|
Afghanistan, Iraq War Costs Grossly
Underestimated
From Boss
Kitty for BlueBloggin
WASHINGTON
- To paraphrase an old US Army song
(The Caissons Go Rolling Along),
the costs of the overall
US
global “war on terror”,
including, but not limited to the
Iraq
war, just keep rolling along and
piling up. The title “The Growing
Budgetary Costs of the Iraq War”
of an October 24 House Budget
Committee hearing succinctly summed
it up.
 Total
Outlays (Federal
Funds): $2,387 billion
MILITARY:
51% and $1,228
billion
NON-MILITARY: 49% and $1,159 billion
Bush plans to
increase his request to nearly $200
billion. The troop buildup and new
gear are the main reasons.
U.S.
war costs have continued to grow
because of the additional combat
forces sent to
Iraq
this year and because of efforts to
quickly ramp up production of new
technology, such as mine-resistant
trucks designed to protect troops
from roadside bombs. The new trucks
can cost three to six times as much
as an armored Humvee.
The Bush administration said
earlier this year that it probably
would need $147.5 billion for 2008,
but Pentagon officials now say that
and $47 billion more will be
required. Secretary of Defense
Robert M. Gates and other officials
are to formally present the full
request at a Senate Appropriations
Committee hearing Wednesday.
The funding request means that
war costs are projected to grow even
as the number of deployed combat
troops begins a gradual decline
starting in December. Spending on
the wars in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
is to rise from $173 billion this
year to about $195 billion in fiscal
2008, which begins Oct. 1.
When costs of CIA operations and
embassy expenses are added, the war
in
Iraq
currently costs taxpayers about $12
billion a month, said Winslow T.
Wheeler, a former Republican
congressional budget aide who is a
senior fellow at the Center for
Defense Information in
Washington
.
The
Liar, The Divider, The self
proclaimed Changer of the World has
once again pulled the wool over our
eyes. His squandering
of Tax Dollars is leaving this
country in a desperate condition.
Bush quietly echoes Peres
Musharraf’s statement “Fighting
the war on terror is more important
than Democracy”.
The wars in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
are financed through a single
administration request to Congress,
and their costs are combined in the
legislation.
The new spending request is likely
to push the cumulative cost of the
war in Iraq alone through 2008 past
the $600-billion mark — more than
the Korean War and nearly as much as
the Vietnam War, based on estimates
by government budget officials.
The US has been suckered
and is reluctant to admit it. We
have, collectively, agreed to be
participants in a Psychopath’s
Delusions of Grandeur. We are
masochists. The sick supporters of
our psychopathic administration
surely outnumber the remaining
reasonably balanced population. It
will take an election revolution to
turn the US Titanic around -
however, I fear we have already hit
the ‘Iceburg’ and must prepare
the lifeboats.
Veteran by Tom
Chelston
From Human for Copy
Paper
This is my 3rd post on a Tom Chelston song. His songs are so powerful,
you will not want to miss this
one called "Veteran". His home page, Tomsongs
can be found here. He has a new CD
out and at $12.99 itsa steal.
My previous post on Tom Chelston can
be found here.(scroll up)
Peace. And as I should constantly remind myself, if one wants Peace, one
must Be
Peace.
Presidential Race
Shifts
From Shane C. Mason for Montana
Netroots
While the media has pounded into our heads that the
Clinton machine unstoppable, it seems as though that
might not be exactly the case. Certainly the
polls back this up, as Hillary’s lead in New
Hampshire has slid 11 points from 30% to 19% in recent
weeks. While that is still a commanding lead, it is
never a good sign for a candidacy to take such a swift
nose dive. Howard Dean anyone?
