Former is first...enjoy the moment!

Senator Dodd is first for a day.

82. from the previous...

he also wrote the campbell soup theme song. i performed several of his pieces in college.

mmm...mmm...good...mmm...mmm...good...

Hillary leading Dems over a cliff

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=4695

Zogby's recent poll asking "Whom would you NEVER vote for president?" was kind of mischievous, wasn't it? But if I were a member of the Democratic National Committee, not to mention a congressional Democrat, I'd be sweating bullets over it.

A neat 50% claim they would never, even under pain of waterboarding (kidding), cast their presidential vote for Hillary Clinton.

"Never say never," Howard Dean or the Democratic Leadership Council's Harold Ford might say. That may have been right seven months ago when 46, not 50%, claimed they would never vote for Hillary. But now, at a time, when other polls show her pulling ahead of Senator Obama in the Democratic race, it's looking more like "Always say never."

Worse, her campaign is beginning to emit the stench of Bob Dole's 1996 Republican presidential run. You know -- hand her the nomination because it's owed her.

The cynicism of such a strategy notwithstanding, Democratic leadership forgets there's little margin of error because of the likelihood that Republicans will engineeer widespread voter fraud again.

Hillary's campaign seems to have developed a mind of its own. Is there any way to stop it before it leads the Democratic party over a cliff only to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below?

NOT UNLESS THE DEMOCRATIC SHEEPLE WAKE UP.

2.

I second Phil's putting Dodd up first for a day.

In fact, I totally support Dodd -- period. He may have made the mistake of voting yes on the Iraq resolution, but he wasn't alone and long ago stated he regretting that vote.

No candidate is perfect but Dodd's record for the last few years except for that fateful vote of so many who were led astray by a mad man, is one I can support.

The CNN fix is already in: the day's menu is McCain, wildfires, Guiliani, wildfires, Romney, wildfires . . .

Boycott! MS is better.

I also could vote for Dodd and remain amazed that he's polling so low here.  Has he posted here yet?

If Gore were elected, Howard would have a cushy spot in the cabinet, perhaps HHS altho a Gore/Dean ticket sounds good except for the fact that Dean still has a bullseye on his back when it comes to the media.   

"Thought Crime Bill" Could Ensnare Peaceful Activists
Fears that government could define "Internet radicalization" and criticism as terrorism mount, violent comments left on messageboards by trolls could be exploited to entrap peaceful 9/11 truthers Prison Planet | October 26, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

A new bill that recently passed the House and is headed for Senate approval has online activists worried that the vague definitions used for defining the Internet's contribution to radicalization of potential terrorists could lead to a government crackdown on talk radio, free speech and the 9/11 truth movement.

The bill is H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 and passed Congress after a bipartisan vote on October 23rd.

Ostensibly, the bill targets United States citizens because of its constant reference to basic Constitutional protections, but this has led some to fear that it is intended to shut down free speech on the Internet and stifle patriot and alternative talk radio networks.

The bill defines "violent radicalization" as "The process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

It further defines "homegrown terrorism" as "The use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

(Article Continues Below)

The term "planned use" has caused concerns that "thinking about violence," ie thought crime, could be considered a terrorist act. But since to plan violence must involve some form of planning, whether that be drawing up bomb diagrams or making violent statements, the real threat seems to have been overlooked.

A disturbing trend in recent months has been the proliferation of violent postings on messageboards of websites affiliated with peaceful 9/11 truth organizations.

These messages are being posted by shameless trolls, COINTELPRO operatives and their stooges in a clear effort to discredit the 9/11 truth movement by making us all appear to be crazy nutcases who plan to commit terrorist acts.

Establishment media hacks like Glenn Beck have then seized upon the idea to spew propaganda about how the next Timothy McVeigh will come from the truth movement, despite the fact that the leadership of the truth movement have practiced what they preach all along, by engaging in completely peaceful protests and other forms of non-violent educational activism.

The bill's reference to how "The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens," is shocking.

Remember, the bill is not aimed at "Al-Qaeda" websites or arabic forums that post alleged Bin Laden video tapes, it is aimed at American citizens using American based websites, like the very one you're reading now.

