Accountability?

I must have missed this one:

WASHINGTON, June 14, 2004 (HalliburtonWatch.org) -- Five former Halliburton employees and one former executive of a Halliburton subcontractor describe egregious examples of abuse involving Halliburton’s Iraq contracts. In a letter written by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), these whistleblowers describe instances where Halliburton employees would abandon or torch new trucks -- worth $80,000 -- if they acquired a flat tire or other minor mechanical problems. Halliburton would subsequently purchase new trucks with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The former employees also described repeated instances of theft involving both Halliburton and Army personnel. One employee complained to Halliburton's KBR chief, Randy Harl, about the contracting abuse, but two weeks later he was fired.

Another former employee said Halliburton purchased soda for $45 per case and laundry bags for $100 each.

Saturday skim

The Dark Window has discovered Amber in Seb's closet and it ain't pretty:

What is “divisive” about taking out someone like Saddam Hussein? Let me explain the war in simple terms, understandable to the left: Saddam Hussein was a bad man, we are at war with an entire culture that wants us destroyed, and taking him out can do nothing but good. There is nothing about this that is too terrible.

Amy Goodman: I think the mainstream media is a misnomer, because the mainstream media doesn’t represent the mainstream. The mainstream media represents a tiny minority elite, and I am not talking about people of color. I am talking about government officials, corporate executives, generals and their underlings, who beat the drums for war and beat the drums for the establishment. That does not reflect America. And what we need is to break the sound barrier, making our own media but also challenging them. We are not the only ones using the public airwaves. They are using them too, and they have a responsibility to present the full diversity of voices in this country.

Our next President, chillin':

Osama captured!!!

This one really had me going:

Kerry Campaign Questions Timing
By DAVID STOUT 10:37 PM ET

Overcoming the distraction caused by the suspiciously timed announcement of the capture of Osama bin Laden, John Kerry pledged tonight to help build an America that is secure and prosperous within its own borders; the rest of the world was told to "shove it".

I had to look thru that site a couple times before I read this:

John Kerry and an aide wave good-bye to Kerry's hope of victory in November following the stunning news of Osama's capture.

The lights finally came on.

TGIF

Lotta angry people out there:

Prettygirl: When the doors open in the morning, find the biggest toughest Mom in the crowd and rip her goddamn throat out her neck to show all the other Moms you're not to be fucked with. If you don't acquire a Mattel Piss Cannon this morning, you do not love your son.

TerryC: NEWSWEEK reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: "We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being."

Attaturk: Well, clearly this is an outrageous and shrill start for this most incompetent and treasonous tool of abolitionists and misogynists that comprise the Lincoln Administration, and all Yankee politics. First, what the hell does Fourscore and Seven mean anyway?

The price is right

Attractive bumperstickers. Free to good home:



"In rivers and bad governments,
the lightest things swim at the top."
-Tallyrand

Speaking of the vapors...

Stolen from My Stolen Nation

Morning voices

Three from my day:

Nat: This was once a country that understood the value of speaking softly while carrying a big stick. But it seems that public discourse has become so shallow and trite that all we can do is talk loudly about our big stick.

SDAI Tech1: Not a lot of people know much about Dick Cheney. The media doesn't show many pictures of him smiling, but Cheney does smile. He smiles a lot. The media just seems to consistently miss those moments.
Via TBOGG

Molly: The more or less official Democratic line is whether you were for the war or against it, the administration screwed up the implementation beyond recall, which I suppose works politically and has the added virtue of being true.

Star Gazing

RightWing nirvana.

Jonah didn't bring his couch. He was on his feet the whole night and organizing on the phone. As you can see from the picture he is also the world's tallest Jew. He blinked - he wasn't hammered (although that might be a better strategy for coping with hours of DNC speeches). I couldn't not include it though, its a picture of me and Jonah Goldberg!

Cool! And I say good for Jack. It’s always fun meeting the movers and shakers even if ya disagree with them 99% of the time.


Jonah/Pasty Wingnut

Around the Net

They said it:

Chris: OK, let me ask you, because you have been where many—very few people have been before.  It‘s like—not “Star Wars.”  It‘s like “Star Trek.”

Josh: This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.

Gregory: Show me the money, Josh. Or, even better, quit sliming senior policymakers throughout the Bush Administration with your ad hoc, gratuitous attacks.

Digby: Kerry's speech tonight spoke directly to those people, people who have serious concerns about whether a Democrat can adequately handle a national security crisis but who also see that things are not going well under Bush. Those people may have tuned in to see a Democrat speak tonight and saw a president instead.

