Just watched the pre-game tonight (yes, for the Red Sox game...I still love my boys!) and just witnessed the greatest thing I've seen in a while. They interviewed (briefly) a woman attending the Sox game on her 100th birthday. She even had a Sox jersey on with the name "Grammy" across the back, with a number 100 on it.
I'm looking at a six days off from the daily grind as we celebrate the last long weekend of the summer. Yippee!The letter, written by Dr. Cate Jenkins and obtained by RAW STORY, claims that EPA-funded research on the toxicity of breathable alkaline dust at the site “falsified pH results” to make the substance appear benign, when it was, in reality, corrosive enough to cause first responders and other workers in lower Manhattan to later lose pulmonary functions and, in some cases, to die.Our government at work yet again.
According to most polls, there is a decent chance the Democrats could take over the Congress in November. While this has me rubbing my hands together in glee, I don't want to get too ahead of myself. After the questionable elections of 2000 and 2004, I wouldn't put it past anyone to snatch this victory from the American people.Cheney has planted aides in major Cabinet departments, often over the objection of a Cabinet secretary, to make sure his policies are carried out. He sits in on the Senate Republican caucus, to stamp out any rebellions. Cheney loyalists from the Office of the Vice President dominate interagency planning meetings.
The Iraq war is the work of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The capture of the career civil service is pure Cheney. The disciplining of Congress is the work of Cheney and Rove. The turning over of energy policy to the oil companies is Cheney. The extreme secrecy is Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
If Cheney were the president, more of this would be smoked out because the press would be paying attention. The New York Times' acerbic columnist Maureen Dowd regularly makes sport of Cheney's dominance, and there are plenty of jokes (Bush is a heartbeat away from the presidency). But you can count serious newspaper or magazine articles on Cheney's operation on the fingers of one hand. One exceptional example is Jane Mayer's piece in the July 3 New Yorker on Cheney operative David Addington .
Cheney's power is matched only by his penchant for secrecy. When my colleague at the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss, requested the names of people who serve on the vice president's staff, he was told this was classified information. Former staffers for other departments provided Dreyfuss with names.
So secretive is Cheney (and so incurious the media) that when his chief of staff, Irving Lewis Libby, was implicated in the leaked identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, reporters who rushed to look Libby up on Nexis and Google found that Libby had barely rated previous press attention.
Why does this matter? Because if the man actually running the government is out of the spotlight, the administration and its policies are far less accountable.
Our latest race-by-race review of Congressional districts around the country convinces us that a Democratic wave is building and that the party is poised to take control of the House of Representatives in the fall. The only question now is the size of the November wave.
The national mood remains bleak for Republicans. President George W. Bush’s job performance ratings are terrible, and the public still gives Congress low marks. A majority of Americans continue to tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
That’s a recipe for a GOP disaster, and there is no reason to believe that things will change dramatically between now and Election Day to improve Republican prospects.
"I talked to him about how important this person was to me," Halley recounted, speaking of her husband. "It's not just a soldier who died. Lives are changed forever...I said, `This doesn't make sense to me.'"
"He said, `Terrorists killed three thousand people, we had to go to war.'" Halley continued to me. "I said, `Well, who put the Taliban into power? The United States did.' He said, `I'm not going to have a philosphical debate over politics.' The whole conversation was very gentle."
Halley says that while Bush was personable and receptive to her, she was very direct and critical of Bush's policies and insisted that the right thing to do was to end the war.
"We literally sat knee to knee...I looked deep into his eyes and talked to him about love and losing people and that he was responsible for this. I said, `I didn't vote for you, but you are my President. And you're not serving me.'"
"I said I believed it was time to put an end to this. His job is to find solutions. I said, `You yourself have said you had erroneous information going into this.'"
She continued: "I said, `As a Christian man, you realize that when you've made a mistake it's your responsiblity to end this. And it's time to end the bleeding and it's time to end the war.'"
I've had it with the Muthaf...ing Wankees in the muthaf'ing baseball diamond!
Remember when we had a real president? Well, he's turning 60 today. I wish him well--still miss the dude.
What in God’s name did we ever do without search engines?
Well, well, well...it appears that the US and British disagreed on when to close the dragnet on the Shampoo Bombers. Apparently, the British wanted to let it go a little longer and the US pressured them into breaking up the alleged plot quickly. So do you think they might have wanted to distract us here in the US from the low approval ratings, Joe Lieberman's loss in the recent primary, and all the other problems they are causing? 
Remember when we were all told by Homeland Security to have mass quantities of duct tape on hand for the next big terrorist attack? Well, I do believe they are at it again."Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport planned to give 11 boxes of surrendered items to the city's human services department, which will give the unopened bottles of shampoo, toothpaste and other items to homeless shelters, airport spokeswoman Lexie Van Haren said."So my question is...if it's safe enough to give to homeless people, why isn't it safe enough to take on a plane?
Last night I was delayed coming home from work and, believe it or not, missed a visit to our house by our Congressman. He was making the rounds of registered Democrats in the area on behalf of Deval Patrick, who's running for Governor of our fair state. 