Hillary has taken some pretty tough hits lately,
between stiffing
a waitress on a tip and planting
questioners in the audience. What’s more, Obama
and Edward’s have turned up the heat. Now, both of
these issues have been somewhat dismissed as politics as
usual or non-stories. While Don
rightly points out the hypocrisy of the kool-aid
drinking hand wringers over the planted questioners and
the missing tip is pointed to as a non-issue, I think
that both really are important issues. The obvious
argument on the plant issue is that Democrat’s ought
not to try and fight Bushism by acting like Bush.
Edward’s pointed that out in no
uncertain terms when he said:
On Saturday, Edwards, while campaigning in Iowa,
criticized the Clinton camp for planting a question in
the audience, saying the practice is “what George
Bush does.”
-
“George Bush goes to events that are staged, where
people are screened, where they’re only allowed to
ask questions if the questions are favorable to George
Bush and set up in his favor,” the former senator
from North Carolina said.
To which the Clinton camp responded with the classic
“I know you are but what am I!”
“What George Bush does is attack Democrats and
divide the country,” Clinton campaign spokesman Mo
Elleithee said Monday. “Sen. Edwards’ campaign
resembles that more and more every day.”
While the ‘acting like Bush’ assertion holds
water, there is a bigger issue to be examined. In both
cases the claim has been made that Hillary wasn’t
involved. It wasn’t Hillary who didn’t not tip the
waitress, one of her staff members was responsible for
that. It wasn’t Hillary who planted the questioner, it
was a staffer who decided that. This raises some serious
problems in my mind. One of the major complaints I have
against the Bush administration is not just in his
incompetency but also the incompetency of the people
around him. From Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld,
Michael Brown and a plethora of Regency University
graduates, the administration has been riddled with
incompetence. When you elect a president, you are
electing an administrator. One of the main
tasks of an administrator is to fill positions with
competent people who wont embarrass of harm the country.
That is how Clinton is resembling Bush right
now, and that is a problem.
The Party of Reagan: Still the Same
From TomCat for Politics
Plus
Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s
campaign kickoff in 1980.
Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn
Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son,
David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.
They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the
racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage
local blacks to register and vote.
It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were
reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed
strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism.
“I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me
many years later, “to tell him not to go.”
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town
of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious
white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of
the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county
and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day
after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner
and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found
until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites
enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights
of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American
history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary
claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s
nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a
festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were
still being protected by the local community. And white
supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and
that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his
general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba
County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd
of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want
Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear
at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he
told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that
appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the
meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been
trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a
racially benign context.
That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a
Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was
elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of
Goldwater and Nixon.
Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan
was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and
Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race
haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And
Reagan knew.
He was tapping out the code. It
was understood that when politicians started chirping about
“states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba
County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the
blacks, we’re with you.
And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year
that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As
president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national
holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried
to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private
schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in
1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal
civil rights legislation.
Congress overrode the veto.
Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on
the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress
overrode that veto, too.
Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and
mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to
black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to
clean up that dismal record.
To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County
Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the
murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the
acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that
the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of
blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the
G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment
came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency... [emphasis
added]
Inserted from <NY
Times>
Ronald Reagan could not have been
more clear about his bigotry if he had appeared in the sheet
and hood of the KKK. Today the GOP proudly proclaims
itself to be the party of Reagan, and that they are.
Their presidential candidates compete to see who can drop his
name most often. And despite their attempts to disguise
it, their Southern Strategy remains the same.
So when you hear them parrot, "Reagan! Reagan!!
Reagan!!!", don't forget that their sheets, hoods and
nooses are, at best, poorly hidden!
Know a blog that
deserves to be featured on the Blog World Report? Contact Robert.
George Harrison---Acoustic Demo, While
My Guitar Gently Weeps
From Hector Diego for The
Walrus Speaks
 "Is
there possibly a God?—I knew
absolutely. It’s just that big light
that goes off in your head."
An interviewer from the music rag Creem
asked George Harrison about Ellis Dee. Here's part of that
interview, which you can read entirely here.
