THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Way too much coffee. But if it weren't for the coffee, I'd have no identifiable personality whatsoever."
~~David Letterman

COFFEE LINKED TO LOWER DEMENTIA RISK

By Nicholas Bakalar, for The New York Times:
"Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.
"A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
"After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.
"Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, does not as yet advocate drinking coffee as a preventive health measure. 'This is an observational study,' she said. 'We have no evidence that for people who are not drinking coffee, taking up drinking will have a protective effect.'
"Dr. Kivipelto and her colleagues suggest several possibilities for why coffee might reduce the risk of dementia later in life. First, earlier studies have linked coffee consumption with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, which in turn has been associated with a greater risk of dementia. In animal studies, caffeine has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect in the bloodstream, reducing vascular risk factors for dementia.
"Dr. Kivipelto noted that previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.
"The new study, published this month in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, is unusual in that more than 70 percent of the original group of 2,000 people randomly selected for tracking were available for re-examination 21 years later. The dietary information had been collected at the beginning of the study, which reduced the possibility of errors introduced by people inaccurately recalling their consumption. Still, the authors acknowledge that any self-reported data is subject to inaccuracies."

TAGGED AGAIN

I've been tagged in the ubiquitous 25 Random Things About Yourself. I won't tag anyone with this, but if you'd like to play along, just leave a comment about it here, so we know to check it out.

25 Random Facts about Pam:
1. I am very kind-hearted - probably more than most people realize;
2. I am still, at 56, quite shy;
3. I quit smoking 23 years ago by having major surgery (I highly recommend it);
4. I am seriously anxiety prone;
5. I love to laugh - in fact it comes way too easily in often horribly inappropriate situations;
6. I love all animals, and will do whatever I can to help/protect an animal in need;
7. I often prefer the company of animals to that of people;
8. I can be very stubborn, if the situation warrants;
9. I have a quick temper, but over the years, have learned the benefits of controlling it;
10. I love to read, and am rather picky about what I read;
11. I adore movies, and again, am rather picky about what I'll watch;
12. I like music, but have to be in the mood, and play the appropriate music;
13. I REALLY adore technology - computers, phones, pods, my car; I still say, "Thank god there are smarter people than me in this world, or we would still be writing with coal on a shovel;
14. The book that has affected me like no other is Blindness, by Jose Saramago;
15. I am an only child;
16. But, I'm pretty good at sharing;
17. I love the show 24, but I often get too tense while watching it;
18. I am on my tenth Toyota, a 2008 Prius which is as close to a perfect car as I have ever driven;
19. My partner and I have been together nearly 16 years;
20. My son, daughter-in-law, and their 2 kids are the light of my life;
21. I wish I could see them more often;
22. I am so happy that Barack Obama is our President; I backed him from the start; I don't think I could have taken 4 more years of a Republican presidency;
23. I love coffee, and have been drinking it since I was about 3 (that's the Swede in me!); but I rarely have more than 2 cups per day or I become too jittery;
24. I am hating cold weather much more as I get older, but I still love snow;
25. I moderate a local Freecycle (TM) recycling group because I realy believe in recycling - for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great."
~~Orison Swett Marden

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body."
~~Oliver Wendell Holmes

BOHEME

Tagging rears its ugly head again...
It goes like this:
1. Put your iTunes or iPod on shuffle
2. For each question press the next button to get your next answer.
3. You must write that song name down no matter how outrageous is sounds!
4. Tag ? friends who might "enjoy" doing the game as well as the person you got the note from. (I'm not tagging anyone; if you want to do it, go for it!)

IF SOMEONE SAYS, "IS THIS OKAY" you say?
Mother and Child Reunion (Paul Simon)

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Graceland (Paul Simon)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Come Together (The Beatles)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
Sweet Painted Lady (Elton John)

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
We Can Work It Out (The Beatles)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
The Only Living Boy in New York (Simon & Garfunkel)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN?
Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel)

WHAT IS 2+2?
Slip Slidin' Away (Paul Simon)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Get Back (The Beatles)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Super Trouper (ABBA)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Sacrifice (Elton John)

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Tiny Dancer (Elton John)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
A Most Peculiar Man (Simon & Garfunkel)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Homeless (Paul Simon)

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Lady Maddona (The Beatles)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Further to Fly (Paul Simon)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
All Around the World or The Myth of Fire (Paul Simon)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Let It Be (The Beatles)

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op.55 "Eroica" (Beethoven)

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Train in the Distance (Paul Simon)

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Sparrow (Simon & Garfulkel)

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Rocket Man (Elton John)

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Yes I Am (Mellissa Ethridge)

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
So Long Frank Lloyd Wright (Simon & Garfunkel)

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
Grey Seal (Elton John)

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Roy Rogers (Elton John)

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
The Winner Takes All (ABBA)

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
A Hard Day's Night (The Beatles)

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Boheme (Deep Forest)

