If possible, please speak to the DFA HQ IT person about reparing my profile page at the DFA-Link. None of candidates campaigns that I'm supporting show up on my profile page anymore. I've sent numerous requests about the problem without much results.

Thank you,

Susan Rowe

what is "NN"...

"Capitulation Blues" IS a Dean song, with an original melody and so far none of it rhymes with Obama...

grin

Though I really feel silly singing The Vermontster Mash...

Thankful 2 and Thankful 4 Howard Dean, without DeanforAmerica there would be no Obama and no hope.

:wave thingie:

is that the large single finger you're waving???  hard to tell at this distance....lol...

Now if we could just find a way to invite the 26,000 people at the Obamablog who signed the FISA petition...

mprov - We met Jan '07 while I was living at my sister's and caring for my brother.  Only started dating just before I moved east.  He's never been married either, lol.  Nice thing is, my sister and b-in-law have known Gary for years and introduced us...

very sorry we'll miss you at Dfest :-(   Hey, hope you know yer welcome at our place any time you visit Chicagoland.

~ ~ ~

(trying my bestest but have no idear how to be on topic)

~ ~ ~

go Obama.

Gonna go crash under a pillow...

mprov - my screen is showing a probable post by you but the format is all krezzed and all I see is your gravatar under Subway @ 12:37 and me @ 12:40...  the sidebar stuff is all under this reply box.

ah, now your 12:35 show up.

Nite Mark. Happy dreams.

Pillow time for me also.

Thanks Adam for the Obama campaign page.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-bergmann/the-week-that-should-have_b_111983.html

This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain's efforts to become the next president of the United States. But you wouldn't know it if you watched any of the mainstream media outlets or followed political reporting in the major newspapers.

During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made -- TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn't say anything about him.

This Sunday expect the ten incidents above to get short shrift from pundit after pundit, because after all Jesse Jackson said he wanted to cut Obama's nuts off.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/11/obama-to-sponsor-car-at-n_n_112167.html

<!-- /Inline digg from default --> JOLIET, Ill. — NASCAR's BAM Racing team has presented Barack Obama's presidential campaign with a potential sponsorship deal in the Sprint Cup series later this year, but it doesn't look like an Obama car will be burning rubber on the track anytime soon.

Late Friday, the Obama campaign said there would be no sponsorship.

"The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters and convey Senator Obama's message of change." said Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman.

BAM's choice of drivers and car brands might have been a little too sticky politically for the Obama camp.

The car, a Toyota _ the only foreign automaker racing in NASCAR _ would be driven by veteran Ken Schrader.

According to the Federal Election Commission's Web site, Schrader gave $1,000 to the campaign of North Carolina Republican congressman Robin Hayes in June 2004, and a total of $2,500 in 2003 and 2004 to the failed Virginia congressional campaign of Republican Kevin Triplett, a former NASCAR official.

I am going to take some minutes to write the Boston Globe.  They've got a story about "lob bombs" without making any mention of the drones' assassination by remote control killing Iraqis and Afghanis right and left.  How did they think Itaqis were going to react to killing machines in the air?

Somehow, the import of al Sadre's announcement that only foreign troops were to be targeted by the Mahdi army was  lost on our press.  Perhaps that's because Americans find it difficult to consider themselves foreigners anywhere on the globe.

Anyway, until this web effort settles into a sensible routine, I find it impossible to urge my group to take part in the Obama page or anything else.  Most found the original format confusing.  Most still don't know how to log in.  Most do not have either the time or inclination to navigate through the maze.  Presumably, regular DFA members consider to send in their dollars or we wouldn't have a staff.  However, I can't recommend participation in this mess.  The integration of BFA and DFAlink was good.  The effort to resegregate the insurgent bloggers is bad.