END GAME: Blueprint For Global Enslavement has arrived! Click here to subscribe and watch online in high quality and download versions.

The opportunity for the state to seize upon violent posts left by trolls and use them to entrap peaceful 9/11 truthers under the guise that they "promoted violence" should be a major concern for us all.

Our message is simply this - don't even try it.

We have preached a doctrine of absolute non-violence from the very beginning and we will continue to do so. Anyone who calls for violence in a messageboard post is either a Fed, a Mom's basement dwelling troll who spends their entire day attempting to debunk the 9/11 truth movement, or a completely deluded moron who is unrepresentative of the vast majority of the 9/11 truth movement.

Those individuals who advocate violence should be sought out and investigated individually. Any plans to try and entrap prominent 9/11 truth movement figures using guilt by association should be abandoned immediately and we will ceaselessly emphasize this point until this current wave of propaganda subsides.

Alex Jones' terrifying new film End Gme: Blueprint For Global Enslavement explores the history of eugenics and answers why the elite are so obsessed with thinning the human population. Click here to order the DVD or subscribe to prison planet.tv and watch the documentary in high quality online streaming format.

Hello, mprov.....are you here?

Were you able to hook up with a coordinator for District 13 in collecting Nomination Papers to put Al Gore on the primary ballot?

If not, and if you're still interested, you can contact gayhart@san.rr.com.

Many hands make light work. 

I

Speaking of torture ... if our Congress won't do its job and hold putzCo to standards, then it looks as if others will.

Pretty soon, no one in putzCo will be able to travel in Europe without fear of being subjected to legal complaints ... as Rummy has just been.

OK, Nancy, it's time for the impeachment train to get started.

***********
And hurrah to Chris Dodd. FINALLY, someone is saying what should be said. Has this administration NO shame? Apparently not.

==================
DONALD RUMSFELD CHARGED WITH TORTURE DURING TRIP TO FRANCE
Complaint Filed Against Former Defense Secretary for Torture, Abuse at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib
CONTACT: Jen Nessel, 917.442.0112, jnessel@ccr-ny.org

October 26, 2007, Paris, France – Today, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the “Court of First Instance” (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture. Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, and left through a door connecting to the U.S. embassy to avoid journalists and human rights attorneys outside.

“The filing of this French case against Rumsfeld demonstrates that we will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in the torture program are brought to justice. Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide. A torturer is an enemy of all humankind,” said CCR President Michael Ratner.

France is under the obligation to investigate and prosecute Rumsfeld’s accountability for crimes of torture in Guantanamo and Iraq. France has no choice but to open an investigation if an alleged torturer is on its territory. I hope that the fight against impunity will not be sacrificed in the name of politics. We call on France to refuse to be a safe haven for criminals.” said FIDH President Souhayr Belhassen.

[...]
http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-rel...

Good grief - the MSM is all about Hillary and her inevitability - not if I can help it. Cripes, who exactly are they polling?

Krugman ... I missed the NYT version this morning. But Common Dreams picked it up for us all.

With ideology and deliberate incompetence in equal parts, this disastrous administration is ruining our nation in every way that it can.

Nancy: is impeachment on the table YET? What the Hell does it take to get it there?

===============
Published on Friday, October 26, 2007 by The New York Times
A Catastrophe Foretold
by Paul Krugman

“Increased subprime lending has been associated with higher levels of delinquency, foreclosure and, in some cases, abusive lending practices.” So declared Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official.

These days a lot of people are saying things like that about subprime loans - mortgages issued to buyers who don’t meet the normal financial criteria for a home loan. But here’s the thing: Mr. Gramlich said those words in May 2004.

And it wasn’t his first warning. In his last book, Mr. Gramlich, who recently died of cancer, revealed that he tried to get Alan Greenspan to increase oversight of subprime lending as early as 2000, but got nowhere.

So why was nothing done to avert the subprime fiasco?

Before I try to answer that question, there are a few things you should know.

First, the situation for both borrowers and investors looks increasingly dire.