THE BEST AMERICAN NON-REQUIRED READING 2008

By Mark Flanigan, Contemporary Literature Guide for About.com:
"The Best American Nonrequired Reading features fiction, nonfiction, journalism, comics, and humor, and is doubtlessly the most eclectic of Houghton Mifflin's Best American series. It grew out of the 826 Valencia project, a writing workshop for teens that Dave Eggers founded in San Francisco's Mission District. 826 Valencia has since evolved into 826 National, with writing workshops springing up around the country, and as in previous years, the pieces chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 were done so by high school student participants of these workshops. And while there's something in this collection for everybody, I found that the selection of fiction was largely overshadowed by the remarkable nonfiction inclusions:J. Malcolm Garcia's "The White Train" is an illicit peak into the lives of a caste of Buenos Aires trash scavengers, the cartoneros, whose existence depends upon the skeletal ghost train upon which they transport their recyclables through the city.Raffi Khatchadourian's "Neptune's Navy" came from The New Yorker, and is a short version of Peter Heller's book, The Whale Warriors, which delves into the adventures of marine activist Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as they patrol the icy waters of the southern seas to stop illegal Japanese whaling.
"Veteran fiction writer George Saunders really delivers with a piece of creative journalism entitled 'Bill Clinton, Public Citizen.' Saunders describes a classroom in a hospital in the Dominican Republic where children are playing chaotically prior to the arrival of a special guest. The guest is Bill Clinton, and Saunders fools me into believing that this is a fiction, an alternate world of his imagination, by painting Clinton not as the affable, gregarious figure we're accustomed to seeing, but as grave - dour even. Then he hits me with the punch line: 'If not for the William J. Clinton Foundation, every one of these little kids would be dead or dying soon, since every one of them is HIV positive, and until the foundation intervened, almost no one in the Dominican Republic had access to life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). And for most kids this young, the life expectancy for someone with HIV not on ARVs is five years.' Saunders is part of a press crew following the former president to several developing African nations, where the work of the William J. Clinton foundation has made ARVs affordable and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. The author spotlights the private moments he shares with Clinton, moments when it becomes clear to Saunders, no slouch himself, just what an incredible individual the former president is. At a press dinner, Saunders notes that Clinton does most of the talking, not because he is self-absorbed or prone to pontification, but because Clinton is easily the most interesting person at the table:
" 'Because when Bill Clinton's at your table, you don't really want anyone else talking, and that includes you. When you do talk, you feel stupid. I mean, you are stupid. You are suddenly short of facts and full of intuition. You lack the conversational zing that comes with having once been leader of the free world. Have your previous dinner partners included Gobachev, Mandela, Bono, Liza Hurley, Stephen Jay Gould? Were you instrumental in bringing peace to Ireland? Were your personal foibles broadcast at a cringe-inducing level of detail into every home in America? Did you sign into law the Family and Medical Leave Act, already used by some three million Americans to be with a dying parent or at home after the birth of a child? Do people routinely accuse you and your wife of Macbethian levels of intrigue and ambition, levels that no actual living person is diabolical or efficient enough to attain? Have you ever made a speech to 50,000 people? Do people look at you and think: should have done more in Rwanda? Have you started a foundation that has saved, by even the most conservative estimates, hundreds of thousands of lives and set the stage, through a series of price cuts and the stabilization of markets, for millions more to be saved? Well, right, me neither.'
"The Gene Weingarten article, 'Pearls Before Breakfast,' about violinist Joshua Bell's experiment in the Washington D.C. metro originally ran in The Washington Post and won Weingarten a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. It's brilliant, and along with George Saunder's piece on Clinton, should never appear in something labeled "nonrequired." No, this reading is most certainly required. Everyone should be handed this reading at the door and quizzed upon it before they are allowed to leave.There are other amazing pieces in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. The collection opens with Marjorie Celona's "Y," a heart-breaking short story, and graphic novelist Rutu Modan's "Queen of the Scottish Fairies," a single installment from her http://www.nytimes.com/ comics column, Mixed Emotions, is absolutely brilliant - this from someone who rarely reads graphic novels or comics. And "Cake," a hard-hitting short story from Patrick Tobin on the survival of pain, both emotional and physical, will leave you doubled-over, holding your gut.Pick up a copy of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. As I said above, there's something for everybody, and with the Saunders and Weingarten essays being required anyway, you get an awful lot of bonus for your $14."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Once you choose hope, anything's possible."
~~Christopher Reeve

JANUARY 20, 2009 WAS A VERY GOOD DAY

By Bob Edwards, on the BobEdwardsRadio.com blog:
"I am absolutely overwhelmed by everything that took place on Inauguration Day and I say that as an aging cynic. My father was a lowly soldier in city machine politics. I've known from birth how the game is played, how the cards are dealt and how the deal goes down. Working in the news business for more than 40 years, my cynicism has been reinforced every day. I've seen the bright-eyed neophytes shot down, the brainy thinkers steam rolled, the truly needy cast aside with the powerless others. That's the routine of politics--that's the day-to-day reality. But then once in a great while comes a defining moment---the exception to the rule---a moment that gives you a little bit of hope that they're not all charlatans trying to line their pockets and accommodate their rich friends. Rarely---very, very rarely---comes an occasion when the cynic is moved to think there might be another way that we might be governed. I have had that feeling exactly twice. The first time was in 1960, when John F. Kennedy proclaimed that the torch had been passed to a new generation. He was talking about his generation (he was 43) but I felt he was talking about mine (I was 13). JFK made government service cool. He infused service to America with a status that a number of subsequent presidents have shot down. Federal workers have been told for years they are part of a bloated bureaucracy that's a burden on rich people trying to become richer. I think national service got a big lift at Barack Obama's inauguration. I believe that, for the first time since JFK. Obama inspired young people to give some thought to serving their fellow citizens through public service. He has sent a surge of energy into the populace unmatched since January 20, 1960. I was deeply moved by the events of Inauguration Day and I will be happy to unburden myself of decades of cynicism if this feeling lasts another week, a month or a year. I will give Obama time, because no one since FDR has been left with such a big load of crap to deal with. If he screws up, I'll give him the same treatment I've given George W. Bush. But for now, the honeymoon is underway, and who's not in the mood to enjoy a honeymoon? January 20, 2009 was a very good day. Let's hope we have many more like it!"

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family."
~~Bella Abzug

OBAMA BACKS 'RIGHT TO CHOOSE' ON ROE ANNIVERSARY

From CNN.com:
"President Obama affirmed his support for a woman's "right to choose" on Thursday, the 36th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that led to the legalization of abortion, as thousands of anti-abortion activists descended on the National Mall to challenge his position.
"Roe v. Wade 'not only protects women's health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters,' Obama said in a statement.
"The landmark 1973 decision held that a woman's right to abortion was protected by the right to privacy under the Constitution's 14th Amendment, voiding most state laws against abortion at the time."

THOUGHT FOR THE FIRST 100 DAYS

"Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win."
~~Victor Laszlo, Casablanca

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"At long last, HOPE."
~~Zztopdog

EXIT THE BOY KING

By Maureen Doud, Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times:
"It was the Instant the Earth Stood Still.
"Not since Klaatu landed in a flying saucer on the Ellipse has Washington been so mesmerized by an object whirring through the sky.
"But this one was departing, not arriving.
"As W. ceased to be president, he flew off over the Capitol and across the Mall en route to Andrews Air Force Base, and then back to Texas.
"I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands, a wave that moved westward down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, and keeping their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that green bird.
"They wanted to make absolutely, positively certain that W. was gone. It was like a physical burden being lifted, like a sigh went up of 'Thank God. Has Cheney’s wheelchair left the building, too?'
"The crowd was exuberant that George Bush was now an ex-president, and 43 himself was jovial 'the way he always is,' according to his last press secretary, Dana Perino.
"It was like a catharsis in Greek drama, with the antagonist plucked out of the scene into the sky, and the protagonist dropping into the scene to magically fix all the problems. Except Barack Obama’s somber mien and restrained oratory conveyed that he’s no divinity and there will be no easy resolution to this plot.
"It was a morning of such enormous emotion and portent — jaw-dropping, Dow-dropping and barrier-dropping — that even the cool new president had to feel daunted to see his blocks-long motorcade and two million hope-besotted faces beaming up at him, dreaming that he can save their shirts.
"The optimism was tempered by pessimism, a vibe of 'Maybe this once-in-a-lifetime guy can do it, but boy, there are a lot of never-in-our-lifetime problems here.'
"Unlike W., Obama is a realist. He knows there is the potential of letting all these blissed-out people down.
"The day had its jittery moments: Teddy Kennedy’s collapse and Robert Byrd’s distraught reaction. There was also that match of the titan smarty-pants — the new Democratic president face to face with the conservative chief justice he voted against.
"First John Roberts had to say, Easy, cowboy, after Mr. Obama jumped the gun on “I” at the start of the oath of office. Then the president, who had obviously been looking over his lines, graciously offered the chief justice a chance to correct his negligent syntax, when he put the 'faithfully' and other words out of place.
"Under the platform, near where I sat, Denzel Washington, Beyoncé, Jay-Z and P. Diddy looked on proudly as the new commander in chief showed he was in command of the script and the country.
"After thanking President Bush 'for his service to our nation,' Mr. Obama executed a high-level version of Stephen Colbert’s share-the-stage smackdown of W. at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2006.
"With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was — (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it: 'As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,' he said to wild applause (and to Bartlett’s), adding: 'Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.' He said America is choosing hope over fear, unity over discord, setting aside 'false promises' and 'childish things.'
"Letting a little air out of the highest hopes about what one man, even 'The One,' can do, he emphasized the word 'our.' He stressed that rebuilding after the wreckage of W. and Cheney will be a shared burden and that 'giving our all to a difficult task' isn’t as bad as it sounds.
"I grew up here, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen the city wholly, happily integrated, with a mood redolent of New York in the weeks after 9/11. The Obamas have made an unprecedented pledge to get involved in the real city that lies beyond the political Oz, and have already started doing so in many ways, including starting the night out at the D.C. Neighborhood Inaugural Ball.
"Downtown was a euphoric pedestrian mall of commerce and communal kindness. The patience that America is extending to Mr. Obama, according to a Times poll, was reflected across the capital, as the cram of people sparked warmth rather than antsiness.
"Strollers laughed as a peddler in a Rasta hat hawked his 'Barack Obama incense.' And revelers stepped up to a spot where you could pick out a colored magic marker and complete posters that began, 'Mr. President, I hope for ...'
"Entries ranged from 'burning less oil' to 'healthcare for all' to 'a cure for cancer”' to this lofty and entirely understandable sentiment: 'a sick inauguration party.' "

