Howard is 1st...especially on his birthday

I picked up a "One Sky One Climate One Future" yard sign at our state meeting today...these are pop up in yards...
http://www.1sky.org/

pop s/b popping

One Climate One Future One Chance is the sign...long day...now ended

15.

Joan* In*Florida
Sat, 11/17/07
6:20 pm

...I believe Dodd is by far the strongest candidate...

He also has a wife that would make us proud....
----------

...lol, NOPE even ROFLMAO!

Never knew that someone's wife "would make us proud"....all of us?!..., then we really deserve what we have!

Happy birthday to Howard Dean.   

Still looking for the video of Dean and Blitzer pre-debate...but I did find this post debate one with Melissa Long. 

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2007/11/15/long.howard.dean.interview.cnn

I am really angry about Karl Rove being hired by Newsweek while he is implicated in the Siegelman case.  Plus in the firing of the judges, and who knows what else.   More about it here.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/1650

People in Ca are ready for some action on global warming, and this issue is uniting the political spectrum. We've got strange political bedfellows, Jerry Brown and Arnold, suing the EPA for dragging their feet.

I wanted to throw in a little rant about the drivers license nonsense. It is a distraction that does not belong in presidential politics . I live in Los Angeles. I do not care what your politics are regarding immigration, the fact is, we all share the road and I , for one, would like everyone hurtling around on SoCal's roads to have taken a drivers test. 

Also, hello to some of those names I see from '03.

Happy birthday Howard!

Bumper sticker alert..........of course on a truck here in a red state............

"Stop Global Whining"..........................probably some ignorant ass.

Hey, LaMom ~~ I remember you! You speak French, right?

Linda*in*SFNM
Sat, 11/17/07
8:44 pm
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Great words Linda..............do the honourable thing next Novemeber.............dont vote, or at best write in your candidate................

Why the hell is Rove writing for Newsweek fer god's sake?

************************* 

Musharraf Installs Puppet Government to Satisfy the West General Pervez Musharraf installs a hand-picked set of cronies as a "caretaker" Pakistani government to mollify the West and minimize criticism of his extended emergency rule.

Yep!

ALONE: KUCINICH CHARGES THAT AMERICAN MEDIA OWNED BY MILITARY CONTRACTERS ARE BIASED AND SUPPORTS HIS CLAIM (8 comments) Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Ohio, Democratic Party Candidate for President) argued fairly successfully on the Voice of America (VOA) program , Press Conference USA of VOA News Now, this past weekend (Nov. 17, 2007) that the American media is biased against him and its campaign. This, he claims, is why he is not running at least 3rd or 4th in Democrat election polls alread

And so the confiscation of guns begins and fear will allow this to continue.  Americans are practically begging for a police state.

BOSTON POLICE LOOK TO SEARCH HOMES WITHOUT A WARRANT...

Big day looms for Venezuela with new constitution vote; centralized socialism fueled by oil...

Big Oil, Big Money, Big Wars

Saudi minister warns of dollar collapse...

Oui, but only to paranoid neo-cons...;-)

Alan Dershowitz has written a post that first attacks Larisa Alexandrovna for suggesting he's pro-torture, and then goes on to accuse the Huffington Post of censorship. Regarding Ms. Alexandrovan, he apparently feels it's "name-calling" - and worse - to state what appears to be obvious: Although Mr. Dershowitz professes his opposition to torture, he continues to advocate for its use. Specifically, he wants to make it legal for the United States government to engage in torture practices under certain conditions.

Mr. Dershowitz's logic appears to be that making torture legal and then establishing guidelines for its limited use is actually a form of noble opposition. It's hard to understand how he can argue that this make him "anti-torture," but his motives and state of mind are immaterial to the discussion.

With 2 crooks vying for power, those "evildoers" could just step in and grab the nukes....while our congress was trusting putz and napping on the job.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the crooked Princess Ferragamo--Benazir Bhutto—has returned to Pakistan. Bhutto’s been traipsing all over Washington trying to garner support from think-tank heavies and establishment powerbrokers to help her stage a political come-back in Islamabad. She even hired a high-powered public relations firm to polish her image so the media wouldn’t focus too much attention on her past transgressions. Allegations of money laundering and corruption have haunted Bhutto ever since she was driven from office in 1996. Last month, General Musharraf cut a deal with Bhutto which freed her from the prospect of criminal prosecution and allowed her to return home. The arrangement ignored the judicial system entirely. The $1.5 billion that she and her husband allegedly “received in a variety of criminal enterprises” has simply disappeared down the memory hole.

