Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Max Cleland

Secretary of the Interior

Julia Hill

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
You see her work in the opening credits to Miami Vice.

Secretary of Labor

Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont

And God saw how good it was Gen. 1 v 10 NAB

I'll bite.

Death by dehydration is inhumane

I would have killed her another way.
"After all that long period of time in a coma, I think she would qualify."
----
For the record, Terri was not in a coma for a long period of time.

In Cash We Trust

Q: So what's your point?
A: Brace yourself.

Nat Hentoff on Terri Schiavo on DN

Democracy Now! site
"The Longest Public Execution in American History"

Terri Schiavo on Karen Ann Quinlan

Where there is life, there is hope.
CNN1 CNN2

I kept my promise

What promise was that?

Planned Parenthood

Actually, UnPlanned Parenthood.
Or, Planned UnParenthood.

Should the Police enforce the Ten Commandments?

Why? For religious reasons?
I thought the idea was that you should want to be good.

For civic reasons? One of the constraints is that it becomes impractical to have more than 2 to 3% of the population in jail at any one time. The laws need to conform to the world's priorities: justice without fanacticism. The police are not out to change to world, as the socialists and the Panthers have noted. Mostly live and let live, with the occasional exception.

If My peoplewho are called by My name

will humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

And ye shall know that I am the LORD when I have wrought with you for my name's sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor according to your corrupt doings, O ye house of Israel, saith the Lord GOD. Ez 20:44

Director of Homeland Security

Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane

Secretary of Agriculture

Michael Pollan
author of Botany of Desire.

Secretary of Education

Jonathan Kozol (wiki)

Secretary of Energy

James Howard Kunstler.
We may be running out of oil. Ya think?

Good reporter

Something
The Putin Doctrine: the defense of Russia is my highest constitutional duty

Secretary of the Treasury

Robert Shiller of Yale.
He is concerned about ranges of income per person,
or John Edwards's "Two Americas".

Who decides if an education is equal

Who decides what constitutes an equal school? We compel a child to go to school for 12 years; what is the compelling interest in making him go to a particular school?
----
The case in Seattle has to do a system where students choose their school. When too many parents want to send their child to one school, can the school board use race as a factor making school assignments?

As if this were the big stumbling block.
How about: Let blacks go where ever they want for the next 200 years.

The next big thing

Pink Slips
at Wal*Mart

Secretary of Defense

Making soap in Kandahar.
Sarah Chayes's Arghand.

Her story of the life, and death, of Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal is The Punishment of Virtue.

The Collapse of Iraq

is hundreds of times worse than the collapse of the towers.
600k dead vs 3k dead, plus years of danger and chaos.

What I expect from government

1. No secrets
2. The right to bear cameras
3. Checks and balances
4. Stable curency
5. Law enforcement
6. Protect the commons

National Goals

1. Defense
    a. export oil
    b. no national debt
    c. regional farming
2. Public health

Ensure the CIA interrogators have the tools they need to keep our country safe

[Bush's statement]
Let the marines conduct the interrogations.
They seem willing to abide by the Geneva convention.

AWOL - how does he do it

Connections. Plus charm?

The Torture President

The Geneva convention prohibits outrages upon personal dignity.

Bush says every CIA interrogation may violate this restriction. Unless the Congress clarifies what this restriction means, he will be forced to shut the program down completely.

more from the New Yorker, on the push-back against torture.

more from the Voice, that Bush is protecting himself from Hamdan.

War against terra-firma

"Bush's job was to hunt down and kill the architect of the Twin Towers/Pentagon/PA bombings."

So what we are doing in Iraq?

The end of so-called Iraq

Terrorist training camp discovered Six murdered

The six Jesuits were murdered on Nov. 16, 1989 in El Salvador.
The murderers were trained at The School of the Americas,
at Fort Benning, Georgia.
----
Other Lands have Dreams. Kathy Kelly

Return of the Ghost Dance

It may be time for us to place our hopes in the Ghost Dance.

Rumsfeld orders "No post-war planning"

from the Buffalo News
But in 1989, 2,000 U.S. reinforcements were flown in to help establish order, in Panama. Maintaining order was part of the plan in Panama.

Shock without awe

I am shocked, but not in awe.