JEN'S FAVORITE MOMENT FROM THE INAUGURAL SPEECH

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. "
~~President Barack Obama, in his Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."
~~President Barack Obama, in his Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009.

INAUGURAL POEM BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

The following is a transcript of the inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, as provided by CQ transcriptions:

Praise song for the day.

'Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
"Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
"A woman and her son wait for the bus.
"A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, 'Take out your pencils. Begin.'
"We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
"We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."
"We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
"Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
"Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
"Some live by 'Love thy neighbor as thy self.'
"Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
"What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
"In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
"On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light."

THOUGHT FOR INAUGURATION DAY

Today is the day of the promise of Hope for America....

"Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. Americans know this. We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together."
~~Barack Obama, in a speech August 7, 2006

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"One... more... day.... 'The end of an error.' "
~~Zztopdog

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"When you know how to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through - even if he was serious about it."
~~Eleanor Roosevelt

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Four... more... days...."
~~Zztopdog

HE'S LEAVING. REALLY,

By Gail Collins, an op-ed column for The New York Times:
"I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.
"So far, the Bush farewell appearances have not drawn a lot of rave reviews. (Most striking, perhaps, was a critique of that final press conference from Ted Anthony of The Associated Press: 'It all felt strangely intimate and, occasionally, uncomfortable, in the manner of seeing a plumber wearing jeans that ride too low.') A Gallup poll did find that his approval rating had risen slightly since they began, but this was probably due to enthusiasm for the part about his going away.
" 'Sometimes you misunderestimated me,' Bush told the Washington press corps. This is not the first time our president has worried about misunderestimation, so it’s fair to regard this not as a slip of the tongue, but as something the president of the United States thinks is a word. The rhetoric is the one part of the administration we’re surely going to miss. We are about to enter a world in which our commander in chief speaks in full sentences, and I do not know what we’re going to do to divert ourselves on slow days.
"The White House has promised that in his final address, the president will be joined by a small group of everyday American heroes, which means that the only person on stage with a history of failing to perform well in moments of stress will be the main speaker.
"Bush is going to devote some of his time to defending his record, although there has been quite a bit of that already. Over the last few weeks we have learned that he thinks the Katrina response worked out rather well except for one unfortunate photo-op, and that he regards the fact that we invaded another country on the basis of false information as a 'disappointment.' "Since Bush also referred to the disappointments of his White House tenure as 'a minor irritant' it’s perhaps best to think of the weapons of mass destruction debacle as a pimple on the administration’s otherwise rosy complexion.
"If there’s any suspense about the speech it is how many times Bush will use the word 'freedom,' which popped up 27 times in his relatively brief second inaugural. The man who gave us Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Freedom Agenda, the USA Freedom Corps and the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has so thoroughly debased one of the most profound concepts in our national vocabulary that it’s getting hard to hear it used without remembering Janis Joplin’s line about how freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
"There are a lot of ways to approach this farewell-speech business. Ronald Reagan started with winning folksiness, then lurched into a warning against big government and a plea to raise a new generation of patriots that knows 'who Jimmy Doolittle was.' Bill Clinton’s sounded very much like a bid for a third term. ('Thirty-five million Americans have used the family leave law ...') On the other hand, anybody listening to it now would surely begin to tear up when Clinton got to the part about how he was leaving the country 'on track to be debt-free' by the end of 2009.
"History does suggest that Bush performs best in venues like this one, in which he has a long lead time and virtually no actual role in preparing the words he is about to say. But still, what could he possibly tell the country that would change anybody’s opinion about the last eight years?
" 'My fellow Americans, before I leave you next week I want you to know that ...
A) 'Although things have gone very wrong, I take comfort in the realization that Dick Cheney was actually in control from the get-go. Honest, I never even knew half the people in the cabinet.'
B) 'Laura and I have come to realize that all things considered, retirement to a mansion in Texas is just totally inappropriate. And so we take our leave to begin a new life as missionaries at a small rescue station in the Gobi desert ...'
C) 'Surprise! This has all actually been a bad dream. It’s really still November of 2000 and tomorrow Al Gore is going to be elected president.'
"Otherwise, the best possible approach for a farewell address might be for Bush to follow his father’s lead and just not give one."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Whatever they grow up to be, they are still our children, and one of the most important of all things we can give them is unconditional love. Not a love that depends on anything at all except that they are our children."
~~Rosaleen Dickson

WHAT I WANT FOR YOU AND EVERY CHILD IN AMERICA

A letter to his daughters by President-Elect Barack Obama, on the eve of his inauguration, in Parade Magazine:
"Dear Malia and Sasha:
I know that you've had a lot of fun these last two years on the campaign trail, going to picnics and parades and state fairs, eating all sorts of junk food that your mother and I probably shouldn't have let you have. But I know it hasn't always been easy for you and Mom, and that as excited as you both are about that new puppy, it doesn't make up for all the time that we've been apart. I know how much I've missed these last two years, and today I want to tell you a little more about why I decided to take our family on this journey."