Patriotboy: I was relieved to read that your report on the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan found no systemic problems. I hope it puts an end to the vile lies being spread by those who have for so long rhetorically sodomized Uncle Sam with the treacherous glow sticks of treasonous speech, but I doubt that it will.

Changing minds

The Decembrist has some second thoughts about John Kerry:

As a political analyst, Tom Oliphant is the equivalent of a Red Sox broadcaster, always certain that his own homeboys are going all the way this year, not quite finding the distance. It's got its limits as analysis. But on the subject of just those New England politicians who float his bowtie, he is indispensable. I found his argument for the potential that John Kerry could be not just a non-Bush president but in fact a great one, in the current American Prospect, extraordinarily convincing. And this has really troubled me, because I thought I had a grasp of Kerry. I thought that after seven years spent observing a lot of Senators, sometimes in their public roles and sometimes in meetings of 2-3 Senators and some staff, I was correct in dismissing him. He hadn't been much of a presence, didn't seem to have figured out how to make his way in that absurd, entrepreneurial institution, didn't seem even to have a driving passion. I had a sense of him as sort of an incomplete person, unable to find much of a reason to be in public life except for his own sense of himself and a conviction that one can never be too careful. It was a view of him very similar to William Saletan's, expressed often in Slate.

And, I think, wrong. Or maybe right at the time, and for that context, but not right anymore. I still don't quite know how he did it, but this nominee -- despite going into January stuck in a pack of Dean alternatives -- won the nomination more smoothly than any non-incumbent in history, and has raised five times as much money as any Democrat in history: there is some real talent there. I'm certain that his marriage played a role here in centering him around a human purpose. Oliphant says as much.

You want fries with that?

Tom DeLay has tiny vapors :

A super-sized Statue of Liberty, holding aloft an order of french fries, is adorning food tray liners in Subway restaurants across Germany. And House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, is angry enough about it to lose his lunch.

The ad in German, whose headline translates as "Why are Americans so fat?" is a promotional tie-in to the movie Super Size Me, director Morgan Spurlock's take on life in the fast-food lane.

In his award-winning documentary, the American filmmaker eats nothing but McDonald's Quarter Pounders, Egg McMuffins and the like for 30 days, gaining 25 pounds and reportedly risking his health.
~snip~
"I guess for some companies, corporate patriotism is as flexible as Jared's waistline," DeLay said. DeLay objected to the ad's parody of the Statue of Liberty, "one of the most recognizable American symbols."

And he complained about the flier including a quote from filmmaker and "pathological partisan" Michael Moore, whose anti-Bush diatribe Fahrenheit 9/11 has become the Democrats' choice for best picture. Moore is quoted as saying, "The only time I have been scared for my life has been going through a McDonald's drive-through."

Subway officials point out that the prime images on the tray liners — the goateed, fry-stuffing madman and the Rubenesque Lady Liberty — were both borrowed directly from the movie promotions running in Germany.

Fat Americans? I'm stunned and I'm one of them!!

"This is every bad stereotype about corporate America come true," Tommy lectures us. I can't even begin to start trying to explain the irony in that statement.

 UPDATE: SadlyNo! has more on this threat to our national icons.

edited 11:30p

Timing is everything

Imagine my surprise:

WASHINGTON - A U.S. official on Thursday confirmed that Pakistan has captured a senior al Qaeda member wanted by the United States in connection with the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

"He is wanted for the death of Americans," the official said on condition of anonymity. The United States had offered a reward of $25 million for the capture of the suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailini

What time does Kerry speak tonight?

Bon Voyage

Meet Helen and Graham:



I’ve been lucky in my travels to have met some great folks along the way. I met HG on Ko Pu Thailand last February, hung out with them on that beach for about 15 days then time ran out and I had to come home when my holiday ended mid-March. Yeah and I was bummin pretty bad about that too.
 
We all were having a pretty good time in SThailand and I just didn’t want to come home. The water on Ko Pu was warm and clear snorkelingsnorkeling the beaches were hot…the food was HOT and cheap. The place I stayed at, Ting Rai Resort, was only three months old, hadn’t really had time for the staff to gel, and had a thoroughly enjoyable Fawlty Towers-ish feel to it. Service was sketchy at times and the snakes and flying reptiles were everywhere (sounds awful, but pretty typical for jungle huts in SThai) everybody was friendly and the food was unbelieveable, good weed, bikini's abounding, all cheapcheap. We played Jenga every night fer chrissakes.
 
Big fun. I go every year.

