Yay, Cap'n Sally! Gosh, all this Uranian energy. And I must say that, while the teachings of Buddha and Jesus are virtually identical in terms of how we should treat each other, I prefer Buddhism primarily because there is no "God" hanging around demanding to be worshipped, obeyed, etc. It's just us, alone in our little boats yet together with all the others in this vast sea, figuring it out as we go along (existentialism anyone?), trying to blend perfectly with the universe. Many thanks for all you do for us, Cap'n Sally, including allowing this quiet space where we can gather our little boats together.

Great column Sally - you've told it like it is!

Darn it, shylurker, I wanted to be first to respond to Sally. LOL

Sally,I don't think I've ever heard you so angry and it completely reflects how I feel too. Powerful article.

Re: 8/9/10 mutable signs. My asc is 8 Pisces and Saturn is 9 Sag.

Uranus in action: My 16-year-old nephew was unexpectedly dumped by his girlfriend yesterday. Uranus was sitting exactly on his 7th house cusp. He's heartbroken.

Hi Sally, I'm running out ... and am looking forward to sitting down and enjoying your article later ... in the meantime ...

Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
by Lou Dubose, TomPaine.com

The sordid tale of how Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff greased the wheels to keep a for-profit American labor gulag humming.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050512/two_amigos_and_their_gulag_archipelago.php

Great article Sally - as usual. My family and I are constantly walking around with our mouths open in amazement because we cannot believe how little people in the U.S. care that we are rapidly hurtling backwards towards the dark ages and not doing more to stop it. I really believed that Bolton would not get the UN post, just goes to show how naive I was.

Have great hope for 2006 though - eventually everything will start hitting the fan for a myriad of reasons - and perhaps the seeds of change will finally begin to take hold and wake people up. The 2006 midterm elections will be very interesting and a barometer of things to come.

As for the ultra religious right, their hypocrisy is absolutely mind blowing. But what goes around comes around - and although it may take awhile, their day will eventually come too. History has proven that time and time again. All we can hope is that it won't be too late to undo all the damage that has been done...

Sally, bravo....and you know, I was telling an old friend (finally) about the cycles we are going thru...and do you remember that the US chart for July 4 1776 has Uranus at 8 Gemini, and that in May of 1893, when the new Great Cycle started (Pluto conj. Neptune) it was at 8 Gemini...John Kerry's mars is 9 Gemini...and most of us born in 1942-43 have Uranus around that degree, as well as Saturn....it is no wonder we are angry (my Uranus is 5 Gemini, Saturn 16 Gemini)...and of course, Uranus had gone into Gemini at the start of the Civil War....when Michael Jackson was STILL on trial...lol....

bobbypins....DID BOLTON GET CONFIRMED?I couldn't find a story on it....I just thought it went to the floor for a vote? but I'm with you ....naive about how badly skewed our gov. is. Time for revolution again.

My, my. I've been so overwhelmed with work of late that I rarely check in and haven't felt I'd had anything important enough to add to the fine discussions here... but today, Sally, your article has led me to post this. Since you started your fine article with a quote from Nietzsche I thought I would just post a few selections from what I think is the heart of his critique of Christianity in his book The AntiChrist (which could just as well be translated as The AntiChistian). I apologize for the long post but it seemed perhaps to tie in well to your article. Aside from a few scholars I doubt that many understand his critique though it is especially most relevant to America today. Basically, his critique is that perhaps the message of Christ was misunderstood from the very beginning:

In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it.
The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew (“the neighbor”—really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody; by not permitting himself to be seen or involved at courts of law (“not swearing”); by not divorcing his wife under any circumstances, not even if his wife had been proved unfaithful. All of this, at bottom one principle; all of this, consequences of one instinct.
The life of the Redeemer was nothing other than this practice—nor was his death anything else. He no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with God—not even prayer. He broke with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the practice of life that one feels “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” at all times a “child of God.” Not “repentance,” not “prayer for forgiveness,” are the ways to God: only the evangelical practice leads to God, indeed, it is “God”! . . .
The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself “in heaven,” to feel “eternal,” while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself “in heaven”—this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption.” A new way of life, not a new faith." (§ 33)