To read the rest of the article, click here.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want."
~~Margaret Young

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war."
~~Albert Einstein

UNVARNISHED CONCLUSIONS AFTER COVING THE WHITE HOUSE

Review by Gary J. Bass, from Books of the Times:
"Rarely will a president enter office so thoroughly challenged on Day 1 as Mr. Obama. This dazzling and mordantly hilarious book is a history of how we got into this particular ditch. Mr. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, drops the strict detachment of a daily reporter and lets rip, delivering a withering indictment of his longtime subject: President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, which he writes 'has left us less admired by our allies, less feared by our enemies and less capable of convincing the rest of the world that our economic and political model is worthy of emulation.' "
"After seven years covering Mr. Bush, Mr. Sanger, a shrewd and insightful strategic thinker, is left stunned by 'the president’s inexplicable resistance, until the final quarter of his term in office, to changing course.' Mr. Bush, he says, saw strategic change and negotiation as signs of weakness. This is a Nixon who never went to China."
"These unvarnished conclusions by Mr. Sanger will of course confirm the perfidy that Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly presume lies in the black hearts of Times reporters. But Mr. Sanger’s criticism, the product of extraordinarily diligent reporting, is too hawkish to be easily dismissed by conservatives. He believes in putting brute military power behind diplomacy, wants to win the war in Afghanistan and hates the thought of a nuclear-armed Iran and North Korea."
"Unlike other accounts of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy, 'The Inheritance” is not about Iraq but about the crushing opportunity costs paid elsewhere for that quagmire. With America bogged down in Iraq, a rising China has expanded its global influence. Mr. Sanger reports of the peril from unsecured nuclear arsenals: “As the situation in Iraq worsened, the post-9/11 efforts to create a multilayered defense against a domestic W.M.D. attack waned.' "

Zztopdog's note: To read the rest of the article, click here.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence."
~~Philip James Bailey

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system."
~~William Booth

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
~~Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird, from the novel by Harper Lee.

THE B LIST

From The Bob Edward's Show Blog:
Bob talks with film critic David Sterritt about his book The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love. They cover the criteria Sterritt used to determine if a movie had "that B movie spirit" and the historic definition of a B movie. They discussed films that most people would not consider B movies, like Oliver Stone's Vietnam epic Platoon - Quentin Tarantino's gritty debut Reservoir Dogs - and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, which he shot in between Godfather's 1 and 2.
Then there's Peeping Tom, which ruined British director Michael Powell's career and which Sterritt says HAD to be included in the book. While it shared some taboo themes with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and was even released around the same time, Peeping Tom was not accepted by fans or critics.
Four "Film Noirs" are mentioned -- Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, Detour which was made for $20,000, the Mickey Spillane early atomic thriller Kiss Me Deadly and the Bonnie-and-Clyde-like Gun Crazy, which elicited a world-class performance by John Dall, who Sterritt calls "the worst actor in the history of the cosmos...except here."
Horror and science-fiction stories lend themselves very well to the B Movie formula. I Walked with a Zombie is a particular favorite of Sterritt's and he notes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers works both as a cautionary tale against American consumerism and as an allegory for the Red Scare. Though the original filmmakers swear they had no political message to deliver, just a thrilling movie.
David Sterritt is the chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and The B List is the group's third release. The others are The A List about essential classics and The X List about "the movies that turn us on."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."
~~Martin Luther King, Jr.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right."
~~Oprah Winfrey

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The real winners in life are the people who look at every situation with an expectation that they can make it work or make it better."
~~Barbara Pletcher

CATS KEEP LOST BOY WARM

From UPI, via Cynical-C:
"Argentine police say a destitute 1-year-old boy was kept alive by a colony of stray cats who shared food scraps and kept him warm in the city of Misiones.
"The boy, who had been missing for several days, was found by Police Officer Lorean Lindgvist, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday. 'The boy was lying at the bottom of a gutter. There were all these cats on top of him licking him because he was really dirty,' Lindgvist said. 'When I walked over, they became really protective and spat at me. They were keeping the boy warm while he slept.' Lindgvist said she noticed scraps of food near the boy and surmised 'the cats knew he was fragile and needed protecting,”' the Telegraph reported, noting doctors said the warmth of the cats saved the boy during freezing nights that could have killed him."

Zztopdog notes: Never underestimate the intelligence and emotions of animals.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife.
"The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?'
"The second was, 'Did you find joy?' "
~~ Leo Buscaglia

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
~~Milan Kundera

HONORING LEIA, A BEAUTIFUL BOXER GIRL

"He is my other eyes that can see above the clouds; my other ears that hear above the winds. He is the part of me that can reach out into the sea. He has told me a thousand times over that I am his reason for being; by the way he rests against my leg; by the way he thumps his tail at my smallest smile; by the way he shows his hurt when I leave without taking him. (I think it makes him sick with worry when he is not along to care for me.) When I am wrong, he is delighted to forgive. When I am angry, he clowns to make me smile. When I am happy, he is joy unbounded. When I am a fool, he ignores it. When I succeed, he brags. Without him, I am only another man. With him, I am all-powerful. He is loyalty itself. He has taught me the meaning of devotion. With him, I know a secret comfort and a private peace. He has brought me understanding where before I was ignorant. His head on my knee can heal my human hurts. His presence by my side is protection against my fears of dark and unknown things. He has promised to wait for me... whenever... wherever - in case I need him. And I expect I will - as I always have. He is just my dog."
~~Gene Hill

We shall all miss you, sweet Leia Lou (10/20/02 - 01/02/09).

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
~~Martin Luther King, Jr.

2008 YEAR IN REVIEW - PART 2

By Tom Tomorrow, for the Huffington Post:

THE MOST RIDICULOUS POLITICAL QUOTE OF 2008

From a blog post by Bob Cesca, on the Huffington Post:
"[T]here was one jaw-droppingly ridiculous quote that went almost entirely overlooked, perhaps because it was one of seemingly hundreds of nincompoopish displays of nincompoopery -- all of which were unforgivingly compressed into a dense, rapid-fire three months of political insanity.
"This means only one thing. The quote comes from Governor Sarah Palin.
"As I'm sure you'll recall, Sarah Palin had trouble with things like 'facts' -- specifically and most shamefully, she had no idea what the Vice President of the United States does. I mean, no clue. "Which is fine, I suppose, unless you're actually running to become, you know, the vice president. On several public occasions (I can't even imagine the verbal fumbling during private rehearsals), she was specifically asked to describe the job and I'm reasonably certain she never once got it right. For example: '...a Vice President has a really great job, because no only are they there to support the President agenda, they're like a team member, the team mate to that President. But also, they're in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the Senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it's a great job and I look forward to having that job.'
"Yeah, it sounds like a great job, if she had been running for Senate Majority Leader, that is.
"And during the vice presidential debate -- the vice presidential debate! -- she was asked to describe the role of the vice president, and this was one of her two answers: 'Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.'
"What about that agenda and there also? Cooperative with the president's... whah? And yet the post-debate conventional wisdom was that she somehow nailed it. Mark Halperin gave her a "B" and wrote: '...she succeeded enormously. She had a solid 90 minutes of rapid, confident discourse... didn't leave Tina Fey much to work with.'
"Yeah, she couldn't accurately or coherently describe the job for which she was campaigning, but since she didn't choke on her own tongue, well then, great success! And as for Tina Fey? The vice presidential debate sketch was probably the funniest of the year. Good call, Halperin.
"But that wasn't the worst of it. Here now, The Most Ridiculous Political Quote of the Year, courtesy of Sarah Palin on October 4, 2008:
'Q: One of the things you talked about last night was the flexibility the vice president has-- 'PALIN: Yeah.
'Q: --Uh. What did you mean by that?
'PALIN: Uh. That thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it's constitutional -- vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible, but it's gonna be those other duties as assigned by the president. A simple thing.'
"That last sort-of sentence -- 'a simple thing' -- was actually correct, believe it or not. The vice president's job description, according to the Constitution, is an extraordinarily simple thing. Which, consequently, makes it unbelievably difficult to butcher. Like Sarah Palin did. Multiple times. But in this instance, on the FOX News Channel with Carl Cameron, she couldn't even form actual sentences using words that line up to form a coherent thought. In fact, I would love to see the sentence structure for 'vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible.' Position flexible?
"That she wasn't summarily laughed off of the national stage right then and there is a testament to the forgiveness of horny middle-aged white Republican men. Yes, in 2008 the Republicans nominated for vice president a person who on multiple occasions couldn't accurately say: The vice president breaks ties in the Senate, and succeeds the president if he or she is killed or incapacitated. Instead we got something about 'position flexible' and a lot of winking.
"And she's already being championed as a favorite for the Senate in 2010 -- not to mention as a serious contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. This naturally means we'll get to hear more from Sarah Palin for many years to come as a de facto leader of the Republican Party. We can only hope that she'll be asked to describe these jobs many, many times along the way.
"Happy New Year Position Flexible There Also!"
BobCesca

2008 YEAR IN REVIEW - PART 1

By Tom Tommorrow, for the Huffington Post:

THOUGHT FOR NEW YEAR'S DAY

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."
~~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

THOUGHT FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man."
~~Benjamin Franklin

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"There are two ways of meeting difficulties; you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them."
~~Phyllis Bottome

NEW CAR FOR SWANNY

If you saw the post, a week or so ago, with a picture of Greg's wrecked car , you know that he needed to get a new one. He was fortunate enough to find a used 2008 Prius, at the local Toyota dealer. He and Jen each test drove it, and then bought it. It's a very cool green color. Emy wanted that particular color because "green is one of her four, very favorite colors."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"I am only one. But still, I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something."
~~Helen Keller

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me."
~~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

CHENEY'S LEGACY OF DECEPTION

By Robert Scheer, in a column on June 26, 2002:
"Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman circus, drawing the people's attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal."

Zztopdog's note: Robert Scheer is author of a new book, "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us."

~~Robert Louis Stevenson

AN OPEN LETTER TO CONSERVATIVES

From Anne McCrady, of InSpirity:
"(Dear) Conservative America,
"I know many people are stunned by the loss of presidential candidate John McCain, and his running mate Sarah Palin, and the victory of President-elect Barak Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden. Many 0f you may think we 'liberals' are dangerous. You may even feel your country is in deep trouble. In angry and fearful voices, some are already saying, 'They will never take away our guns…our rights…our freedom…our wealth!'
"If you are one of those worried about what this election means for America, here’s food for thought on some important issues:
*Politics - Don’t worry…unless you think our country belongs to someone besides its people
*Security – Don’t worry… unless you care more about your safety than the safety of the whole world
*Foreign Policy – Don’t worry… unless you value violence over the power of words and ideas
*Wealth – Don’t worry… unless you disagree with rewarding honest work and ethical investment
*Healthcare - Don’t worry… unless you believe there are people who don’t deserve a doctor’s care
*Education – Don’t worry… unless you think some children should have to follow their dreams without an education
*Energy – Don’t worry… unless you would rather have cheap gas now than energy resources in the future
*Environmentalists - Don’t worry…unless you don’t really care about the Earth we give our children
*Guns – Don’t worry… unless you would be willing to use a gun to get your way
*Religion – Don’t worry… unless you want to take away someone else’s God
*Race - Don’t worry…unless you believe your family heritage is superior to all others
*Elitism - Don’t worry…unless you have your own sense of being better than someone else
*Morals - Don’t worry… unless you support people who don’t have any
"If this election didn’t go your way, if you feel angry or frightened or sad, open your hearts to this: Barak Obama is calling us to face down our fears, resist the temptation to hate, draw on our faith in each other and be our best selves as Americans! This is a historic time for us–all of us. Let’s believe that no matter how much we disagree, we can have a conversation. Let’s try to understand that the things that upset us can also teach us. Let’s embrace the politics of possibility and, like Esther in the Old Testament, who was called to lead her people, believe that we were 'made for such a time as this!'
"When We Rise to the Occasion, We Can Be a Blessing!"

THOUGHT FOR CHRISTMAS DAY

"What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace."
~~ Agnes M. Pahro

CHRISTMAS FROM LOL CATS

A Christmas cutie from LOLCats:

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The joy of life is the forward road...."
~~Tertius Van Dyke

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Democracy is an objective. Democratization is a process. Democratization serves the cause of peace because it offers the possibility of justice and of progressive change without force."
~~Boutros Boutros-Ghali

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"He was a person who, if he did not exactly love change, had learned to welcome it, to stand in the shifting winds with a continuous alert curiosity about whatever might come next. I think this is the secret...of a different sort of youthfulness...."
~~Mark Doty

A THANK YOU NOTE ADDRESSED "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN"

By Richard Eskow, on A Night Light:

Zztopdog's note: Originally written for Thanksgiving, this message seems equally appropriate for Christmas and the new year.