This year I went home and HG took off to Vietnam at the end of March, spent a few weeks up North with some UK friends, exited VN north into China, spent a month traveling around. Flew to Austrailia…spent a month in Cairns…..a few weeks in Malaysia…......back to Bangkok.  Ho hum I hate these people.  
 
HG have to return to England soon. All the moneys' gone and they have to go back to their real jobs where they'll work for a couple years, save every quid and take off mindlessly traveling for another year like they did last July. 
 
They've been everywhere. They have figured it out.

edited

Stressed out

As fearless as it is unreliable, Capitol Hill Blue suggests that Chimpy has gone bananas:

President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Angry Bush walked away from reporter's questions.
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.

“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Are we really safer now?

A confidence builder...

The First Brother has everything under control:

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."

Oops:

A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of election troubles in Florida, where the new technology was supposed to put an end to such problems.
~snip~
The loss of data underscores problems with the touchscreen voting machines, the citizen's group said. "This is a disaster waiting to happen," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. "Of course it's worrisome."

Yeah but what about Kerry's people?

Hullabaloo points us to one of JK's advisers: Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy:  

Kennedy was a real breath of fresh air, and clearly a truly progressive thinker. She first spoke about how one flaw in government we can fix with Kerry is how we come to decisions. Usually this process is crisis-driven.We need a much more sophisticated process that is more "granular" and shaded. Echoing Clark a bit, she spoke of the RAMP (Relevance of American Military Report), which clearly suggested we need some kind of "hand off" after military action, whether to the State Department or other agencies. The military is neither resourced nor trained to do these things, and often the military solution is not the appropriate first step. Finally, she explained how we understand hardware very well but not what Joseph Nye called the "soft elements of power"--abstract ways of mapping out the world (like, say, how receptive other countries are to our ideas) instead of counting weapons systems. She also, thankfully, said she felt it was unhelpful to use the "war on X" language,and that we needed to develop new vocabulary. She also stressed that we need to expand the notion of national security to include education, health care, the economy (both ours and the "bad guys'"), etc. Oh ... and she said we should invite a greater range of voices, not just the boardrooms of the defense contractors. This is a beautiful woman (both intellectually and physically), and I am so glad she is one of Kerry's military advisors.

Oh and BTW she's a pretty smart cookie, makin the big bucks out on the lecture circuit:  

Kennedy graduated from Southwestern College-now Rhodes College-in Memphis, Tennessee and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1969 through the Women's Army Corps. She served as deputy commander of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and assistant commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence School, both in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Kennedy was also director for intelligence of the U.S. Forces Command in Fort McPherson, Georgia.

Her army service has taken her to Germany, Texas, and Hawaii, where she held several command and staff positions. These include stints as commander of the 3rd Operations Battalion at the U.S. Army Field Station in Augsburg, Germany, commander at the San Antonio Recruiting Battalion, and commander of the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade in Kunia, Hawaii. In July 1995, Kennedy was appointed the Army's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, a position she held until her 1997 promotion to deputy chief of staff.

Fee Range: $15,001 - $20,000     Traveling From: District of Columbia

Generation 9/11

 The lady can write some:

That said, beyond the (very nice and very much appreciated) extra gifts youth delegates received at the convention (a FCUK –French Connection t-shirt and a copy of Primarily New Hampshire ) there doesn’t seem to be much of substance for youth to participate in. Yes, there are youth caucuses, but from reports, they tend to be “warm and fuzzy” events, with no voting on youth issues by youth delegates.

What about the deficit? What about the crisis in American higher education? What about the most economically disadvantaged of our generation being heavily targeted by the military? What about youth health care issues? And what about the environment we are inheriting? Young Americans have inherited an extraordinary country with exceptional freedoms (compared with, say, our peers in Iran or Saudi Arabia), but with these blessings, we have inherited an uncertain future with looming crises. What are we, as young Democrats doing to prepare for our future?

In other, lighter notes, I met Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. today and thanked him for endorsing Dean and heading into Iowa in the cold days of January to speak on behalf of DFA. I was also interviewed by MTV and featured in the Seattle PI yesterday. I was interviewed on the convention floor by “All Things Considered on NPR.” The MTV and ATC bits may be airing today, July 28th.

Smart too. She considers meeting Jesse on a "lighter note".

The Locals are restless...

BendBlogger Jake is all up in the Bulletin's face:

And the first thing I'm going to hear back from the authority figures is that "We don't want to lose print subscribers." I understand that, and I wouldn't want to, either, but thanks to the efforts of folks like Barney at Bend.com, you probably already have. Because they are providing news online in a timely manner while to get any news from you guys folks have to wait until the next-days edition, which contains just what you could fit in the 12-inch hole you were given. Granted, Barney is long-winded, and he knows it, but I'm reading news there far before I'm reading it in your print edition, and certainly long before your online edition.