"If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is that he accepted only inner realities as realities, as “truths”—that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical, only as signs, as occasions for parables. The concept of “the son of man” is not a concrete person who belongs in history, something individual and unique, but an “eternal” factuality, a psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time. The same applies once again, and in the highest sense, to the God of this typical symbolist, to the “kingdom of God,” to the “kingdom of heaven,” to the “filiation of God.” Nothing is more unchristian than the ecclesiastical crudities of a god as person, of a “kingdom of God” which is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, of a “son of God” as the second person in the Trinity. . . .
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something that is to come “above the earth” or “after death.” The whole concept of natural death is lacking in the evangel: death is no bridge, no transition; it is lacking because it belongs to a wholly different, merely apparent world, useful only insofar as it furnishes signs. The “hour of death” is no Christian concept—an “hour,” time, physical life and its crises do not even exist for the teacher of the “glad tidings.” The “kingdom of God” is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in “a thousand years”—it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere. (§ 34)

This “bringer of glad tidings” died as he had lived, as he had taught—not to “redeem men” but to show how one must live. This practice is his legacy to mankind: his behavior before the judges, before the catchpoles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn—his behavior on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step which might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. And he begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible—but to resist not even the evil one—to love him. (§ 35)

Only we, we spirits who have become free, have the presuppositions for understanding something that nineteen centuries have misunderstood: that integrity which, having become instinct and passion, wages war against the “holy lie” even more than against any other lie. Previous readers were immeasurably far removed from our loving and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the unriddling of such foreign, such tender things: with impudent selfishness they always wanted only their own advantage; out of the opposite of the evangel the church was constructed.
If one were to look for signs that an ironical divinity has its fingers in the great play of the world, one would find no small support in the tremendous question mark called Christianity. Mankind lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of the “church” it has pronounced holy precisely what the “bringer of glad tidings” felt to be beneath and behind himself—one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony. (§36)

I go back, I tell the genuine history of Christianity. The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding: in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “evangel” died on the cross. What has been called “evangel” from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived: “ill tidings,” a dysangel. It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in a “faith,” for instance, in the faith in redemption through Christ: only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian.
Such a life is still possible today, for certain people even necessary: genuine, original Christianity will be possible at all times.
Not a faith, but a doing; above all, a not doing of many things, another state of being. . . . (§ 39)

Shylurker, after I quit the presbyterian church in disgust at age 15....I should add, with some rage, too....at hypocrisy abounding....I remembered that when I was a few years younger (around 12) I had started telling people in my mother's family (devout high ups in the national methodist church) that I was a Buddhist, just to piss them off. Little did I realize that I actually was more of a buddhist than a member of a church that distorted the christ message as badly as our did.

Actually, I am way to lazy to belong to any church.....too lazy to want to belong.

well....what a perfect coda to Timothy's post, which hadn't been posted when I posted mine. Reminds me that ex Jesuit radio personality Bernie Ward (lives in SF) always said Christianity is the most difficult if not IMPOSSIBLE religion to practice.

timothy's post makes that an eclamation point.

Excellent article Sally!!

To my not so good intuition - the energy does seem to be getting very tense the last few weeks. Any idea when it will get better? I thought maybe this Sunday when the Mars/Uranus conjunction happens. But maybe it won't be until the Saturn/Pluto inconjunct on the 24th? Or will it be later? Any ideas - I need something to look forward to.

Here's an snippet that goes along with you "we don't care - Jackson still on trial" post.

http://www.davidsirota.com/2005/05/abc-news-were-not-interested-in.html

from ABC News's "The Note" today:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238

"Brides gotta run, planes gotta stray, and cable news networks gotta find a way to fill a lot of programming hours as cheaply as possible...We say with all the genuine apolitical and non-partisan human concern that we can muster that the death and carnage in Iraq is truly staggering. And/but we are sort of resigned to the Notion that it simply isn't going to break through to American news organizations, or, for the most part, Americans...What is hands down the biggest story every day in the world will get almost no coverage."

Why did I have to read this revealing interview
in the Guardian?

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5192311-113898,00.html

Sally -- wonderful and right on target!

Timothy -- terrific post.

Religion is a construct; the hierachy of reward and punishment meted out by those who manipulate the energy of control. And, something sinister is brewing. I'm of the "feeling" that we must, for our own spiritual survival, practise Love. Our anger will only feed what they seek. It is Love those in power cannot combat, cannot kill, cannot maim, cannot rob, cannot bomb. Love is ours, part of the gifts given to us.