Anyway, the third time I did
it with a guy in England, and I thought "Ooh, I can’t
do this anymore, this is too much." I had a slight fear
of it, as well. Then I was into India and meditating and all
that, and after that I realized so many things, and one of the
things I’d heard about was fear. They said, "Look fear
in the face and it won’t bother you anymore." So I
thought, well, I really do have a bit of a fear left over from
this acid stuff, and I can’t go through the rest of my life
fearing it, so I’d better take it again (laughs). So I just
took it and in that period of time—1967—we just seemed to
be taking it all year, down at John’s house, ’round at
Ringo’s house, and I got to the point were I could drive
this Ferrari around Hyde Park in peak hour traffic on acid and
it wasn’t working anymore. All it did was give me a pain in
the neck. I looked at some under a microscope and it looked
like all this old rope. I thought, well, I’m not putting
that in my brain anymore, and I just packed it in. The good
stuff—the carpet flying up in the room and the chairs
getting bigger and smaller, all that Roman Polanski movie
stuff–stopped happening after I started to understand more
about relativity and time and space. The fun had gone out of
it, so I stopped doing it. I can’t imagine, if I hadn’t
had it, how many years of normal life it would have taken to
get me to the realizations: I might’ve never got them in
this life. It just opened the door and I experienced really
good things. I mean, I never doubted God after that. Before, I
was a cynic. I didn’t even say the word God; I thought
"bullshit to all that stuff." But after that, I
knew. It was not even a question of "Is there possibly a
God?"—I knew absolutely. It’s just that big light
that goes off in your head.
|
California Democratic Party to Consider
Censuring Senator Feinstein
By
Christopher for From
the Left
A resolution
has been created to censure Senator Dianne Feinstein for her
outrageous votes in the last two weeks as a member of the Senate
Judiciary Committee. There are many other votes that she has taken
that have made many of us wonder when she became the Joe Lieberman of
the West.
Whereas the Democratic Party stands firmly against racism in any of
its manifestations and for gender equality, and Senator Dianne
Feinstein voted to confirm Judge Leslie Southwick for a seat on the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit despite his record of
clear racism and gender discrimination; and
Whereas the Democratic Party abhors torture and stands firmly
against its use by the United States at all times and places, yet
Senator Feinstein voted to confirm Judge Mukasey as United States
Attorney General – thereby elevating to the highest position in law
enforcement a men who refuses to renounce the right of the President
to resort to torture, or to recognize waterboarding as a form of
torture; and
Whereas these examples are far from the only instances where
Senator Feinstein, after seeking and securing the support and
endorsement of the California Democratic Party, has worked to oppose
the policies and principles of our party.
Bush vetoes $10bn increase in
health/education budget, signs $40bn increase in Pentagon budget
From John
Aravosis for AMERICABlog
Bush is vetoing
bills that would add money to
health and education, claiming
American just can't afford to
spend the money, but he has no
problem signing bills that spend
four times as much money on the
Pentagon. Bush just asked for
another $200 billion for his wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he
can't spend another $10 billion on
health and education programs for
Americans. He is simply nuts if he
thinks this is a winning strategy
for the Republicans.
From
AP:
President Bush,
escalating his budget battle
with Congress, on Tuesday vetoed
a spending measure for health
and education programs prized by
congressional Democrats.
He also signed a big increase in
the Pentagon's non-war
budget....
Since winning re-election, Bush
has sought to cut the labor,
health and education measure
below the prior year level. But
lawmakers have rejected the
cuts. The budget that Bush
presented in February sought
almost $4 billion in cuts to
this year's bill.
Democrats responded by adding
$10 billion to Bush's request
for the 2008 bill. Democrats say
spending increases for domestic
programs are small compared with
Bush's pending war request
totaling almost $200 billion.
The $471 billion defense budget
gives the Pentagon a 9 percent,
$40 billion budget increase.