And because of the current state of the Bulletin's Web site, you're probably losing print subscribers/readers because of it.

And really, if you're going to lose anybody from the print edition, it'll be the critical 18-34 year-old-age group that is getting all their news online anyway, and do you want them to go to your Web site -- one that they'll probably leave when they can't find what they want -- or would you rather they get their news elsewhere? I thought so.

Jake speaks the truth. The Bulletin's website pretty much sucks. The Bulletin itself has sucked for far longer. Since I get 95% of a my information from more liberal sources anyway, Bend's Local Paper long ago lost any relevance on Planet Logjam. To be honest I really don't spend a lot of time at Bend.com either, tho it's the better of the two sites.

Politics in Bend still leans (and by that I mean overwhelmingly) towards Conservative, but in it's wake has grown a pretty fair liberal community too. I found this out when I got involved in Central Oregon for Dean over the winter. Manymany treacherous curs here, so there's hope. Any self-respecting lefty reads The Source anyway, even with all those gd ads.

Method to the Madness

Conason has the scoop behind "Shoveitgate":

The innocuously named newspaper has long served as the weapon of Richard Mellon Scaife, its founder and publisher. His name is now synonymous with the campaign of hate and calumny focused on the Clintons during the 1990’s, but to Ms. Heinz Kerry, his methods were familiar long before he achieved any national notoriety. During the decades of her marriage to the late Senator H. John Heinz III, she knew Mr. Scaife as part of the rarefied circle of very rich local families whose names adorn museum galleries and university buildings.

Although both men were Republicans, Heinz tended to be moderate and occasionally even liberal, while Mr. Scaife was increasingly conservative, attracted to conspiracy theories and aggressive extremism. Years before her first husband’s death in 1991, Teresa Heinz came to feel that Mr. Scaife had misused his newspaper to punish her and her husband for dissenting from right-wing Republican orthodoxy. Since her marriage to John Kerry in 1995, the hostility of the Scaife press and the outfits funded by Scaife foundations toward her has been nothing short of vicious.

A few days after the Massachusetts Senator and his wife celebrated their second Christmas together, the Tribune-Review ran a column suggesting that Mr. Kerry had been enjoying a "very private" relationship with another woman. There was no byline on the story and no evidence to support the salacious insinuation. There was nothing to it, in fact, except pure malice.

When fresh accusations about her husband’s fidelity erupted earlier this year in the right-wing press, Ms. Heinz Kerry could scarcely have been surprised that the smear’s most eager purveyors included Internet sites financed by Mr. Scaife and his family foundations. Those "news sources" have also impugned Mr. Kerry’s patriotism, maligned his military service and distorted his voting record. They happen to be operated by the same discredited scribblers who once tried to convince America that Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers and drug smugglers.

Meanwhile, Ms. Kerry herself is hardly exempt from the angry fantasies emanating from Mr. Scaife’s strange universe. Last spring, a Scaife-funded "research group" sent out a study that accused her of covertly financing violent radicals of various kinds, including Islamists, through the straitlaced Heinz foundations that she controls. There was absolutely no basis for that tale—as the right-wing sleuths could have learned by making a single phone call. The Heinz money they had "traced" through a San Francisco group had actually gone in its entirety to support anti-pollution projects in Pennsylvania.

The Boys in Boston

WOLF BLITZER: So, Fafnir and Giblets, what IS a blog?
FAFNIR: Blogs are the future Wolf.
GIBLETS: Yes! They are MADE of the future!

G: Blogs must be spontaneous intant reactions to the lightning events of the everyday! Giblets fires up a random news article, pounds his head against the keyboard several times, an hits the "publish" button for the purest of pure blog posts!
F: Otherwise you are not truly flowin in the electric consciousness Wolf.
~snip~
G: But then we would lose our cuttin-edge appeal Wolf Blitzer. Our cuttin-edge appeal.
WB: But given that bloggers might be biased, or play "fast and loose with the truth," and given the increased importance of blogs today, should Americans be concerned?
F: Yes they should be very concerned. We are an unchained force of nature Wolf Blitzer! You cannot stop us once we spin out of telecommunicontrol!
G: Bow before the power of blog Wolf Blitzer! Bow before the power of blog NOOOOOOW!
WB: But that means the mainstream media would be defenseless before an onslaught of raw unfiltered opinion and skewed news!
F: It could lead to... a blogpocalypse.
G: A rain of electronic fire and doom upon all mankind!
F: An the mainstream press would be helpless to stop it.
G: Heeeeellllpleeeessss! BOWBEFOREGIBLETS!