Dying for dollars.

I first addressed this concern about the US dollar in August of 2004. The following column appears to be one of the very earliest written which identified the OPEC pricing monopoly a major linch pin in the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. At the time, I was suggesting how this was a significant factor behind the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam. Hussein had first proposed Iraq's break with the US dollar pricing in early November of 2000, but implementation didn't really actually follow until December 2002. The US invasion of Iraq followed on March 19th, 2003. The very first official order of business for the "Coalition" for Provisional Authority (the CPA) was to "restore the dollar" to its former position in Iraq's limited oil and distillate sales. Please read on.

Shortcuts for the lazy

Good morning, BFA!

Still betwixt & between ISPs here (I think that they make it so difficult to change just so that we never will!), but have a small window this am where I hope that items will go through.

As of last Wednesday, my residence/work permit here came through. That is a big deal, but it would not have been quite so complicated had I not changed residence from one canton to the other in the middle of the process. Live and learn! What a relief! It is just the first step in the bureaucratic maze, but it is the most important one and the rest should fall neatly into place now. But it will still keep me busy in the meantime, just to get them into place. Previously I had a whole administration that did the work for me. As an independent, I must do the work myself. It makes one appreciate the administration that I once took for granted.

Of course, this all means that the heady days of leisure will occasionally come to an end because I still have to supplement my all-too-meager pension. Beginning the last week of the month, I start my first independent contract, but it should not be too onerous ... and I can choose my own work schedule, just so I deliver what is asked for by the time it is needed. This could be fun!

Here's an interesting, if inadvertently recorded, discussion from the current OPEC conference. I saw this item reported yesterday, but it does not seem to have been picked up in either the WaPo or the NYT.

And a huge thanks again to putzCo ... and any Dems who keep enabling them ... for all they have done to ruin our country and our currency!

It's short, but important, so I have posted it in its entirety.

============
Oil leaders' private debate televised by mistake
Tim Webb in Riyadh
Sunday November 18, 2007
Observer

'Kill the cable, kill the cable,' shouted the security guard as he burst through the double doors into the media room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, followed by Saudi police. It was too late.

A private meeting of Opec leaders, gathered this weekend in Riyadh for the cartel's third meeting in its 47-year history, had just been broadcast to the world's media for more than half an hour after a technician had mistakenly plugged the TV feed into the wrong socket. The facade of unity that the cartel so carefully cultivates to a world spooked by soaring oil prices was shattered.

Sometimes, such innocent mistakes can have far-reaching economic and political consequences. Commodity and currency traders said this weekend that oil prices would surge again tomorrow - possibly breaking the $101 per barrel record set in the late 1970s - while the already battered dollar would fall further on the back of the unintentional broadcast.

On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela's oil minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing - and selling - oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.

They said Opec should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world's largest oil producers and de facto head of Opec, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.

Unfortunately his words and those of everyone at the meeting were being broadcast via a live television feed to a group of astonished reporters. 'I couldn't believe it,' said one who was there. 'When I realised they didn't know they were being broadcast live, I frantically started taking notes.'

Opec only realised that the leaders' row was being broadcast to the world when the Reuters news agency put out a report of the argument.

The weakness of the dollar is one reason why oil prices are so high, as cartel members seek to compensate for their lower earnings. This means a further drop in the dollar is likely to be accompanied by a rise in oil prices.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,...

Sorry to have missed Our Howard's BD yesterday! Belated greetings from me and I hope that you had a very happy one!

Thank you so much for all that you are doing! And thank you so much for leaving Jim in charge here!

You make one heckuva team ... (NOT in the putzCo sense of *heckuva* but in the sense that most understand it)!

If you only have time to read ONE thing today, read this wonderful essay from DU poster Sheila Samples.

I am one of the diehards who will only believe that Al will not run once the Dem Convention has been held ... and he has not been selected as the nominee.