Well, Clueless Joe strikes again:"I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War," Mr. Lieberman said.
'Tis the further adventures of Beckperson's battle with the poison ivy, in which the ivy takes the lead.
Many thousands of years ago, when Ms. Magazine was first launched, I was an avid subscriber. They had a column on the very last page called *click* in which women told stories about those small, everyday occurances that vividly demonstrated that they were being treated differently than men, on the job or in the home. Some *click* examples were when they realized the man next to them doing the same job was paid more, or when they were denied credit unless they had the signature of their husbands. "If Lexington-Concord was "the shot heard round the world" - the moment where a festering series of local rebellions became a Rebellion - then the Lamont campaigners on the ground and on the Internet are among the minutemen and Committees of Correspondence of this next American Revolution. But a message needs a messenger, and in the vast number of words written on the subject of Internet politics, this fundamental point is neglected. Partly it is because large traditional media outlets, protecting their economic interests, and right-wing-backed media outlets, pursuing their partisan advantage with typical disregard of the truth, have a desire to paint the entire enterprise as "far left protest politics." They want everyone to see hippies burning college offices and papier mâché puppets.
The reality is rather much the reverse: the people who have made best use of the Internet as a tool for political change are not exclusively on the left. In fact, the right wing has its Internet arm, which is tightly vertically integrated - anonymous right-wing operatives create fake news, such as the recent selectively edited clip that tried to imply that Congressman Dingell supported Hezbollah, then low level right-wing bloggers scream about it, then the well financed Michelle Malkins of this world pick it up, and finally it is funneled into the flagship of right-wing media, the Washington Times. If it is a pro-war stink, the Washington Post can be relied to take it up as well.
This, however, merely integrates the Internet into the old media stream, and the old tightly controlled message politics of broadcast. A campaign is a few people in a room coming up with slogans, and a large number of shills repeating them, hoping they will catch fire. The Lamont campaign is not driven by this same dynamic. It is tightly controlled within itself, but it does not tightly control the messages that surround the candidate. A fact which the flailing Lieberman campaign attempted to use to create a fake controversy.
In short, too few people have understood that the reason the message of a different kind of citizenship that creates a new politics has awaited messengers is because there are too many entrenched interests busy smearing any messenger who manages to rise to the forefront. This does not change the basic reality - the new politics has consistently selected politicians of a particular type, with a particular personality. The type is not the true outsider who comes in with completely radical notions about the system but, instead, the intellectual maverick who has risen within the system and who has succeeded by "thinking outside the box."
"While there have been occasional articles about this new class of political player, as with the nature of the new kind of candidate, there has been a vast void of understanding as to what makes them successful in this new political environment. As with the candidates they support, the crucial quality is the ability to understand where the present political environment has reached a point of gridlock, and then the ability to leverage the very pressure that has brought about stalemate to burst out in a lateral direction with great, and unexpected, force. It is a pressure that journalists like Christopher Lydon, with decades in and covering politics, could feel and smell, but which the major outlets at first denied, and now decry, being dragged kicking and screaming into a world where politics is a conversation, and not an ad campaign.Do I get an AMEN on this?
That, then, is the real lesson of the Revolution of '06: namely, that it was there all along, and it is merely being unleashed this year to create its first wave of victories in electoral politics in the US. It has awaited messengers to carry its message, and with each passing battle, it grows more immune to the deceptive smear-driven attacks from the mass media world. These messengers are not starry-eyed dreamers, but instead people who began in the system as it is, and have crossed the aisle based on an intimate understanding of the failures of the old system. They have gathered around them a new breed of political operative on the Internet, and have made more effective an old breed that had been pushed aside by the old politics of the airwaves. This politics has faith in a different world, it values different kinds of politicians, and it is developing an increasingly cohesive political philosophy,
And while in 2004 this politics merely made a splash, in 2006, it has already won elections. But don't tell anyone, because the old politics still believes that if it isn't on television, it doesn't exist."
We now learn that the 9/11 Commission couldn't get the information it needed from Rudy Giuliani because newspaper editorials criticized the commission for asking tough questions of NYC's firefighters and police. You see, the firemen and the police were heroes, so we don't get to ask them tough questions that might help us avoid a future terrorist attack, or at least respond to it better - you see, that just wouldn't be "nice." Oh no. In Soviet America, we just tell the cops and firemen how great they are, rather than get the information we need to save another, oh, 3,000 lives.Amen.
"Time is running out for Republicans. Unless something dramatic happens before Election Day, Democrats will take control of the House. And the chances that they’ll seize the Senate are rising toward 50-50.I suppose the hurricane imagery is not intended to be ironic.
"The electoral hurricane bearing down on the GOP looks likely to be a Category 4 or 5, strong enough to destroy at least one of the party’s majorities. The political climate feels much as it did before previous elections that produced sizable upheavals, such as in 1994, when Democrats lost 52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of both chambers."