Funny stuff from Fafblog.

What a site she was...

And who exactly is this Mystery Woman?

“Democratic Girl” is Sarah Schacht, a 24 year-old delegate at-large to the Democratic National Convention, representing supporters of Governor Howard Dean’s former presidential campaign.  A Dean supporter since December 2002, she traveled cross-country to work as an unpaid intern for Dean for America in the summer of 2003, and by February of 2004 had interned, volunteered, and staffed in four early caucus and primary states and completed another cross-country trip through 24 states, speaking at 10 universities in eight days, encouraging young people like herself to become politically active and organized with Dean for America and the Democratic Party.

A manifestation of the Dean Revolution, I'd say. Cool site.

Love will keep us together

Get 'em while they're HOT! Bush campaign Hate Buttons:

Alternatives

I was dish surfin this morning and blundered into Democracy Now! on LinkTV.  I'd never seen it before and it's quite good. If you're looking for a  recap of the previous night's Convention Amy Goodman gives as sedately as any.

What's shakin'...

Who's saying what this morning.

Jesse: But Hewitt's just being totally ridiculous here - Drudge is a Republican attack dog. A beast, a machine, a doomsday device. The only excuse he needs to talk about the story is the fact that it involves a Democrat.

greg: Last night Bill Clinton gave one of the most effective anti-Bush speeches I've ever heard. The Republican response? That John Kerry looks stupid.

Joseph: We'd be better off with a troop of Girl Scouts in our coalition than a 51-member outfit that is going to cut and run at the first sign of danger to one of its citizens.

Joho: Barack Obama: The good news for Hillary is that she might get State Department when Obama is President in 2012.

Roy: Mrs. Heinz-Kerry: Reminds me of a late Ingrid Bergman character, faint and unmodulated of speech but strong, nay, steely of conviction. Not very personable, which I consider a plus in the First Lady department. Most others probably don't, but who cares what they would think if they were listening (and they aren't)?

Trouble at the Convention

Somebody always has to ruin it for everybody:

Just five minutes ago I got to see THE Newsweek's Howard Fineman! He is even shorter an pastier an more pathologically blase about the status of American democracy in real life! I tried to engage him in insightful commentary but I was overcome by girlish squealin and mobbed him along with some of the understaff of the New Republic. I came back with two teeth and an eyebrow!

But none a that matters right now cause I AM TYPIN ON ATRIOS'S LAPTOP RIGHT NOW. He musta left it out or somethin cause here I am an he even left his Blogger window open I can totally post to his blog an everythin!

Wooooooo I'm Atrios blah blah blah, phony wars are bad, blah blah blah, the media is corrupt an stupid blah blah blah

aaaaaa here he comes runawayrunaway

Damn troublemakers...

Clinton, Bill

The Big Dog was soooooo on last night:

When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. At first I thought I should send them a thank you note—until I realized they were sending you the bill.

They protected my tax cuts while:

Withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving over 2 million children behind

Cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of job training

100,000 working families out of child care assistance

300,000 poor children out of after school programs

Raising out of pocket healthcare costs to veterans

Weakening or reversing important environmental advances for clean air and the preservation of our forests.

Everyone had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans, who wanted to do their part but were asked only to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. If you agree with these choices, you should vote to return them to the White House and Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats.

Hoho rocks the house...

It's no secret  I was a big fan of Howard Dean and I was as  disappointed  as anybody when DFA went knackers. DrDean, unleashed, getting his still-potent message out:

...Cops blocked hundreds of Deaniacs from entering the over-capacity Royal Sonesta Hotel Tuesday afternoon, after some had waited up to three hours to get in. But when Dean and the organizers heard about the snafu, the former Vermont governor addressed those who'd been kept out from a patio behind the hotel. Campaign for America's Future director Bob Borosage introduced Dean a second time, and apologized for not having a big enough space for everyone. "Blame me," Borosage said. "I'm amazed by your energy and awed by your numbers."

Both crowds were awed by Dean, who's still turning out hundreds of swooning supporters, most of them younger than the average convention delegate. His indoor speech was interrupted by multiple standing ovations plus lots of whoops and screams, even tears. "This is not a roomful of Democratic party regulars," Dean opened, and the crowd roared its agreement.

So he introduced them to Will Rogers' standard party punchline, "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat." But Dean didn't play it for laughs. "Everybody always laughs at that, but we'll laugh ourselves right out of existence," he warned, if Democrats and progressives don't do the serious work of organizing a base.

