Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 02:00:00 AM CST
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1933 - Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the first of his "Fireside Chats."
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Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 00:30:00 AM CST
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Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
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Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 07:03:58 AM CST
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Bush had Carl Rove and Dick Cheney, Barack Obama has Rahm Emmanuel who has managed to create hate and discontent within the Obama administratioon. While my colleague has some very strong opinions about Emmanuel's place and influence in this administration I have reserved judgement.
Is he at the heart of the failings of Obama's first year in office or rather has the President not paid enough heed to that advice? Is he really the master of the dark arts?
Paul Harris, the UK OBSERVER'S
New York correspondent has this piece. There always has to be a fall guy.
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Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 06:26:09 AM CST
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If you are not familiar with Doris "Granny D" Haddock, and her exploits, the following article will give you a glimpse into the life of this extrordianary woman. A wife, mother, grandmother and widow, not until her sunset years did she become a political activist, walking across America at age 89 and running for the US Senate at age 96.
If you would like to see more of Granny D you can go here.
Rest in peace "Granny D", yours was a race very well run.
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Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 02:00:00 AM CST
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1941 - The Lend-Lease Act was signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt allowing America to lend arms and equipment to Great Britain.
1847 - John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed
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Thu Mar 11, 2010 at 00:30:00 AM CST
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And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
Cecil Spring-Rice (1859-1918)
English diplomat who served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1912 to 1918.
Poem: "I Vow To Thee My Country"
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Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 07:41:55 AM CST
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I will never truly understand the "it's ok because we are doing it" rationale when what was done to a group of persons and gasped about and condemned is then perpetrated on another group. The torture and totally inhumane treatment that was meted out to the Jews by the Nazis was grotesque beyond words and yet this country who, it seems, is always the first to condemn such acts of violence and terror turns around and thinks nothing of using torture methods to get the information that they believe is hidden in the hearts and minds of a supposed enemy.
We have known about waterboarding for some time and that it was employed as a favorite brand of torture. We have known that it was given the previous administration's blessing and yet did we actually know just how far reaching and despicable this brand of torture went? Mark Benjamin in his p[iece Waterboarding For Dummies has written about internal CIA memos which show a much darker and meticulously thought out protocol than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water".
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Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 07:21:12 AM CST
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Yesterday I saw this headline...Limbaugh Vows to Leave US... and I have to admit my heart skipped a beat. Could this possibly be true? Could our prayers have actually been ansewred? Apparently this thtreat was issued because of a fear that the Healthcare Bill would be passed, something which Limbaugh in his great wisdom (ha ha) believes will totally ruin the economy. Therefore he will leave and seek his healthcare in a country where presumably they have universal healthcare? There are not that many countries which do not have universal healthcare so I am at a loss as to where he might seek treatment.
I think the thought of this man's imminent departire is perhaps the added incentive needed to make sure that the healthcare bill passes as quicklly as possible!
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Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 06:53:47 AM CST
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There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
American essayist, philosopher, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century
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Tue Mar 09, 2010 at 07:57:48 AM CST
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There are probably more jokes about lawyers than there are about blonds and most are not very complimentary. Much as we grouse about them we still manage to elect a huge number of them to Congress and thirty-five of our Founding Fathers were lawyers or had benefited from legal training. Some had also become judges.
Now we have Ken Starr (whom many of you may remember as the attorney involved with Bill Clinton's impeachment investigation) stepping up to criticize Liz Cheney. SALON.com's Joan Walsh writes on why Starr's response to Cheney is right and proper.
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Tue Mar 09, 2010 at 00:30:00 AM CST
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"The first thing to learn
in intercourse with others
is non-interference with their own
particular ways of being happy,
provided those ways do not assume
to interfere by violence with ours."
William James (1842-1910)
The father of modern Psychology...pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor
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Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 10:57:46 AM CST
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Left , right no one is in the middle except the public.
Hillary Clinton stated that there was a vast right wing conspiracy aligned against her husband Bill when he was Presdient. Now the right is accusing the left of managing a conspiracy against them.
Here in an artcile about
Media Matters we might find some answers. At least you will learn a bit more about the opposing agendas.
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Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 08:52:50 AM CST
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Sunday. a day of rest. A day when one can kick back, relax, browse at leisure the Sunday papers and recharge our batteries for the coming week. For me it is a day when my brain likes to wander into all sorts of random territory. Some might like to say it has been lost in there for some time, however...
Let me say at the outset that I am very proud of being an American and one whose family has been here since the beginning. That also allows for them to have been part of some of the blackest periods in this country's history. The descimation of the Native American tribes, slavery, civil rights denial and presidential assasinations to name but a few, and yet each country has their black marks and ours is no different except that ours are fresher. We managed to move beyond these things, to make amends where it was possibe, and to create a great nation.