I'd put up a separate post, but I really don't have time.  There are more important things to take care of.

bbl

So, when is the Globe going to report on the assassination by remote control, perpetrated on a daily basis by USAF drones, to which these Iraqi lob bombs are an obvious response? If the answer is that the use of drones to kill Iraqis on the ground with hellfire missiles (a hell of an expensive way to run a war) is classified, let me point out that Secretary Gates himself brought up the matter when he complained that getting the Air Force to send enough drones was "like pulling teeth."
True, in Gates' reference to the drones there was no mention of their dropping bombs and lobbing missiles (only intelligence gathering and surveillance), but the Air Force has been quite forthcoming about the program. Both Salon.com and Charles Hanley for the AP have reported on the pilots "driving" drones from consoles in Qatar, Kuwait or Denver, as well as their tussle with the ethical implications of killing people with robots far from where the weapons are being dispatched.
Of course, as is typical of such reports, the stories get published once and then there's no follow up. So, the information doesn't spread. The Air Force, however, published an almost daily log of how many sorties by fighters are being flown and how many bombs are being dropped to achieve every day's success. Since everything (action and assessment) is being carried out remotely, it's not surprising that the Pentagon doesn't know what's actually happening on the ground and that the 49 dead Afghanis were actually members of a wedding party. Indeed, during the Basra episode, the Air Force actually released footage to demonstrate how the decision to vaporize a large group of people running through the street was made by a pilot on the spot without any follow-up (like who was going to pick up the body parts on the ground and wash away the blood).
The Air Force has video records of all this killing. As best I can tell, the images are in black and white, which is a problem. As someone who's used a video camera for many years, I can attest that it's very difficult to differentiate between light and shade and know what's what, unless it's moving. So, the safe thing is to shoot anything that moves and check the images at leisure. Which is all fine and well, as long as it's video you're shooting and not missiles.
In case you missed it, one of the demands in the Helsinki Agreement of last year was that the "continuous bombardment" should be stopped. Since there's been no admission of the Air War (Sy Hersh predicted it would be stepped up, but there's been no follow-up), you're probably lacking the hook on which to hang a story. But, you might at least consider that the reason there's been a drop in combat casualties among American troops is because the killing is being taken over by robots. Moreover, it still seems to be the plan that when there's sufficient coverage by robots to keep the Air Bases from being attacked by shells and mortars, the combat forces can be withdrawn. That was, after all, the original goal--to turn Iraq into the staging and monitoring ground for the long war against the competition from a "re-emerging Russia" and a "rising China" and perhaps even an active India with its new navy.
Why is there a need for a significant American military presence in the Eastern Hemisphere? Because our industrial and commercial and financial sectors have become so used to being backed up by the threat of military force that they can no longer compete fairly. Remember gunboat diplomacy? Well, this is the 21st Century version. How low we have sunk!

there won't be any foreign commerce once trading partners figure out that all of their deal making is being spied on, so we won't need a global military to back up our trade since it will be non-existant

is available through night school and I invite anyone here to click on Night School in the upper left of the home page and RSVP

the radio feed was archived last time which was very useful if you came in late

that should be repeated, otherwise buy the DVD

never seemed like a liar to me which made him very useful to this White House.

Rest In Peace.

The fellow who put up the video on the war crimes referral claims that Obama has not agreed to participate in a town hall forum on a military base in Texas.  No doubt he prefers talking about the economy rather than the war, but the killing has got to stop.