"It's not enough to vote, I want you to run for office," he told the crowd.

 "If you can't run for office, if you're a single mother, give three hours a week to someone else's campaign. Cough up five, 10, 25 dollars." He stopped short of former campaign manager Joe Trippi's call for John Kerry to abandon the public financing system and rely on a small-donor Internet base, but he did say "the best campaign finance reform is raising money from small donors. That's how we take this country back."

You go, Hoho!! He also bakes:

Vermont has been blessed with miraculous trees. One is the sugar Maple, which produces our wonderful Maple Syrup, and another is our apple trees, which produce an abundance of a variety of apples. In the Fall, some of the apples are pressed into cider. Combining the two flavors with Vermont ham produces a culinary experience you don't want to miss.

Who can argue with that? 



edited 2:35p

Nothing to see here...

Here's a charming story from young Chimpys' past:

Other documents in the Bush files provide additional evidence that the training that Bush was paid for in Alabama was never properly authorized. And the statements made by officers of the Alabama Air National Guard also confirm that Bush did not get the authorization necessary from Alabama for him to be paid and credited with training.

Finally, the White House has never released any of the paperwork that could show that this training was approved in advance, or that the training was actually accomplished. Additional circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that none of the training done in Alabama was properly authorized. When the evidence is considered as a whole, the obvious conclusion is that this paperwork never existed, and that Bush was paid for training that he never performed.

So on top of being incompetent, Bush is also a fraud. This is a story that won't go away, nor is anybody likely to care about it. If there was some sex involved Corporate News would be on it like hair on a gorilla...

Go see for yourself...

Once in a while something kinda nice tumbles off the Internet:

Weeding thru my files...

I was doing some housecleaning this afternoon and ran across this one:


One of my wildflower guides tells me the lily above is a lilium columbianum or Columbia Lily, which is found growing hither and yon here in the NW. We planted a few dozen bulbs a couple years back and they're doing nicely in our half-assed landscaping.

I've always known it as a Tigerlily. Your mileage may vary.

Lizard blogging...

This little guy wandered thru my garden the other day, so I thought I'd share the love:

Another first...

Billmon comes back just in time for me to disagree with him:

I've never liked our national anthem much. I usually wince every time I have to listen to it, and if I'm listening to it on TV I always fumble for the mute button. I've often said that if I were dictator (which, as Shrub has noted, makes things easier) my first decree would be to change it to This Land is Your Land, and let the bombs burst and the rockets glare in some other country.

I'm not wild about "The Star Spangles Banner" either, but left to me we'd all be singing "America, the Beautiful" before baseball games.

Lotta angry people out there...

Good to see BushBashing still alive and well:

In a speech that went on so long that California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres began to hover nervously at his side, [actor Richard] Dreyfuss called Bush "arrogant and incompetent'' and said "his appeal to patriotism is simplistic and thuggish.''

Dreyfuss added, "He is the enemy of thoughtfulness.''

"I wasn't raised in George Bush's America, and I wouldn't be comfortable in it,'' Dreyfuss said. ``In this America, you point toward a sin and you are pointed at. You are the irritant not the gatekeeper. You smell funny -- sinister funny. Terrorist-friendly. You mention due process and the silence is not respectful, it is ominous.''

The delegates gave him a standing ovation, which led Dreyfuss to give a few last remarks, urging them to counter the Republicans' every attack and "be consistent and in their face."

Via Atrios.

UPDATE  - Dick Dreyfuss must not have gotten the memo about keeping the BushBashing to a minimum at the Convention. Heard on the floor of the Fleet Center:

Actor Richard Dreyfuss, wandering the halls of Boston's Fleet Center on Monday, made it clear what he thinks of the GOP's Hollywood bashing. "It's a silly, partisan waste of time," he told Salon. "This election will decide the fate of the republic. We're at a crossroads. Twenty years from now, all of us will have to answer to our children. I feel that history is judging us."

Dreyfuss also made it abundantly clear which direction he thinks the country must go. "Who better to grasp the acute nature of our country's current crisis than someone who fought in the Vietnam War, who went through that ordeal and saw friends die. It's no small thing to go through something like that. It took a lot of courage for John Kerry to go to Vietnam and it took a lot of courage to come back and fight against the war. That's guts."

Words of Wisdom

Hahahahahahaha:

May I recommend a trip over to C-Span? The speeches are boring, but at least they are sincere. (Fox News team just got a hearty boo from the crowd.)You get to see lots of shots of the delegates instead of the absurd celebcorps who haven't even the slightest interest in anything but trivia. And the films are actually quite good.