Most of us have struggled to share our gifts/our Love and, i believe, this has been intentional. It's difficult to Love when you must 1)do something you loathe, 2) work unhealthy hours for survival, 3) share no future investments 4) use your energy to make ends meet.

But we must. Love is the only light that will guide us out of this damnable darkness.

karen

VERY powerful, Sally. You really nailed this down (no pun intended) in a very dramatic and essential way and had me glued to every word. Thank you.

What stuck me is your case that Bush & the other power mongers are protected and seemingly untouchable. Yet, G-d, the creator, Spirit, whatever you want to name this mysterious force of life and blessings, does work in miraculous ways, and we getwhat we need and are ready for. So, circumstances can pivot on a dime. We are all waiting and praying for that dime.

It's interesting that I brought of Nietzche at the end of the last article. What little I know of him though. At least he saw through religion but he does have a reputation for elevating the white Arian and inspiring genoicide...possibly he was misunderstood.

When you say the Muslims are helping the rebirth into the Light along, I guess you mean by their direct confrontation of evil (or what they see as evil; I'm not sure I agree with all of it).

I have heard that the new film about the crusades - Kingdom of Heaven -- (Ridley Scott?) is very elucidating. Looking forward to it. Saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and it was clever, imaginative and interesting but was really a ball of fluff - a few things do imprint themselves though.

Judi Gemini - I'm sure you've heard that many people speculate that perhaps Jesus was a Buddhist - or at least influenced by buddhism. Many people think he traveled east and studied Buddhism or Hinduism between the ages of 13 and 30. That may be why Christianity is so different from what Jesus taught. They kept the traditions of Abraham - which don't mesh so well with the eastern way of thinking - that I think Jesus ascribed to.

Here is a good book about it:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/091676687X/ref=pd_sim_b_5/103-8270393-1023813?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

from a review on Amazon "The New Testament Gospels are the worlds primary source of information about the life of Jesus. As most of you probably know the Gospels only tell us about His birth, His childhood up to about 4, then skips about 8 years, there is a short story when He is 12, this skips about 17 years, and at the age of 30 He starts to spread His word. "

This site says no (of couse) - but makes thse points: http://jimvb.home.mindspring.com/ser1998Oct11.htm

Could the teaching of the Buddha have touched the life of Jesus? Actually yes, they could have, which is not the same as saying that they did. Jesus lived about five hundred years after Guatama and in an area thousands of miles removed. Jesus lived in a very different culture from Gautama and was of a different social standing. Yet he shared, it would seem, a thirst for truth with Gautama. Moreover, despite our image of Jesus as a poor man, that was not necessarily the case. In his time and place the term "carpenter" could refer to any skilled artisan including some fairly well compensated ones. Further we are given to understand from the Gospels that Mary was related to the temple priesthood Jesus could thus have grown up in an intellectually enriched atmosphere, one in which the deep questions were seriously explored. Far from being a simple peasant Jesus may well have been a well-educated theologically bent young man. What however does this have to do with Buddhism?

Well, the ancient world was not quite as benighted or as fragmented as we sometimes think. Ideas have a way of spreading out. Remember that Jesus' Israel was part, albeit reluctantly, of the great Roman Empire. The Empire maintained trading and cultural relations with the East and in particular India. India had been the goal of Alexander the Great's last aborted campaign. Cleopatra may have considered fleeing to India after Actiun. In short, India was far from an unknown place in Jesus' world. Some two and a half centuries before Jesus, a remarkable Emperor reigned in India. His name was Ashoka and he converted to Buddhism. Ashoka sent out missionaries to carry the Buddha's message far and wide. We know some of those missionaries made it as far west as Syria.

There is also a tradition that holds that Jesus traveled to the East in the years not discussed in the Bible. There are local traditions of Jesus' presence in Afghanistan, Iran, and even Pakistan and India. However there is no way to know when these traditions arose. Some stories go so far as to claim that Jesus survived crucifixion and returned to the East, dying in Kashmir many years later. However, all of these stories are based on little or no real evidence. We simply do not know what Jesus was doing before his ministry, nor is there any reason why we should expect there to be any records of those years.