A Profile is Something on a Tire
From Mbast for The
Divine Democrat
OR
AMERICAN POLITICS AS SEEN FROM ACROSS THE POND
Ok, Mary Ellen asked me to do a guest post, so I'm
quite flattered and happy to oblige :-). And as a guest on an
American Democrat blog, I suppose the proper thing to do first is
to engage in some Bush-bashing. So here goes (this is a
translation of a classic German joke and I hope it doesn't lose
too much in translation): If I ever had the opportunity to ask
George W. Bush Jr. just one question it would be: "Mr.
President, as an outsider, what's your opinion on
intelligence?"
Right, end of gratuitous Bush-bashing. Start of
"serious" post ;-).
So what are we poor Euros supposed to make of the American
political system? Well, first off, we'd have to understand the
two-party system. You see, most of Europe doesn't have only two
parties. Even the Brits have more than two. And then, all these
party's have a very basic and very individual political doctrine
by way of which you can usually tell which politician belongs to
what party. Therefore, many (unfortunately not all) European
parties have something the American parties, especially the
Democrats, painfully lack: a political profile. Nearly all
Europeans have trouble understanding that,no- Democrats are not
the same as a European socialist/leftist party like Labour in
Britain, the Parti Socialiste in France, the SPD (Social
Democrats) in Germany or Zapateros PSOE in Spain. It's not quite
as simple as that. An American Democrat's (or Republican's)
politics will almost always baffle a European on several issues.
Why? Because there is no such thing as „party doctrine “ in
the sense a European would understand it. You can't predict how an
American politician will react on any given subject, leastways not
by his party affiliation. With a European politician, you can be
sure at least of the general direction of his politics: when in
doubt, a socialist will stick to socialist ideas, a conservative
to conservative ones, a green politician to environmental views
etc..
The recent French presidential elections are a good example of
what I mean: it was basically a race between the socialists (Mme.
Royal and the socialist parties) and the conservatives (Mr.
Sarkozy's UMP). Most of the issues discussed before the elections
were tainted by the political allegiance of the two candidates:
Royal took a more socialist view of things (with a lot of state
help, intervention and regulation on many issues), Sarkozy
notoriously stood for "the anglo-american social model"
which emphasizes a "do it yourself" approach with a shot
of "law and order". In other words: he took a classic
conservative stance.
Whenever the lines between parties are blurred, that's when the
European voter gets a little confused. Case in point: Germany
where you currently have what they call a "grand
coalition", meaning the two biggest parties, the social
democrat SPD and chancellor Merkel's Christian conservative
CDU/CSU share government responsibility. Now you can think
whatever you want of the effectiveness of such a coalition
(personally I think it's working better than expected), but many
Germans are still uneasy about it simply because the government
doesn't fit a given political profile. Which makes it rather
unpredictable. As a grumpy friend of mine put it: "das ist
nichts halbes und nichts ganzes" (literally: "that's not
a half thing and not a whole thing" meaning it's neither fish
nor fowl).
Not so in the US. Americans are much more comfortable with their
politicians taking independent, "non-partisan" views. I
recently found Charlie
Rose's interview of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the web and
it struck me that this guy, even though he's technically a
Republican, does lots of things a European would associate with a
socialist or even a green, but most definitely not with a
conservative. In fact, Schwarzenegger explicitly ran for office on
a platform of non-partisanship. Democrat senators like John Kerry
vote „red“ on many issues in congress, Hillary Clinton votes
yes on a bill declaring the Iranian revolutionary guard a
terrorist organization (which no self-respecting European
socialist would ever dream of doing, so there ;-)).
There are pros and cons to such a system.
Pro: it's much more flexible than European style party politics.
You don't have to tow the "party line", politicians are
free to "think outside the party box". The system is
much less prone to factionalism and therefore it's easier to
implement practical solutions to any given political or societal
problem without having to respect party doctrine.
Con: no identity, no profile, lack of political spine and also
lack of political weight.. Politicians will flip-flop around a lot
according to what seems to be the most popular view of the day.