As Professor DeLong plaintively cries, "Why, oh why can't we have a better press corp?"

So sayeth Digby.

Rude and right...

If you can handle the profanity and the un-PC of the whole blog The Rude Pundit very often gets it just right:

So, like, when you hear the words "bipartisan" and "unanimous" in reference to the 9/11 Commission report, are you just ready to beat your head against the wall until you fall into the sweet sleep of concussion?  Are you ready to try to gnaw off your own arm, held, as you are, in the teeth of a bear trap of logical fallacy?  'Cause, like, when you read articles like this one, which discusses how the commission avoided making any judgements about the "wisdom" of invading Iraq in order to have a "unanimous" report, you know what the real truth is: the Democrats on the committee punked out - they rolled over and let the Republicans have their way with them.   Good prison punks always know that most of the time it's best to just bite the pillow and hope all the anal fucking is over quickly.  If you fight, you might end up getting beaten and fucked.  So just get fucked and deal with the sore rectum rather than the broken bones.

Leadership...

Greg at The Talent Show gets it:

We went to war because the President was "running out of patience". As the inspection process went on and on, it was more and more likely that Hans Blix and his crew weren't gonna find anything and that the U.N. wouldn't support an preemptive war. A decent leader would use this as a sign that he should re-evaluate his evidence and work harder to unite his allies, but Bush isn't even a mediocre leader. He's a shitty one who had a boner to go to war, so he undermined the weapons inspectors and issued a now-forgotten 48-hour ultimatum. The Democrats may have been cowards, but that doesn't excuse the President acting like a goddamn cowboy.

The Way We Are

Post 9-11 funtime in Beantown:

I can't begin to describe my horror being in this place. The same government that calls the law that gives polluters free reign to pollute, the "Clear Skies Act" and calls the justification for us to terrorize the world, the "War on Terror" has the audacity to call this concentration-camp type holding pen a 'Free Speech Zone"! The first thing that came to my mind was the chant often sung at protest rallies, "Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like."

Now I am at the part of this essay that I can't bring myself to write. How do I describe the sense of dread that crawled under my skin as I observed that there were only two entrance/exits to this long narrow cage enclosed with two chain link fences, covered with a mesh net, topped with two rolls of razor wire. Let me tell you what came to my mind the moment I realized where I was standing: If something terrible were to happen while this area was full of demonstrators - something as simple as someone yelling "fire" or something as sinister as the release of a chemical agent - there would be no way to escape. Let me repeat this - there would be no way to escape. No way to escape! This is not an accident.

Conventional wisdom...

I've been looking all over for a good resourse to keep track of the blogging from Boston and I think I found the best. It's  attractive, up-to-the-minute and has everybody you've probably heard of.

Thanks to the (surely) vivacious Annatopia for the link.

Progressive Oregonians...

In my surfings around the Web I occasionally run into some homegrown who are bloggin' the Convention:

I had the good fortune of riding on the plane with Governor Barbara Roberts, who told me stories of Convention's past and made it very clear that you can't do all the things that you think you're going to do. Speaking of things, the sheer volume of mail and email invitations and the many packets of events and organizations and trainings and whatnot is simply overwhelming. Piles of mail. So far, the "find somone interesting and follow them" theory has been working really well for me.

Last night we went to a DNC staff only reception at King's bowling alley (yeah, I know I'm not staff). Picture red neon on the lanes, a neauvou-retro feel, and a bartendress with a T that says "bowlers make better lovers." Security was tight - the conversation went something like this: big man in black shirt, "hey, can I see your credentials," me, "oh, we were just in there," him,"ok, go ahead." The room was packed as America's brightest young politicos did their best impression of a frat party.

Just can't have enough NW bloggers...

Like I need another good reason...

I agree with James over at Left End of the Dial that the World Without BushCo would be a better place:

I would be happy if Kerry does any of the following:

-Kick out every current member of the current White House. That includes Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, ASHCROFT etc.. safe bet

-Make nice with the rest of the world and work to get the people that should be our friends to stop hating our guts because we're acting like a bunch of paranoid idiots.

-Give the religious right, who have wet dreams of dropping a nuclear bomb on the Arabs and starting a holy war, the big middle finger and a swift kick out the back door of the White House. Special kudos for telling Robertson to "fook off!"