A new report from Congress’s Joint Economic Committee predicts that there will be two million foreclosures on subprime mortgages by the end of next year. That’s two million American families facing the humiliation and financial pain of losing their homes.

At the same time, investors who bought assets backed by subprime loans are continuing to suffer severe losses. Everything suggests that there will be many more stories like that of Merrill Lynch, which has just announced an $8.4 billion write-down because of bad loans - $3 billion more than it had announced just a few weeks earlier.

Second, much if not most of the subprime lending that is now going so catastrophically bad took place after it was clear to many of us that there was a serious housing bubble, and after people like Mr. Gramlich had issued public warnings about the subprime situation. As late as 2003, subprime loans accounted for only 8.5 percent of the value of mortgages issued in this country. In 2005 and 2006, the peak years of the housing bubble, subprime was 20 percent of the total - and the delinquency rates on recent subprime loans are much higher than those on older loans.

So, once again, why was nothing done to head off this disaster? The answer is ideology.

[...]
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007...

If the MSM is all a-dither about it, mary vb, I'm pretty sure that it's NOT the grassroots, but the corporatists who are running the show.

Paper ballots in 2008!!

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy everywhere! Is it any wonder that our word is no good outside the US? Pretty soon, our credit won't be either.

Criminally stupid putzCo ... c/mon Nancy, just what are you waiting for to get impeachment going? The Second Coming?

That will be TOO late.

====================
Friday, October 26, 2007
US Sanctions on Iran

The Bush administration announced wideranging new sanctions on Iran on Thursday, which target three Iranian banks, nine companies associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and several individuals, as well as the IRGC (roughly analogous to the National Guard in the US, i.e. a populist adjunct to the formal Iranian army).

These unilateral sanctions clearly reflect frustration on the part of Bush/Cheney that they have not been able to convince the UN Security Council to apply international sanctions. (Iran has not been demonstrated to be doing anything that is illegal in international law.)

The sanctions may work but may not. The Dutch Shell corporation is thinking seriously of bucking the US and helping develop Iranian oil and gas production. China is negotiating a big deal with Iran. The world is energy hungry. Iran has energy. The US is a debtor nation, and has gone even more deeply into debt under Bush. It may just not be able to stand in the way of the development of Iranians energy.

The hypocrisy of the Bush case is obvious when it complains about Iran supporting Hizbullah and Hamas. The Kurds based in American Iraq have done much worse things to Turkey in the past month than Hizbullah did to Israel in June of 2006. Yet when Israel launched a brutal and wideranging war on all of Lebanon, destroying precious infrastructure and dumping enormous amounts of oil into the Mediterranean, damaging Beirut airport, destroying essential bridges in Christian areas, and then releasing a million cluster bomblets on civilian areas in the last 3 days of the war-- when Israel did all that, Bush and Cheney applauded and argued against a 'premature' cease-fire! Yet they are trying to convince Turkey just to put up stoically with the PKK terrorists who have killed dozens of Turkish troops recently and kidnapped 8 (again, more than the number of Iraeli troops that were kidnapped). Bush's coddling of the PKK in Iraq is not different from Iran's support for Hizbullah, except that the PKK is a more dangerous and brutal organization than Hizbullah.

Not to mention the US-backed Kurdish front against Iran itself, ...

[...]
http://www.juancole.com/2007/10/us-sanct...

Sheesh ... when things don't go the Rethugs' way, they just make them up.

I'd say that an apology is the LEAST they can do. Some heads had better roll.

This current FEMA group makes *heckuva job Brownie* look good.

And I'm off to PillowLand.

===================
US agency apologizes for news conference on fires
Fri Oct 26, 2007 3:35pm EDT
By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's main disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a hastily called news conference on California's wildfires that no news organizations attended.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, still struggling to restore its image after the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, issued the apology after The Washington Post published details of the Tuesday briefing.

"We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment," FEMA deputy administrator Harvey Johnson, who conducted the briefing, said in a statement. "Our intent was to provide useful information and be responsive to the many questions we have received."

No actual reporter attended the news conference in person, agency spokesman Aaron Walker said.