Rice, Bush, and Cheney are incompetent.
They ignored clear warnings before 9-11.
No law prevented Rice from talking to both the FBI and to the CIA.
Or from talking to Richard Clark. Clinton warned Bush in person.

Andrea Mitchell, reporting on NBC from outside the Pentagon on 9-11 at 10am, said that Osama was a prime suspect, based on similarity to the east African embassy bombings.

You are either with us or against us

Against.

A bad president

A bad president may be what we need.
I hope so.

Seymour Hersh and Iran

Reporter for the New Yorker.
Seen on Democracy Now! talking about our plans for Iran

Coming to a city near you

The DOE is playing with the idea of a reprocessing plant.

Kindness

The only thing that makes any sense.

The opposite of love

Indifference.

The Big Bang

Not even nothing is forever.

Brown v Board

Brown overturned Plessy in part, and affirmed it in part.
It overturned "separate"; it affirmed "equal".

Stop the War

James Kunstler and Y2K

James Kunstler, otherwise wonderful, feels that the Y2K problem was averted by busy programmers[July 10th]. He must think that there were no Y2K problems in China, Borneo, Mexico, and France because all the clever programmers in those countries found and fixed all those bugs. Clearly this is a false belief, but, well, no one is perfect.

Another false belief: The Y2K bug had a "deadline" of the night of Dec 31st 1999, presumably as the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour hand all crept or swept by the "12". Not so, as all you cognoscenti are aware. The "mess" caused by the ambiguity in deciding whether one date is before or after another date when the century is not specified was already half over at that point. The first half of the bugs, the forward looking comparisions, had all just begun to start working properly again(!) at that point, and the second set, the backward looking comparisons, had just started to malfunction.

A factor that helped enormously: modern databases have a special "date" data type, that does store the century. Applications using databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Access, ...) had limited exposure to the bug.

A picture is worth a thousand lies

Free-range grass-fed Bison?
Not hardly.
CAFO.

Polyface

Sustainable farming.
See The Omnivore's Dilema, a wonderful, subversive, eye-opeing book about farming.

Etymology of tut-tut

tut-tut, British.
Means "not tat tall" and is possibly derived, by elision, from it.
The british pronounce their t's as t's, not d's. Explosively.

What did Terri want?

She wanted a divorce.

The Great Wall

What would it cost to have Mexicans
build us a wall like this?

Were FDR's PWA and WPA insults?

Not to the people they employed.

The Eleven Commandments

John 13:34 (NIV)
A new command I give you: Love one another.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

Charming, Controlling, Violent

Whose wives were leaving them.
Gossip in Buffalo: OJ was into cocaine.

Life vs. The pursuit of happiness

These people worship me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.

There will be no axis of symmetry

Vegetables are off the table.
Sean McCormack, above, chastised Venezuela today for attempting to intimidate Ambassador Brownfield in Caracas. McCormick previously cautioned that our response to provocation is "going to be serious, strong and asymmetric."

"We will not be intimidated by fruits and vegetables" U.S. Embassy spokesman, Brian Penn, said.

The Tupamaros, fingered by Brownfield, denied throwing fruit.

WMD reported uncovered in Iraq

Reports circulate today that WMD have been located in Iraq. The Judge in the Moussaoui trial in the Eastern District of Virginia instructed the jury March 30th that planes can be considered weapons of mass desctruction when used as missles and flown into buildings.

Uncovered were uncontroverted evidence of weaponized planes in Iraq capable of being flown into buildings. It is widely held within the administration that other planes remain undiscoverd.

Suppression of pictures #5

The US Military today "was outraged" today by the posting of a video claiming to show Iraqi insurgents dragging the burning body of a U.S. pilot on the ground after the crash of an Apache helicopter.
They did not protest the shooting down of the helicopter, the setting the pilot on fire, or the dragging of the burning body.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Moussaoui jurors were instructed [Reuters] that a plane qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction when used as a missle.

This means that a missle is a weapon of mass destruction,
and that a plane is dual use technology.

The impact of this line of reasoning on the size of the threat from weapons of mass destruction has not yet been outlined. Presumably, any country with box cutters could be considered to have a program to acquire weapons of mass destruction, if, in addition to the box cutters, we have reason to believe that they are bad people.