"A lot of subjects flashed through my mind when I was invited to write a Thanksgiving piece for the Huffington Post. The slow, corrosive effects of greed. The holiday celebrations of Wall Street CEOs, golden parachutes rippling in the wind, and those of Americans who can't find work through no fault of their own. The generosity of the Native American who took in a group of dying settlers, saving them and losing his land in the process.
"Or the story of a family that, like so many squatters and relatives, took over a house that they were only meant to occupy for a short while. Pretty soon they started acting like they owned the place, like they could do whatever they want with it - change it around, share it with their friends, leave a mess for others to clean up ...
"You know. The Bushes.
"Then there's the irony-rich first set of pardons the President issued this week. I mean, he actually pardoned someone convicted of ... killing bald eagles. What writer wouldn't give thanks for material like that?
"But now doesn't seem like the time for negativity, or sarcasm, or snark. We're facing a crisis whose proportions we have yet to fully comprehend. As hackneyed as it may sound, this seems like a time for thinking positively. It seems like a time for putting aside old resentments and rivalries, a time for doing all we can. And like the old Elvis Costello song says, I'm not angry anymore.
"So I thought about positive topics. John Lennon, for example, or the land that nurtures us (and which too many of us forget to thank.)
"Or Gary Snyder, the poet laureate of this continent. In 1968 he called the single-family house 'a box to capture the biped in,' and this crisis shows how prophetic that comment was. A hundred million Americans enslaved to their mortgages. On a recent road trip I drove through Bakersfield, one of the hardest-hit real estate markets in California. 'We have cash buyers,' one billboard said.
"There's a lot of human misery behind a sign like that. I thought I might give thanks for those who warned us that misery was coming, and who might show us the way out of it.
"Then there's General Carter Ham. This four-star commander had the courage to admit publicly that he suffers from PTSD. Hopefully that will encourage more people in the military to come forward and seek help. Maybe it will help others in society do the same. Mental illness is stigmatized in a way that physical illness isn't, and that's wrong. That stigma's the result of our failure to understand that mind and body are a continuum, a matrix, an interconnected whole. It's an artifact of outmoded Manichean beliefs. Thank you, Gen. Ham.
"It's also worth giving thanks just for the extraordinary privilege of being alive, for the chiarascuro unexpectedness of this existence and all its endlessly fascinating facets. You name it, we've got it: spiral galaxies and Art Deco and film noir and Boltzmann brains. We've even got 70's era garage-rock and country music from the Golden Triangle of Burma. Who could've thought up Lashio Thein Aung, the "Burmese Texan"? Or any of the other stuff we come across every day, if we bother to look?
"That's the great thing about reality: it's endlessly inventive.
"(Boltzmann brains are a theoretical possibility - living intelligences that appear randomly from the fluctuations of the universe, look around for an instant of self-awareness, that disappear back in the flux of existence.)
" 'The way to know God is to love many things,' said Van Gogh. I'd thank God, but I don't believe in an anthropomorphic deity. Another kind? Maybe. I use the word 'God' sometimes, but I'm just as happy to address my thanks to Her, Him, or Current Occupant. Or None of the Above. And I'm especially thankful for the beauty of mathematical laws. Want to say a prayer of admiration and thanksgiving to the universe? Here's one way: First, solve for x ...
"What epitaph would you put on your tombstone? I think I might like this one: 'Wow, that was interesting.' Because it is pretty damn interesting, even if our allotted span isn't all that much longer than a Boltzmann brain's.
"I can't shake the feeling that something big is happening in the world right now. Something really big. I don't know if it will be bad or good - or maybe it will be bad at first and then be good later. It works out that way sometimes. Or maybe I'm wrong, and a bunch of small things will keep happening one after another like they've been doing all along. But however it plays out, it will be interesting. And it will be a privilege to play whatever small part I'm assigned in dealing with it, shoulder to shoulder with everybody else. Because we'll be facing it together, in our common humanity and common membership in the web of living things.
"That includes all of us, even those CEOs and the family in that big house.
"So here's my shot of gratitude to you, Interconnected Universe. Or God, if I may call you that. If that doesn't work, I'll just direct this to 'what is.' Names don't really matter, and maybe I've got no business talking about this stuff anyway. I certainly can't claim any special insight. But on this 27th of November in 2008, for the record, and to whom it may concern: Thanks."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts."
~~Pam Houston

THANKFUL

I'm thankful for Toyota's attention to safety in the design and manufacture of its vehicles. After a rear-end crash, at highway speeds, Swanny's Rav 4 took the beating; Swanny's body did not. Swanny was taken to the hospital, but walked out on his own with only a cut on top of his head. Unfortunately, the Rav 4, is a loss. But Swanny is not.
And for that, we are all very thankful.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
~~Kris Kristofferson

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

From a not-quite-four-year-old drama queen with Pink Eye:
"While Emy was brushing her teeth tonight she said,
'I don't think my eyes will be white ever again!' "

UNDERSTANDING FLOW CHARTS

From XKCD - A Webcomic

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition." ~~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

LIST OF COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS

From Cynical-C:
Wikipedia’s giant list of common misconceptions.

Zztopdog's note: Be prepared to spend hours once you look at this fascinating list.

IRONY THY NAME IS LIMBAUGH

By Tom Tomorrow, from This Modern World:
"Rush Limbaugh, who spent much of the primary season urging Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton in order to prolong uncertainty among Democrats (he called it 'Operation Chaos'), is now complaining that John McCain became the Republican candidate due to Democrats and Independents voting in the Republican primary."

THE BUSH YEARS

From Salon.com

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The important thing is not to stop questioning."

~~Albert Einstein

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

~~Albert Einstein

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, wheather sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
~~Dwight D. Eisenhower

By James Glanz and T. Christian Miller in The New York Times:
"An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
"The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
"In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department 'kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ '
"Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
"Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale."
Read the rest of this article here.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world."
~~James Baldwin

RUMSFELD RESPONSIBLE FOR DETAINEE ABUSE

By Joby Warwick, The Washington Post:
"A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.
"'The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own,' the panel concludes. 'The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.'
"The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) and John McCain (R-Arizona) and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of the United States and undermined national security. 'Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority,' it said.
"The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's use of controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
"'The Committee's report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody,' McCain, himself a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said in a statement. 'These policies are wrong and must never be repeated.'
"White House officials have maintained the measures were approved in response to demands from field officers who complained that traditional interrogation methods weren't working on some of the more hardened captives. But Senate investigators, relying on documents and hours of hearing testimony, arrived at a different conclusion.
"The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the report said, was a memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Convention's standards for humane treatment did not apply to captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. As early as that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support that conclusion.
"In July 2002, Rumseld's senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques - borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE - included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war.
"The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says. In the field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found.
"'It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiers and that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel,' the report said.
"Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that 'SERE training techniques were designed to give our troops a taste of what they might be subjected to if captured by a ruthless, lawless enemy so that they would be better prepared to resist. The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody.'
Defenders of the techniques have argued that such measures were justified because of al-Qaeda's demonstrated disregard for human life. But the panel members cited the views of Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, who in a May 2007 letter to his troops said humane treatment of prisoners allows Americans to occupy the moral high ground.
"'Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right,' wrote Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. 'Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy.'"

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"To look up and not down,
To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in -
To lend a hand!"
~~Edward Everett Hale

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
~~F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the blog, People Reading:

Taking a break from work, Reading Blindness, by José Saramago. A friend had recommended it as a really great book. He's only just begun, but agrees!His favorite authors -- Jane Austen and Michael Chabon. It was Michael Chabon who got him reading again and Jane Austen, he admires. He admires that she lived at home with her parents and he admires the women in her stories who fight against marriage.Before this he was rereading Michael Crichton books--the author passed away from cancer at age 66 last month. He really liked Chrichton's earlier books, but put down State of Fear about 2/3 of the way through--he disagreed with the premise that our fear of global warming is bogus.
What authors do you admire--their lives, not just their books?

Zztopdog's note: If you have not checked out the People Reading blog, do so; it's facinating.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

What is more hilarious than a big, black wig on a little 6-month-old boy?
Absolutely nothing!


Many thanks to his sitter for the wonderful picture!