I've been thinking the last few days about the 'good old days.' The Fifties. And early sixties, before presidents and such starting being gunned down on the street. I guess there were things wrong -- like we whites complained that blacks shuffled their feet when they walked, never thinking that they couldn't afford shoes that fit, or that they smelled on the bus, never thinking that they had come clear across Atlanta to the 'white' side of town to do 8 or so hours of physical labor with no bennies for probably less than minimum wage. Or on the rare occasion that you got lost and drove through 'colored town' you remarked that the flowers were spectacular, and it was b/c the 'colored folks' just put their garbage in the yard.
But there really were some good old days. If a young girl got pregnant out of wedlock, of course is was very shameful, but she had a clean, safe place to go -- the Florence Crittendon home. Or if you were an orphan and your parents couldn't take care of you, you weren't shuffled off to foster care -- there were clean, presumably safe orphanages. We had one in Atlanta -- Southern Christian Home -- two football stars lived there and a girl from my class had us over for spend-the-night parties. And as often as not, a 'date' consisted of Sunday evening church at the Methodist Church, followed by a snack at the Varsity drive in down by Georgia Tech. It was immoral and 'not done' to smoke cigarettes, much less drink alcohol or smoke other things. And certainly a girl 'saved herself for marriage' if her mother drove her by the Florence Crittendon home often enough.
And you could have a house, however humble, in a safe neighborhood, on one workingman's salary. And if you were mentally ill, there were hospitals where you could go -- you didn't have to iive on the streets -- and yes, I know the hospitals were far from perfect -- I've seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest too.
And credit cards! If my folks had 'credit cards' they were gasoline credit cards or maybe Rich's department store credit cards -- Visa hadn't been invented yet - so you couldn't get as deeply in debt.
So I don't know what happened. I shoulder a lot of blame, because my generation (I'm about 3 years too old to be a baby boomer) is responsible for the mess we're in, but look at where we are today. The US of A's government is a bunch of crooks. The Congress is so beholden to God knows who that they won't pass sensible laws for our benefit and protection. We're in debt as a nation up the ying yang. Places like China and Dubai own our ports and our buildings. We are running out of water, without which we can't sustain life, and yet we keep on flushing, not willing to find another method of disposing of our waste. Young folks I know are working two and three jobs w/o bennies just to feed themselves and stay off the street. The banks are failing. Our money is losing value daily. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see a headline that the sky is actually falling. So I think I'm glad to be on the downhill side of my journey. I hate to think what the world has in store for the generations to come. Has veryone seen Soylent Green?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-kreck

Greetings from the little old librarian.

It's been quite a week for me, McCain, the police and the Secret Service. While I may write more later, there are a couple issues I would like to address now -- but first, an excerpt from today's Denver Post story by Felisa Cardona:

It was Sen. John McCain's staff who asked security at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to remove people holding protest signs at the venue -- not U.S. Secret Service agents, who were not involved in Carol Kreck's ouster from the galleria.

A video of the incident circulating widely on the Internet shows a DCPA security guard saying that he was told by the Secret Service to remove Kreck, who was holding a paper sign that said "McCain = Bush."

But Thursday, after two days of being vilified by bloggers, letter writers and others, the Secret Service emphatically denied involvement. [...]

Because it is without attribution, the lede in Cardona's story reads like she took the word of the DCPA and the Secret Service for gospel, which might not have been such a good idea.

Where is the statement from McCain's staff in this story? And why did it take the Secret Service two days to claim they had nothing to do with my ouster?

Also, the part about the security guard had me smiling. The DCPA's Suzanne Blandon seems to be saying that because he is not "a trained speaker," and because it was "the height of the moment," the words "Secret Service" just popped out of his mouth. Huh.

The Secret Service claims what happened in the courtyard would be "inconsistent with our established policies and procedures." But the Secret Service has been hit several times with lawsuits alleging violations of First Amendment rights when citizens expressed opposition to administration policies. Locally, Denver attorney David Lane is suing them for a violation of Steven Howards' First and Fourth Amendment rights. Howards approached Dick Cheney in a Beaver Creek mall and told the vice president his policies in the Middle East were reprehensible. He was arrested; charges were dropped.

(As the New York Times reported, that issue devolved into "Secret Service agents -- under oath in court depositions -- accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards's arrest and the official accounting of it.")

Many of you have been inquiring about the status of legal proceedings. Colorado ACLU has deputized two attorneys to handle my case: criminal defense lawyer Pete Hedeen will take care of the trespassing charge. I will not pay a fine, I will not accept diversion. That leaves two options: dropped charges, or going to trial. After that is resolved, David Lane will proceed civilly.

GO GET 'EM CAROL!!

Adam -

That's what I call making progress -- a pro-Obama main post piece finally on the BFA.  Thanks for posting it.