A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident "inexcusable and offensive to the secretary."

"We have made it clear that stunts such as this will not be tolerated or repeated," spokeswoman Laura Keehner said. She said the department was looking at the possibility of reprimanding those responsible.

The agency had called the briefing with about 15 minutes notice as federal officials headed for southern California to oversee and assist in firefighting and rescue efforts. Reporters were also given a telephone number to listen in on but could not ask questions.

But with no reporters on hand and an agency video camera providing a feed carried live by some television networks, FEMA press employees posed the questions for Johnson that included: "Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?"

According to Friday's Post account, which Walker confirmed, Johnson replied that he was "very happy with FEMA's response so far."
[...]
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCri...

I was on my way, with my digital, to the famous Recoleta Cemetary...good grief, I can't remember how to spell....Cementerio...

Anyway, right down the street from my studio there was a protest against the paper compania across the river  in Paraguay.  The paper company is polluting the beautiful Rio Plata . ... the Plata River in Entre Rios and some of the most superb pristine beaches on the Argentine side are being destroyed.  Finland loaned Uruguay the money to build the paper company.  I learned so much today and took 31 photos and will post a few here.  I met and talked with 2 TV reporters who were about to cover the protest and told me where to stand so that I could be on the local 5 PM news but at the last minute, the coverage was cancelled...  so I almost became famous.  LOL  

There were dancers and drummers and trombones and flag and signs and lots of people watching and police lined up in full gear as I was running about, in and out, shooting and hoping I wouldn't get shot.  Every so often, shots rang out; scared the hell outta me, but they were nothing; firecrackers I think.  Anyway, I had a blast and this is what it means to feel decent again here.  I can actually go out and see what happens. 

The cops don't use stun guns here to my knowledge but I have to check that out again.  I think maybe in extreme cases.

After all the activity today, my tummy is troubled.  It just wants to hang out in bed but it can't anymore. Not as much.   I'll be on meds for the next week and the doctora said it's nothing serious and very common with the foreigners.

Tomorrow or Sunday I dance! 

Judy for Dean.....`13.

Judy, please write Nancy and tell her that. I call her and tell her to impeach or resign, so someone else can.
There is a push to get people to flood her phones about impeachment prior to Kucinich offering his privileged resolution soon.

Audrey, I've called and written to Pelosi suggesting either start impeachment or pack her bags.

Several daze ago, I moved Dodd into second place.

Elections here are held on Sundays.  What is it with the US that we can't be as smart?  The newscaster today told me that the favorite, Sra Kirchner, will win, and that Argentina will be 90% dictatorship and 10 % democracy under her rule.  I replied that maybe that's more than what we have.  The newscasters I met today were not impressed with Ms. Clinton.

We've got to get the fix OUT.

Did he recant?  How can we possibly be so primitive that we are debating torture that is obviously torture?  Water-boarding is not a family value.

Mukasey's Nomination Runs Into Trouble
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102607J.shtml
The Associated Press reports, "Judge Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general ran into trouble Thursday when two top Senate Democrats said their votes hinge on whether he will say on the record that an interrogation technique that simulates drowning is torture."

bbl 

new thread
http://www.blogforamerica.com/view/22705...

Way to go Bernie!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/why-i-will-vote-no-on-m_b_70043.html

The attorney general of the United States must be a defender of our constitutional rights. Because President Bush thinks he can do whatever he wants to do in the name of fighting terrorism, we need an attorney general who can explain to the president what the Constitution of this country is all about. We need an attorney general who does not believe the president has unlimited power. We need an attorney general who will tell President Bush that he is not above the law. We need an attorney general who clearly understands the separation of powers inherent in our Constitution. Regretfully, I have concluded that Michael B Mukasey would not be that kind of attorney general. That is why I will be voting against his nomination.

Seashell......

Thanks for writing Pelosi. It's so good you're feeling better. At least you sound like you are. You mentioned that Howard still might have a bullseye on his back. wait till Gore enters, he will have one too. I'm thinking, anyone that we might like will be targeted. Can't let that stop us.
Have a ton of fun Sea!!!!