And no, that will NOT be too late. Not IMO.

================
The Last Founder Standing
If you want to go quickly, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
We need to go far -- quickly." ~~ Al Gore

No entity in this once-proud nation is more corrupt than its shallow, hubris-infested media. Any pricks of conscience the media may have felt for covering up the treasonous seizure of the 2000 election were swept away in the swirl of terror following the attack on 9-11. The "big story" to confront George Bush when he returned from his month-long vacation in September 2001, his approval numbers tanking, was that Al Gore got more votes than any Democrat in US history -- nearly a half-million more than Bush. It was that five conservative Supreme Court judges stopped the vote count that would prove Gore won because, in their unsigned decision, they wrote such a democratic win would cause "public acceptance," which would "cast a cloud over Bush's legitimacy" and thus harm "democratic stability."

[...]
http://www.democraticunderground.com/dis...

Thanks to all of the DFA members who are continuing to work hard to elect progressive candidates ... not just to come on here and slam all Dems in the names of those comparative few who are capitulating to the Rethugs.

Let us remember that MOST are not capitulating ... and when we work together, we can change even a Feinstein's mind ... hopefully also a Pelosi's.

Keeping us bickering and putting down the lot are definitely Rovian tactics.

***************
And my window is now closing ... have good ones ... and I leave this item especially for sea.

=============
Strictly tango for the dance tourists
Argentina's trademark sensual tradition is now an international attraction for reality show fans
Uki Goni in Buenos Aires
Sunday November 18, 2007
Observer

The Salon Canning is an authentic milonga, a bare hall in the old Palermo district of Buenos Aires where dancers gyrate into the early morning to Argentina's most distinctive musical style, the tango. At one of the tables a tall, dark-haired man scans the room, his attention resting on female tourists sitting alone or in groups waiting to be asked to dance.
He is not a tango instructor or a lothario seeking easy prey. Eduardo Amarillo is a 'tango taxi dancer,' and he aims to ensure no tango-loving foreigner leaves Argentina without twirling a few times around the floor. 'I learnt the tango from my grandmother in the 1970s,' says Amarillo, 39, dressed in rigorous black. 'I was a young boy dancing with my head stuffed between her breasts.' Like many Argentinians of his generation, Amarillo forgot about the tango as he grew older and the milongas went out of fashion.

But now the tango has made a startling comeback. Boosted by the worldwide success of reality TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with Stars, Argentinians have rediscovered their tango roots and Amarillo is among those who have started frequenting the old tango salons that still dot the city.

'I hadn't danced since my grandmother died,' he says. But with foreign visitors flocking in to the home of the dance, Amarillo noticed that some returned home without having tangoed. 'About 80 per cent of them are young, single, independent professionals who can only afford a few days in Buenos Aires,' he says. The milongas follow a pecking order in which only the best women dancers are asked to dance. Approaching a man is heresy in the tango bible, and a tourist breaking this rule will be rebuked by an experienced dancer. 'Male tango dancers can be merciless,' says Mariana Lopez, a 40-year-old psychologist and tango aficionado. 'They won't ask you unless they've seen you dancing already.'

Tango instructor Julieta Lotti often hires Amarillo's dancers for her students, greeting them with champagne for their first lesson. 'Experienced dancers tend to be men who exist only for the tango,' Lotti says. 'They can be very romantic characters. As more foreign women came to Buenos Aires in search of a real tango experience, these men were drawn to them like honey.'

[...]
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,...

Good morning, everybody

Been busy catapulting the propaganda.

Need to change browser.  BBL 

Here's a heart warming first person account.  NOT

http://hannah.smith-family.com/?p=2100 

It was originally published on Bluehampshire but the absence of paragraphs raised some complaint.  So I "stole" it for Hannah and added paragraphing.  Also posted it on DFNH, because it's a real NH story.

I hadn't paid that much attention to NAFTA, to be quite honest, but then I started reading up a bit yesterday and discovered that the boy from Hope wasn't quite as much a man of the people as we might have thought.  Not only did his grandparents own the local grocery, but his best friend, McLarty, who became his chief of staff, was actually a member of an auto dealership  family and, when he moved on to the Council of the Americas, he moved back into the world of David Rockefeller, the Carlyle Group and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Did you know?