-Kill the whole "we'll save Social Security by giving all our money to Wall Street" scam, and actually re-introduce the concept of responsible spending

...Assuming that Kerry will have to at least do the first one, I think its pretty obvious that I would be happier with him in the White House and the current gang of liars and thieves safely back in the corporate world...My idea is that FIRST, we return to where we were, crooked politics WITHOUT the lunacy, and work up from there.
~snip~
The man was pretty low on my list of preferred candidates (though I would have been even more irritated at a Lieberman nomination), and I am gathering that his approach to foreign affairs will be too hawkish for my comfort, but at least he's not a fanatic and is highly unlikely to further strain our military on ill-conceived ideologically-addled ventures such as a war with Iran (the "peace prez" henchmen are already sounding the war drums). Given the mess Bu$hCo has made both at home and abroad, Kerry and his inner circle could be thoroughly mediocre and look comparatively like they are walking on water. I'll take sane crooks over insane crooks any day. It's a start.

I can round up a hundred million people in this country who might agree with this, and probably another 4 billion folks we have to learn to live with.

Test test anybody home?

Well that wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be....

OK so it took me longer than expected to do re-do The Skeptic. Still tweaking....

I really haven't been doing a whole lot of blogging lately because I was busy preparing for some SUNDAY KNEE SURGERY BLOGGING!!!



Yeah I spent the better part of Tuesday at SCMC getting my left knee scoped. Dr. Coe (of The Center) fame did the meniscus repair and he did a wonderful job.

Of course, he's not to be confused with this Dr. Coe:

Charles Spencer Edwards was Bend's first doctor, arriving in 1902, but he left Bend to practice in Prineville in 1904.

But Edwards was soon replaced by Urling C. Coe, Bend's first licensed physician and for a year, the only doctor practicing in Bend.

Coe handled all manner of cases, and like other country doctors, traveled hundreds of miles by horse and buggy to reach patients at distant towns and homesteads, according to his book, "Frontier Doctor."
A smallpox outbreak in Shaniko and Prineville in 1903 touched Bend, though the fear was greater than the occurrence of disease in the town. The major diseases of Coe's early years in Bend were dysentery and typhoid, which killed children and babies, though few adults succumbed to the illnesses. Coe preached about sanitary conditions and screening homes against flies, which he believed helped spread the disease. He also exhorted the city government to pass health ordinances to lessen the severity of summer outbreaks.

In 1918, an outbreak of Spanish flu killed many and sickened many more. The Bend Amateur Athletic Club — now the Bend branch of the the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Oregon — transformed into a temporary hospital to care for flu patients.

Jacob Frederick settled in Redmond in 1906 to become the new town's first doctor, according to C.J. Rademacher in his history of Central Oregon physicians. Coe got a partner in 1906 when Bernard Ferrell started a medical practice.

Coe and Ferrell opened Bend's first hospital in August 1909. The hospital was on Oregon Street and included an operating room. The hospital closed in 1919.

Several other hospitals operated in Bend in the early 1900s. Dr. John Vandevert built a 16-room hospital on Wall Street in 1919, which was later operated as the Grove Hotel. The Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon lumber mills ran the Lumberman's Hospital on Broadway Street from 1922 until 1951.

But Bend's health care community would change drastically in 1918 with the arrival of five nuns with big plans.

Love they way thay put that. "...five nuns with big plans."

Post removed during remodeling...

So says Hunter S. Thompson:

"I got into politics a long time ago and I still believe, on some days, it can be an honorable trade...That is not an easy belief to hang on to after wallowing for 30 years in the belly of a beast that has beaten and broken more good men and women than crack and junk bonds combined. Politics is a mean business, and when September rolls around in a presidential campaign, it gets mean on a level that is beyond most people's comprehension. The White House is the most powerful office in the world, and a lot of people will tell you that nothing is over the line when it finally comes down to winning or losing the presidency of the United States. Nobody is safe and nothing is sacred when the stakes finally get that high. It is the ultimate fast lane, and the people still on their feet in September are usually the meanest of the mean."

And...

The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November. Take my word for it. Mahalo.

It's Friday Flowerblogging!!! Fresh from the garden:

Picture removed, sadly....h5>

LOL Photoshop MAGIC!!


Caught at Catch.

John Kerry does the right thing and picks Johnny Sunshine as his running mate:!!!



I kid, because I love this guy!!

UPDATE: The always effervescent Talent Show has a good rundown on why Edwards is the right choice.

Alllll righty! It's Friday Flowerblogging!!


From my garden....

Quote of the day:

After a particularly brutal day of bombings in Baghdad an Iraqi friend recently asked, "Are the Americans so smart that they have a plan for Iraq that's so complicated that I don't understand it, or are they so stupid that they have no plan at all?"

It's answer "B".