At this point in time though I see us as a country in decline. Our salad days are long past and yet we have those in positions of power who refuse to admit the need for change and are still riding that euphoric post WWII boom. That too has gone by and we need to stop pretending that we are the greatest country on earth. Our infrastructure is crumbling, we have an economy in gridlock, jobs have been moved overseas, President Obama has targeted healthcare reform as the biggest undertaking we need to move forward on and has made investment in a new high speed rail system a priority and yet we have a long way to go to get up to speed (pardon the pun). We have a poverty rate that runs between 13 and 17%...this in the richest country in the world.
As healthcare reform has been the major issue of late and we have a Senate that refuses to see what their negative position is doing to their constiuents, I think this article will point up what a mess we really are in with our healthcare and how great is the need to create a new equitable system
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Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 06:16:22 AM CST
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Those who are unwilling to invest in the future haven't earned one.
H.W. Lewis,
Professor of physics at the University of
California, Santa Barbara
Technological Risk, 1990
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 11:41:13 AM CST
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The "peanut gallery" has been more or less silent about David Axelrod, President Obama's chief political advisor and successful campaign manager. This commentator, yours truly, fingered Rahm Emanuel early on and mentioned Axelrod but once in eight months' worth of deconstructing the West Wing to the purpose of finding what ASIDE FROM OBAMA HIMSELF is causing the political ineptitude emanating (if leadership seeping slowly can be described as "emanating") from the Administration. In the Sunday edition of the New York Times we finally have an interesting article about Axelrod, and yes, it seems as if he has an attitude problem, too.
Happily, there is an excellent article in the Washington Post about the problems Toyota Motor Corporation has in finding the problems with its products, which up to now have dominated the automobile market on account of their high quality. It is an instructive essay because it very nicely points out that diagnosis is a tricky business in engineering and in medicine ... and now with a good analogy ... in politics. We cannot just rely on deconstruction of individual personalities, but must view the whole thing in action, then on the laboratory bench, then in terms of exogenous conditions, that is, the response of the organism to its environment. Key to the analysis is the notion that an "emergent" condition occurs, absent with any individual, but crucial (perhaps fatal) when the whole mechanism (or organism) is assembled. This, I believe, is the overarching problem with the Obama administration.
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 07:14:31 AM CST
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Vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals.Vultures are found on every continent except Antarctica and Oceania and money vultures I suspect could also find a way to inhabit those areas as well.
The most despicable ones prey on those who have the lest to give and the most to lose. Greg Palast of the BBC has this report.
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 06:44:38 AM CST
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John Cory at RSN (Reader Supported News) is angry as so many others of us are. Here he speaks out about why he is angry and what he feels needs to be done.
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 04:00:00 AM CST
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Kees van Dongen
[Dutch, 1877-1968]
Title: Spring
1908
Have we all had enough of winter yet? It always seems that spring will never arrive, although before we know it we will be complaining of the heat. It could be worse. 1816 was known as the year with no summer or 1800 and froze to death".
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 02:00:00 AM CST
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1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone. Born in Scotland, Bell settled in Boston when he was in his early 20s. He made his living as a teacher of the deaf; on the side he tinkered with transmitters and electromagnets. In the summer of 1876, Bell gave the first public demonstration of the "electrical speech machine" he had invented. A few months later he achieved his ultimate goal: transmitting and receiving spoken words over a telephone line. When Bell died on August 2, 1922, the nation's telephones went silent for one minute in a fitting tribute to a man who had done so much to further oral communication.
1945 - Allied troops crossed the Rhine during World War II
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Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 00:30:00 AM CST
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Dissent is the highest form of patriotism
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
3d President of the United States (1801-9), Author of the Declaration of Independence Apostle of agrarian democracy
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Sat Mar 06, 2010 at 08:02:54 AM CST
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From infrequent listener, Joseph Wyatt we have a quick look at the lies that Rush Limbaugh tells on a daily basis. At least, as Wyatt points out at the end of the essay, the radio Station in Huntington, W.VA. carries Ed Shultz a liberal radio talk show antidote to the Drugster.
With the exception of more foreign autos and signs which are in a foreign language, these photos could have been taken in any part of the United States within the last week or two. So why are we always criticizing others and looking for differences? Globally, we are all in the same boat.
From the Universe Today we have this article about the demise of the dinosaurs. If you are of the notion that they were around when man was not and if you believe, as many do, that man was busy commuting to work at the local rock quarry (as did Fred Flintstone) by riding his faithful dinosaur, then you will also believe that they died out because they were over hunted for dino burgers and not by an asteroid impact.
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