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Ratio of Americans who die from tobacco-related illnesses each year to the number who are murdered : 17:1 .
~~September issue of Harper's Index

From Who Hijacked Our Country:
"Everyone’s having a field day with the Indian Navy’s little blooper. They thought they were sinking a Somali pirate ship, but it turned out they had actually just sunk a Thai fishing boat that the pirates had seized. Heeheeheeheehee.
"Now, as long as we’re having fun with military bloopers and blunders committed by third world governments, here’s a real kneeslapper: (Technically, the following unnamed country isn’t part of the Third World. They have the largest, most advanced and most omnipresent military force in the world. But in terms of infrastructure, education, competence level among government leaders — we’re talking Third World all the way.)
"Anyway, on September 11th, 2001, this country suffered an unprovoked, brutal attack by a gang of terrorists. The country planned its retaliation very carefully and deliberately. The government spent a year and a half collecting intelligence, analyzing data, finding out which country most of the attackers were from and which country was the most closely aligned with the attackers’ organization. And then — they attacked the wrong country!"

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"When you are kind to someone in trouble,
you hope they'll remember and be kind to someone else.
And it becomes like a wildfire."
~~ Whoopi Goldberg

SAVING THE BIG 3 FOR YOU AND ME

A message from Michael Moore:

"Friends,
"I drive an American car. It's a Chrysler. That's not an endorsement. It's more like a cry for pity. And now for a decades-old story, retold ad infinitum by tens of millions of Americans, a third of whom have had to desert their country to simply find a damn way to get to work in something that won't break down:
"My Chrysler is four years old. I bought it because of its smooth and comfortable ride. Daimler-Benz owned the company then and had the good grace to place the Chrysler chassis on a Mercedes axle and, man, was that a sweet ride!
"When it would start.
"More than a dozen times in these years, the car has simply died. Batteries have been replaced, but that wasn't the problem. My dad drives the same model. His car has died many times, too. Just won't start, for no reason at all.
"A few weeks ago, I took my Chrysler in to the Chrysler dealer here in northern Michigan -- and the latest fixes cost me $1,400. The next day, the vehicle wouldn't start. When I got it going, the brake warning light came on. And on and on.
"You might assume from this that I couldn't give a rat's ass about these miserably inept crapmobile makers down the road in Detroit city. But I do care. I care about the millions whose lives and livelihoods depend on these car companies. I care about the security and defense of this country because the world is running out of oil -- and when it runs out, the calamity and collapse that will take place will make the current recession/depression look like a Tommy Tune musical.
"And I care about what happens with the Big 3 because they are more responsible than almost anyone for the destruction of our fragile atmosphere and the daily melting of our polar ice caps.
Congress must save the industrial infrastructure that these companies control and the jobs they create. And it must save the world from the internal combustion engine. This great, vast manufacturing network can redeem itself by building mass transit and electric/hybrid cars, and the kind of transportation we need for the 21st century.
"And Congress must do all this by NOT giving GM, Ford and Chrysler the $34 billion they are asking for in "loans" (a few days ago they only wanted $25 billion; that's how stupid they are -- they don't even know how much they really need to make this month's payroll. If you or I tried to get a loan from the bank this way, not only would we be thrown out on our ear, the bank would place us on some sort of credit rating blacklist).
"Two weeks ago, the CEOs of the Big 3 were tarred and feathered before a Congressional committee who sneered at them in a way far different than when the heads of the financial industry showed up two months earlier. At that time, the politicians tripped over each other in their swoon for Wall Street and its Ponzi schemers who had concocted Byzantine ways to bet other people's money on unregulated credit default swaps, known in the common vernacular as unicorns and fairies.
"But the Detroit boys were from the Midwest, the Rust (yuk!) Belt, where they made real things that consumers needed and could touch and buy, and that continually recycled money into the economy (shocking!), produced unions that created the middle class, and fixed my teeth for free when I was ten.
"For all of that, the auto heads had to sit there in November and be ridiculed about how they traveled to D.C. Yes, they flew on their corporate jets, just like the bankers and Wall Street thieves did in October. But, hey, THAT was OK! They're the Masters of the Universe! Nothing but the best chariots for Big Finance as they set about to loot our nation's treasury.
Of course, the auto magnates used to be the Masters who ruled the world. They were the pulsating hub that all other industries -- steel, oil, cement contractors -- served. Fifty-five years ago, the president of GM sat on that same Capitol Hill and bluntly told Congress, what's good for General Motors is good for the country. Because, you see, in their minds, GM WAS the country.
What a long, sad fall from grace we witnessed on November 19th when the three blind mice had their knuckles slapped and then were sent back home to write an essay called, "Why You Should Give Me Billions of Dollars of Free Cash." They were also asked if they would work for a dollar a year. Take that! What a big, brave Congress they are! Requesting indentured servitude from (still) three of the most powerful men in the world. This from a spineless body that won't dare stand up to a disgraced president nor turn down a single funding request for a war that neither they nor the American public support. Amazing.
"Let me just state the obvious: Every single dollar Congress gives these three companies will be flushed right down the toilet. There is nothing the management teams of the Big 3 are going to do to convince people to go out during a recession and buy their big, gas-guzzling, inferior products. Just forget it. And, as sure as I am that the Ford family-owned Detroit Lions are not going to the Super Bowl -- ever -- I can guarantee you, after they burn through this $34 billion, they'll be back for another $34 billion next summer.
"So what to do? Members of Congress, here's what I propose:
1. Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address. And because we are facing a massive economic, energy and environmental crisis, the new president and Congress must do what Franklin Roosevelt did when he was faced with a crisis (and ordered the auto industry to stop building cars and instead build tanks and planes): The Big 3 are, from this point forward, to build only cars that are not primarily dependent on oil and, more importantly to build trains, buses, subways and light rail (a corresponding public works project across the country will build the rail lines and tracks). This will not only save jobs, but create millions of new ones.
2. You could buy ALL the common shares of stock in General Motors for less than $3 billion. Why should we give GM $18 billion or $25 billion or anything? Take the money and buy the company! (You're going to demand collateral anyway if you give them the "loan," and because we know they will default on that loan, you're going to own the company in the end as it is. So why wait? Just buy them out now.)
3. None of us want government officials running a car company, but there are some very smart transportation geniuses who could be hired to do this. We need a Marshall Plan to switch us off oil-dependent vehicles and get us into the 21st century.
This proposal is not radical or rocket science. It just takes one of the smartest people ever to run for the presidency to pull it off. What I'm proposing has worked before. The national rail system was in shambles in the '70s. The government took it over. A decade later it was turning a profit, so the government returned it to private/public hands, and got a couple billion dollars put back in the treasury.
"This proposal will save our industrial infrastructure -- and millions of jobs. More importantly, it will create millions more. It literally could pull us out of this recession.
In contrast, yesterday General Motors presented its restructuring proposal to Congress. They promised, if Congress gave them $18 billion now, they would, in turn, eliminate around 20,000 jobs. You read that right. We give them billions so they can throw more Americans out of work. That's been their Big Idea for the last 30 years -- layoff thousands in order to protect profits. But no one ever stopped to ask this question: If you throw everyone out of work, who's going to have the money to go out and buy a car?
"These idiots don't deserve a dime. Fire all of them, and take over the industry for the good of the workers, the country and the planet.
"What's good for General Motors IS good for the country. Once the country is calling the shots."