Voters cannot be sure that certain basic tenets will be respected
once the politician is actually in power. And finally, as an
American politician you will often be left to fight for yourself
rather than being supported by a party. Being a Democrat or a
Republican in the US nowadays is not necessarily a guarantee that
the party will support you if you run for office (or afterwards,
if you win). In short: it's more difficult to get into power.
The Democrats nowadays are a classic example of all that: no
really clear-cut political program, neither on domestic issues nor
on foreign issues like Iran or Iraq. And that, as Mary Ellen's
blog proves time and again ;-), does not necessarily sit well with
the voters. As
Andy Stern, a well-known American unionist put it, "the
Democratic party needs counseling. It needs to figure out who it
really is."
One last caveat before I end: mind your political vocabulary. To a
European a "socialist" is not necessarily a commie and
it is not a pejorative term like in American politics. In fact,
many of the American Democrats would be considered to have
"socialist" views in Europe. Hence the common European
mistake of equating the American Democrats with European socialist
parties.
The same goes for the term "liberal". It's not an insult
like it often is in American politics. To a European, a liberal is
not a "lefty", or a libertarian without any moral
standards, but a centrist, a moderate conservative. Classic
European liberal parties are the FDP (Free Democrats) in Germany,
Bayrous UDF in France or the "Lib Dems" in Britain. All
of these parties have non-interventionism (by the state) as a
major part of their doctrin, which, as I'm sure we'll all agree,
is not a particularly "socialist" approach.
Right, this has gotten too long (as I thought it would ;-)) so I
shall stop right now. All the best to you all and kudos, Mary
Ellen, for an excellent blog.
The Big Lie, back again!
From JJ for Unrepentant
Old Hippie
 Okay.
One. More. Time.
Once again, fetus
fetishists are flogging the nonexistent "abortion-breast
cancer link". Lifeshite's got its knickers
in a knot today because the media didn't cover the latest
absurd little, um, "study", that came out last month,
the PAPRI Study. No, Big Corporate Media didn't cover it, but Unrepentant
Old Media did. The big media didn't cover it because the
phony "ABC link" has been debunked
so many times by so many reputable medical experts that it's
getting boring. The only ones that ever talk about it are the
anti-choicers who oh so
wish it were true -- that'd serve us sluts right. Oh well,
boring as it is, when this subject rears its ugly head I feel
obliged to kick it to the curb with a steel-toed boot and do a
short but vigorous little happy dance on its face. So at the
risk of sounding like the Department of Redundancy Department,
here (again) is why the PAPRI study is a steaming load of
bullshit (and I'll type slowly):
(1) The study was commissioned by an anti-choice organization,
so we can assume the skewing of questions and results to fit the
agenda -- why else would they pay for it? (Strike one);
(2) The study was published in the Journal
of American Physicians & Surgeons, the mouthpiece of the
Association
of American Physicians & Surgeons, a small fringe of
extreme right-wingers who formed the group to give themselves
the appearance of having the same credibility as the American
Medical Association. They don't. They are against Medicare,
abortion and emergency contraception, don't believe humans cause
global warming, claim that the "homosexual lifestyle"
shortens lifespan, and believe "humanists" have
conspired to replace "creation religion" with
evolution. In other words, garden-variety wingnuts. And there's
more: many AAPS leaders have also been linked to the nutty John
Birch Society (the only real link in this post), and the
AAPS isn't even listed in Medline
or any other mainstream medical source -- they are, however, on Quackwatch,
which lists their Journal as an "untrustworthy,
non-recommended periodical". (Sterrrike two);
(3) The so-called link has been repeatedly rejected by the National
Cancer Institute and leading breast cancer experts such as Dr.
Susan Love (probably the world's foremost expert on breast
cancer). (Steeeeerike Three! Yer out!)
