forrest Gump"

(so described for his uncanny ability to be found "at the scene of every [GOP] crime")
fail to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, according to a letter sent by Cliff Arnebeck
to AG Michael Mukasey asking for Connell's protection.









Good luck, folks!

Looking Back in Anger

His corpse isn't cold yet, but the devastating looks back at Bush's legacy are starting to pour in.

The British newspaper, the Guardian, asked seven American authors to reflect on the Bush era. Their essays are scathing.

Tobias Wolf writes about get-togethers with friends: "When we meet for dinner we do our best to take up other subjects - books, gossip, movies, our children - but then, like the addicts we've become, we sneak back to the drug of outrage, shooting up the latest barefaced lie and squalid revelation, not forgetting to list yet again the national and global catastrophes brought about by the incompetence, hypocrisy, muddleheadedness, venality, truculence, mendacity, callousness, zealotry, machismo, lawlessness, cynicism, wishful thinking, and occasional downright evil of the administration of George W Bush. Our economy is in freefall, our public school system a disgrace, our military exhausted, the wounded and traumatised dying of neglect, yea, the very earth groaning for relief - and he's optimistic! Yessiree! Looking forward to it! Leaning toward us over the podium with that exasperated little squint and that impatient, dentist-drill voice, utterly at a loss as to how he got saddled with a nation of such gloomy Guses and crybabies.

"Eddying around our own indignation again and again, as if caught in some Bermuda Triangle of complaint, we are unable not to remind each other of the fatal character of George Bush's incomprehension, the thousands upon thousands who have died by his blithe actions and inactions, and his inability to understand at any level - political, moral, emotional - the terrible damage he has done, this man whose idea of sharing in the grief of parents who've lost a son or daughter in Iraq is to give up playing golf! If he really did.

"There - I've stepped in the trap again. I can't help it. And for many of us that has been a defining condition of life in George W Bush's reign, this unanswerable need to register anew and aloud our shock and dismay, indeed our disbelief, at finding him at the wheel as we wake each morning."

Siri Hustvedt writes: "For years,Americans have been listening to a president who has essentially cut the world in two. We are 'the protectors of freedom' fighting the 'evil-doers' who 'hate freedom'. . . .

"Playing on the age-old fear of malignant outsiders and foreigners, both those residing on American soil and elsewhere, the administration successfully created an atmosphere of absolutism after 11 September 2001. The exhortation 'If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists' is a form of political speech that makes dialogue impossible. There is no legitimate response because anyone who counters with another thought has already been lumped with an inhuman enemy. In psychiatric parlance, rigid polarities like those the President has made time and again are regarded as pathological: 'splitting'. The patient is unable to tolerate ambiguity and insists on viewing the people in his life through an 'all good' or 'all bad' lens. Bush and his cohorts have been masterful splitters, employing a language that gives no room for exchange and necessarily distorts reality, which, unfortunately, is usually murky. This kind of speech does not recognise an interlocutor, a real human other. It is speech without empathy, and it is startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the Muslim radicals who spew venom on the West and 'the enemies of Islam'."

Walter Mosley writes:

"Bush, along with his cronies - Cheney, Rumsfeld,

Rice and Rove

- received the strongest hand that could be dealt a sitting president and squandered the potential for true personal, party, national and international advancement. After the World Trade Centre disaster we (Americans) had the sympathy and support of much of the globe on our side. But instead of capitalising on this largesse we declared war on the world and upon our own people - especially the poor. . . .

"Our soldiers have been killed and maimed, scarred physically and psychologically. Most have seen no remuneration and their homeland is no safer or any more secure.

"Bush has done many things wrong. Sometimes these transgressions have hurt us but even when we are wounded we learn. We now have a glimmer of understanding why so much of the world hates us and why so many others have disdain for our archaic sense of pride and vacuous moral authority."

Aleksandar Hemon writes: "I am no historian but it is my guess that the Bush regime would be in the running for the worst elected government in the history of Western civilisation. The score sheet is catastrophic: American foreign policy and international prestige are in tatters; the deficit and the national debt are reaching Zimbabwean proportions; states are impoverished and national infrastructure is falling apart; the practices of democracy have been so devalued that a militant bimbo is a viable vice-presidential candidate, while race-baiting is acceptable campaign practice. What to say of the destruction of New Orleans and the collapse of financial markets, neither of which the Bush court seemed particularly interested in until it was too late? Nothing Bush and his administration handled has remained undamaged, no stone misturned, all children left behind to forage through the debris in the aftermath of the past eight years."

Rick Moody writes: "The Ownership Society! That was the name for this second term of Bush's America, and it's logical to assume Bush didn't come up with the coinage himself, because how could he have? He has trouble getting through a simple sentence. Probably some staffer, gifted with ad speak, came up with it, coining what was already de facto policy, the notion that the government needs to remove itself entirely from the business of regulation and owning industries, leaving the oversight of corporate capital - as well as derivatives, packaged mortgages, and so on - to an ill-equipped marketplace.

"What the Ownership Society came to feel like to the overwhelming majority of Americans was feudalism. The modern return of the robber barons. No backstop in the case of catastrophic illness. No backstop in case of corporate malfeasance. No backstop in the case of a despoiled natural environment. No backstop in the case of cascading corporate bankruptcies. The wealthy and the large corporations, now largely unregulated, were free to do as they wished in most if not all areas, in order to increase the bounteous riches of their executives."

Edmund White writes: "Perhaps the most depressing moment in the last eight years was Bush's re-election. As a teacher, I've long lamented the dumbing down of America; now I was tempted to see our educational failure as a plot to keep the electorate stupid and gullible. In America, a tiny elite receives a rigorous education and the rest of the population is kept in darkest ignorance, just as a small percentage of our youngsters constitute Olympic champion athletes and the rest of the population is grotesquely obese: a strange idea of democracy. I was prepared to believe that Dubya's first election had been a mistake or a cheat, but the idea that the voters could re-elect him was too grim to contemplate."

Joseph L. Galloway writes in his McClatchy Newspapers opinion column: "They played on our fears like a mighty Wurlitzer Organ, frightening us with lies into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Frightening us into re-electing George Bush, even after we knew that he was anything but presidential, anything but intelligent, anything but a worthy, effective leader.

"They frightened us so badly that we voluntarily surrendered the precious rights that a million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and others bought for us with their lives during two centuries of freedom and democracy.

"They used fear to violate international law, to torture and imprison thousands of suspected enemies without charges or trials. They used fear and invoked national security to suspend the right of habeas corpus, the foundation of our freedoms.

"For these and far too many other sins and transgressions to list in so short a space as this, we the people have every right, and perhaps a duty, to cast them aside, and with them their only hope of avoiding justice and judgment -- John McCain, who voted with them 90 percent of the time."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/11/03/BL2008110301254_4.html?hpid=opinionsbox1