Two quiet revolutions were the catalysts for this change. The first, of course, was the quiet revolution of democracy and open markets in the Americas. The second quiet revolution was Mack McLarty, our Special Envoy to Latin America, who helped all of us to realize that the Americas must become a cornerstone of our prosperity and security for the 21st century.

Mack has made over 40 trips to the Americas since he became my Special Envoy. He has earned the trust and respect, the friendship and affection of leaders from the Caribbean to Central America, from Canada to South America, who value his extraordinary combination of integrity and intellect, ability and civility. He helped to change the way we see Latin America, and just as important, he's helped to change the way Latin America sees us.

That's what Clinton said when Thomas McLarty resigned.  Also

During Mack's tenure, we launched policies that helped to turn our country around, to bring our people together, to make our government work again. Our party had been out of office for 12 years. Beginning with Mack's steady hand as we chose our first Cabinet, he helped to put in place a dramatic change in direction for out nation. He organized our forces at the White House and was a driving force on Capitol Hill toward the passage of our economic plan that has helped to bring such unparalleled prosperity.

It sparked a boom in investment, cut the deficit over 90 percent before the Balanced Budget Act was passed, invested in education and health care, in the environment, in science, and space; cut taxes on small businesses and 15 million people and led to the creation of 15 million jobs. He helped to secure the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which over 12 million Americans have used when a baby is born or someone in their family is sick. He set the stage for the crime bill, continued our work that we began in Arkansas on education reform, helped us to fight and win major victories to open markets in this hemisphere and around the world through NAFTA and GATT.

After he became my counselor, I asked him to tackle complex and important missions -- from his work with the Vice President to make the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta a success to his efforts in the Gulf, to secure support for the Dayton Peace Accord in Bosnia, to reaching out to the business community and other key constituencies, and to his truly historic service as Special Envoy to the Americas.

He has pursued these many missions with grace and decency and good humor, earning the admiration and trust of a pretty disparate group of people, from Dick Gephardt to Trent Lott, from Tom Donahue at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to John Sweeney at the AFL-CIO, from Jesse Jackson to Ross Perot. Now, this does not surprise me, because as long as I've known him, he's always been well liked and well respected by everybody. And, frankly, I still resent it. (Laughter.)

 Talk about re-writing history.

And why have we overlooked that the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction was Winthrop A. Rockefeller and that his son, Winthrop P. Rockefeller was Huckabee's lieutenant governor until he died?  And now we've got a Rockefeller from West Virginia sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee that's not releasing reports either.

Looks like that fatherless son from Hope had a lot of foster fathers and didn't get to Yale and Oxford entirely on his own hook. 

By Simon Santow

Posted Fri Nov 16, 2007 9:48pm AEDT
Updated Fri Nov 16, 2007 11:16pm AEDT

A Polish man who had just arrived at Vancouver Airport died when Canadian police tasered him into submission. (ABC TV)

• Video: Investigation launched after man killed by stun gun (Lateline)

Tasers, or stun guns, are meant to be a substitute for lethal force. Every police force in Australia at the moment is either conducting trials of taser guns or already using them officially.

But an incident in Canada has again raised questions about their safety.

A Polish man who had just arrived at Vancouver Airport died when Canadian police tasered him into submission. Two bursts of 50,000 volts into the man were enough to kill him.

Robert Dziekanski had not been drinking and was not under the influence of drugs.

But the 40-year-old from Poland was behaving erratically soon after arriving in Canada on his first ever flight from Europe.

Looks like that fatherless son from Hope had a lot of foster fathers and didn't get to Yale and Oxford entirely on his own hook. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

nobody gets anywhere entirely on their own

if the owner of the elevator hadn't carried my fathers feed bill til the hogs were sold, I'd of never had a chance to buy a farm, because he sat on the bank committee that made the loan, and watched me grow up knowing that a handshake was money in the bank

I think every successful person as well has a friend that knows exactly where they came from no secrets,that they can collaborate with. Clinton was such an obvious talent, that plenty of people would bet on his success.

I don't hold those kind of judgements as suspect. It is how the world works.

but judge the deeds

new thread