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.comMichaelMoore.com

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us daily."
~~Sally Koch

THE REAL JOURNALISTS

From The Bob Edwards Show blog:
"Christiane Amanpour is my guest on Thursday's program to draw attention to "Scream Bloody Murder," her riveting documentary about genocide--and also to celebrate her 25 years of going to the worst places in the world on behalf of CNN. Christiane is a brave, dedicated and indefatigable journalist who has covered wars, famines, and disasters all over the world. A person seeing her arrive in his or her town must figure calamity is imminent.
"Christiane is also on TV, and people on TV are easily caricatured. She is an international"star," a celebrity for whom heads of state would cancel important meetings just to meet her. She is attractive--men all over the world desire her and some women want to BE her. She is paid extremely well, gets the best tables at restaurants, airlines upgrade her, cabbies will not take her money, there are freebies and perks aplenty. Yet I would not dream of trading my life for hers.
"I have one of the cushiest jobs in all of broadcasting. I don't make Christiane's dough, but I'm doing more than all right. I work with a staff of smart, talented, funny colleagues whose company I enjoy. Sirius XM executives do not tell me how to do my job. My working environment is sheltered from the elements and despite its location in a changing neighborhood, I've not yet been under fire. There was a time 35 years ago when I might have sought adventure, then I got married, had children and turned chicken. I wanted no part of war when I was in the army, why should I pursue it as a civilian? Other journalists do and we are all in their debt.
It is the responsibility of journalists to bear witness. Very bad things happen when journalists are not around. No journalist witnessed My Lai or Abu Ghraib, but word leaked and journalists caught up with the facts. How many My Lais or Abu Ghraibs have there been when the word didn't leak? How many atrocities were averted because someone knew a journalist was nearby? Journalists also need to be there to record the bravery of our men and women in uniform and the positive work that they do.
"To get those stories, many other brave Americans--journalists--risk their lives. Daniel Pearl wanted us to know more about the war on terrorism and became one of its victims. Ernie Pyle, one of the most famous war correspondents of all time, was killed on Okinawa. Robert Capa survived the Normandy beach only to step on a land mine in Vietnam. George Polk was a U.S. soldier in World War II and later was hired by Edward R. Murrow at CBS to cover the civil war in Greece where he was assassinated. The list of news people killed covering wars is a very, very long one. It nearly got longer last weekend.
"My former colleague, NPR's Ivan Watson, was doing interviews for a story on security in Baghdad. Returning to his car parked at a marketplace, Ivan and his Iraqi staff were pulled away by Iraqi police officers who'd received a tip that a bomb had been attached to the car. Then the car exploded---and fortunately no one was hurt. Ivan not only was spared, but he certainly learned something about security in Baghdad.
"Many other of my NPR comrades have been in danger. Neal Conan was Saddam Hussein's prisoner in the Persian Gulf War. Deborah Amos and John Hockenberry had very close calls in Iran. NPR reporters were under fire or under detention in Central America in the 80's. Anne Garrels was one of the very few American reporters to stay in Iraq when the U.S. started bombing prior to the invasion. She risked her life to hide a forbidden satellite telephone so she could talk to me each day on Morning Edition. Sylvia Poggioli and Tom Gjelten saw things in Bosnia that no human should have to endure--and journalists there were major targets of snipers who didn't want that story reported. Reporters put themselves in danger so that we would know what was going on. They put themselves in danger so that I wouldn't have to do that job and I could be comfortable in my air-conditioned studio.
"For all I know, CNN might have a dozen or so commandos whose job is to keep Christiane Amanpour alive--to protect CNN's investment. I probably should have asked her that question when I interviewed her, but no matter. She still goes---she's there for every example of man's inhumanity to man--and God bless her for that. Whatever they're paying her, it's not enough."
Bob

PUSHING ON A STRING

From Badtux, the Snarky Penquin:
"Helicopter Ben has been printing money with all the fervant abandon of a Weimar Republic finance minister. Anybody see anything that looks like economic recovery anywhere in sight?
Pushing on a string, folks. Pushing on a string. If the money isn't making it into the pockets of people willing to spend it (i.e. ordinary people who need jobs), you're just pushing on a string. Money that just sits in bank vaults (or 1's and 0's in their computers nowdays) ain't doing diddly to keep people employed and keep factories rolling."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and genuine to the bad and counterfeit."
~~ Samuel Johnson

WHY NO ONE SHOULD BUY PRESENTS THIS YEAR

By Kira Craft, on The Huffington Post:
Last week, Black Friday heralded the unofficial kickoff of the 2008 winter holiday shopping frenzy. Despite the economic chill in the air and the Ghost of Christmas Future in our peripheral vision, determined consumers gathered to snag special deals from anxious retailers who opened stores as early as 12:01 a.m. for these stoic souls. While it appears that sales have gotten off to a robust start, analysts warn holiday buying enthusiasm may fade once doorbuster deals peter out. Hallelujah!
Call me Scrooge if you want, but I think that no one should buy holiday presents this year. Materialism has been on a rampage for too long in this country- it deserves a time-out and we deserve an extended vacation from it. There's something really wrong with how the holiday season has been transformed from communal celebration into gift competition. Is there anything more valuable in life than our time and what we choose to do with it? The last thing I feel like using mine up on is running around searching for presents that are supposed to prove my love.
This year my goal is to be present instead of giving presents. My focus for the holiday season is to have fun and connect with loved ones instead of worrying about what to buy everyone. There isn't a single material thing I've ever received that could compare to time well-spent with friends. Though I've been nurturing this philosophy for years it's a particularly gratifying belief right now because it's become so socially acceptable. As the economic downturn affects us all there has been a perceptible shift in American sentiment towards acquisition. This year it's finally cool to give from the heart instead of the wallet, and I say hooray!
A shining example of promoting a return to tradition was Oprah's "Favorite Things" episode-- her focus was on bringing real meaning back to the holidays. While some people grumbled that the thriftiness of the show was depressing, I found it refreshing that she challenged people to actually think about meaning and authenticity. And check out a website called www.NoChristmasGiftsThisYear.com- it helps you create fun, customizable e- cards to send to friends and relatives that offer them the gift of time instead of money.
This year Americans are planning to spend an average of $431 on gifts for the holiday season. This is down almost 50% from 2007, an indicator of just how tight times are getting. So why not declare a no-gift Christmas/ Chanukah/ Kwanzaa, etc. and save your money for a better use than presents which decorate the basement? The act of emphasizing creativity, thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit this holiday season is a win/win situation: it yields both great personal dividends and helps keep your bank account positive.