Lifeshite wimps and whines about "shooting the
messenger", but in this case to do otherwise would be like
believing Dick Cheney when he talks about the imminent threat
posed by Iran. The only people who'd believe anything he says at
this point are the ones who just want an excuse to kick more
Muslim ass.
And that is the last time I'll deal with this idiotic topic.
Over & out!
Except for this update:
Here's the Guardian
story on the damn study that ran last month. I corresponded
and assisted the writer, Libby Brooks, with some of the research
for this.
John Negroponte to go to Pakistan!
From Kay in Maine for White
Noise Insanity
(photo by www.benfrank.net and found on Google
Images)
Oh gawd. You know what that means. It means
Pakistan will become the newest American Taliban
death squad camp! Move over al-Qaida! John
Negroponte is back in town! Oh yes. John
Negroponte won’t be there to make peace with
Musharraf on behalf of the United States, but will
however, get tips from Musharraf on how to take
over a country and will also spend lots of time
figuring out where in Pakistan Negroponte can set
up American Taliban death squads to get the
training they need (Blackwater is having a
difficult time right now getting their training in
Iraq, because there are WAY too many US soldiers
there keeping tabs on this death squads. See? The
surge is working!).
From Forbes:
ISLAMABAD (Thomson Financial) - US Deputy
Secretary of State John Negroponte will visit
Pakistan shortly, officials said Tuesday,
without confirming if he was the envoy
reportedly being sent to demand an end to
emergency rule.
The New York Times reported that President
George Bush was to send an envoy to personally
tell military ruler Pervez Musharraf that
Washington wants emergency rule lifted ahead of
general elections promised by early January.
‘I can confirm that Deputy Secretary of
State Negroponte is to visit but this was
planned for some time as part of the long-term
strategic dialogue,’ US embassy spokeswoman
Liz Colton told Agence France-Presse.
 Meanwhile,
back in Washington, DC, the White House has been
ordered to save their emails. Wow! Will they do
this? I doubt it. There are over 5
million emails missing from the White House
databases and we all know where they went too.
They’re either encased in cement and are at the
bottom of the ocean or they’re on the databases
of the RNC! Oh yes, because America is being run
by an honest group of individuals for the past
seven years, it makes sense to do business on your
party’s servers, because that way you don’t
have to share these emails with the American
public…because well…you’re so honest and
transparent! Spit.
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What do you
think of this?
Posted by Fran for Ramblings
File Under: 'It's About
Time" - Changes at Wal-Mart
From BAC for Yikes!
 It's
about time that Wal-Mart addressed lack
of health care coverage for its employees.
For much of the last decade, the retailing
behemoth Wal-Mart
Stores has been associated with stingy
health care as much as low prices.
Across the country, politicians and labor groups
derided the company’s health plans for their
high expense and bare-bones coverage. Two
states, California and Maryland, even passed
laws demanding, in effect, that the company
spend more on employee health benefits.
“We want this giant to behave itself,” one
Maryland legislator, Anne Healey, said at the
time.
The giant, it turns out, was listening. All the
criticism was hurting its reputation and its
ability to expand. So now, after spending two
years seeking advice from everyone from Bill
Clinton to executives at Starbucks,
Wal-Mart is overhauling its health plans.
The company, according to data available for
the first time, is offering better coverage to a
greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the
nation’s largest private employer, provides
insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did
just three years ago — and it is now easier
for many to sign up for health care at Wal-Mart
than at its rival, Target,
whose reputation glows in comparison.
Wal-Mart has hardly become a standard-bearer
for corporate America: it still insures fewer
than half its 1.4 million employees in the
United States.
Better, but not good enough! How many Walton
billionaires does one family need before it will
begin to offer health coverage for ALL its
employees?
And while we are on the subject of Wal-Mart ...
what about the sex discrimination and sexual
harassment claims?
Baby steps just won't cut it anymore.
"I will restore
habeas corpus"
From Candace for Chapterhouse
As I mentioned in a prior post, Critical
Historical Moments,
We face another critical moment with
inauguration day in 2009. The new president,
no matter who he or she may be, and the new
Congress, regardless of which party has
control, must begin the immediate rollback
of the previous administration's actions
that have shredded this country's
Constitution, beginning with the restoration
of habeas corpus.
This will be the most important test our
country has faced since its earliest days if
it is to survive as a democracy. If we don't
pass this test, then nothing else will
matter. We might as well give it up now for
our first king, also named George.
My candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, said in
this speech, "I will restore habeas
corpus." For this reason (and many
others), this man has my vote for President of
the United States.
I hope you will take the time to listen to
this amazing speech. It's long (20 minutes),
but not nearly as long as the past seven years
under George W. Bush has been. For those who
have not yet read Sen. Obama's book, The
Audacity of Hope, I can't recommend it
highly enough. For anyone who thinks he is an
inexperienced political lightweight, I say
read the book, then come tell me what you have
to say about it. :)
I'll be taking off for a few days to get
serious about writing. I'll be looking in on
your blogs, though, so mind your Ps and Qs. :)
What Mormons
Really Say About Gays
From Serena
Freewomyn for The
Bilerico Project
 It’s
not easy for me to talk about the Mormon
Church (aka “The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints,” aka the LDS Church)
without coming across as angry. But I wanted
to offer some additional information about the
article Alex posted last week regarding the
Mormon Church’s position on homosexuality.
First off, I want to apologize for using
the term “homosexuality,” because I find
it dehumanizing and offensive. But seeing as
this is the term used in the majority of the
Church’s literature, I will be commenting on
that.
Secondly, I want to apologize for not being
able to remain “objective.” But after
being raised in the Mormon Church, it’s
really hard for me not to get pissed off about
the Church’s teachings in regards to sexual
orientation.
The Mormon Church has received a lot of
publicity lately, for good or for bad, because
of two people: Mitt Romney and Warren Jeffs.
Romney, of course, is the dude running for the
Republican presidential nomination. And Jeffs
is the former leader of a fundamentalist
branch of the LDS Church who was convicted
earlier this year of rape as an accomplice
after he forced a fourteen year old girl to
marry her nineteen year old cousin. If you
believe a lot of the media’s coverage of the
issue, Mormons are rare creatures who only
live in Utah, despite the fact that the LDS
Church is a multi-billion dollar institution
with over 500 million members worldwide.
Last week, Alex quoted an article that
implied that the Mormon Church has recently
softened its position on homosexuality.
However, the Church still advocates that
homosexuality is a mental illness that can be
controlled and that church members should
“love the sinner and hate the sin.”
In a
recent statement on the Church’s website,
Elder Dallin H. Oaks and Elder Lance B.
Wickham, both senior figures in the Church’s
hierarchy, issued a 17-page interview
regarding “same-gender attraction.” In
response to a question about how parents
should react if their child tells them that he
is gay (the article never addresses lesbians,
bisexuals, or transgender children), Elder
Oaks responds:
The distinction between feelings or
inclinations on the one hand, and behavior
on the other hand, is very clear. It’s no
sin to have inclinations that if yielded to
would produce behavior that would be a
transgression. The sin is in yielding to
temptation . . . Homosexuality . . . is not
a noun that describes a condition. It’s an
adjective that describes feelings or
behavior.
Oaks, who is a lawyer by training, not a
psychologist or medical doctor, goes onto say
that:
Homosexual feelings are controllable.
Perhaps there is an inclination or
susceptibility to such feelings that is a
reality for some and not a reality for
others. But out of such susceptibilities
come feelings, and feelings are
controllable. If we cater to the feelings,
they increase the power of the temptation.
If we yield to the temptation, we have
committed sinful behavior. That pattern is
the same for a person that covets someone
else’s property and has a strong
temptation to steal. It’s the same for a
person that develops a taste for alcohol.
It’s the same for a person that is born
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