I've wondered for a long time what actually happened/happens for those who say they converse with G-d. I believe that many of the people who inadvertently started religions (if everything is perfect in the drama, maybe they were meant to?) actually were in contact with G-d while in states of fasting and meditation/contemplation. Remember Abraham was supposed to be a very humble man known for his kindness, particularly to strangers. One of the reasons that the monotheistic religion of Judaism came into being was that other practices of the times were at a lower level. If the message was that the Jews were chosen, or Yeshuah was chosen or the Buddha was chosen, I believe they were chosen to spread a message of the truth. At the same time, the Jews as a people did need to stay strong both in order to survive as well as maintain their level of purity. But purity should also include integrity, fairness, love, flexibilty and inclusivity. And if spiritual groups could do this without competition and chauvinism, there would not be a problem. Going back again to The Chalice and the Blade, I think it was the introduction of the domination principle, backed by weapons and carried out by males that is the problem. BTW, my Jewish uncle, a Talmudic scholar yet a very modern thinker, always said that if he wasn't born Jewish, he'd want to be a Budhist. Interestingly, there are many "JewBus" in existence today. I'm kinda of one myself, but then I have always been a student of religion and a lover of the do unto others principle. If you want to see an innocent view of religion as beautifully expressed through the eyes of a young boy, read "Life of Pi" (great book but a few very disturbing scenes.)

The vote to send Bolton to the full Senate without recommendation passed 10-8 exactly 3:25 p.m., EDT. I am at work but I was watching on the internet.

Reading your article made me think of Ginsberg's "Howl", and then another poet came to mind, Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It's hard right now not to rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Here we go again....

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE11Ak01.html

The Pope, the Musician and the Jews.....

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GE10Aa01.html

Marine unit wiped out in Iraq...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_051205Y.shtml

Rage on Cap'n Sally, Rage on... you are so right. Thanks for the heads up re anger... I'll be aware.

WV...excellent Guardian article on NYTimes...sure as hell does tell you how easy it is to distort news, depending on who is at the top and who is writing the checks and who is creating the atmosphere for the reporters to work in. And who is choosing the opinionistas, too...

It might take hell to wake them all up

Isn't Nebraska a RED state? so this is amazing....

(05-12) 14:43 PDT Lincoln, Neb. (AP) --

A federal judge Thursday struck down Nebraska's ban on gay marriage, saying the measure interferes not only with the rights of gay couples but also with those of foster parents, adopted children and people in a host of other living arrangements.
The constitutional amendment, which defined marriage as a union.between a man and a woman, was passed overwhelmingly by the voters in November 2000.

watch this and weep...
(meaning it is funny in a horrible truthful way)
Conservatubbies Rule The Toob
Mark Fiore: Corporation for Political Broadcasting, brought to you by Ken Tomlinson and his PBS pals.
http://sfgate.com/columnists/fiore/

Sally, I enjoyed your article very much! For some reason, you remind me of Randi Rhodes on Air America. I love both your styles, you both give me what I crave -- sense of humor but most of all great common sense. She is more abrasive than you, I would think, but there are similarities.

This site is EXTREMELY disturbing, in a "religious" way, but go have a look anyway. It will freak you out.

http://www.bushfish.org/

M., I love that poem, it is one of my favorites. When my brother-in-law died at 42, my husband (his brother) read that poem at the funeral. Then, two years later, my grandson was named Dylan for that very reason. Thanks for posting it!

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/

Which theory do you think should be taught in U.S. schools?

Creationism

Evolution

Intelligent Design

All of the above

CNN might as well ask, what flavor religion do you think they should serve in 'school' ---

School is about EDUCATION not superstition.

CNN is about ratings... selling tooth paste...

Something I ponder is the anchors who live in NYC... who on 9/11/2001 wondered where their children were, their spouses. A few spoke about that in the early days. Paula Zahn talked about not knowing if her children were alright. YET, they have continued to read press releases, to spout the propaganda of the State. If one of the 'big' three (used to be!) had stepped up to the plate and shouted they were hogtied, the public would have responded. Dan Rather did in a low key way, long before the Fundies hounded him out... (maybe that's why they hounded him out?) Like most of you, I respected these folks for most of my life. I suppose the salary and the ability to get a table at any of the top-rated restaurants in NYC and the 'spotlight' are worth more than family or country or soul... Sad, isn't it.

I don't think god talks to anybody... if She wants something done, She can do it Herself. :)

Sky gods were a creation of men... insecure, threatened ones... after all, men don't give birth to young (if they had WAITED and studied evolution, they would have learned that they do after all have a significant role in begetting!)

when did Mother earth become the Fatherland?

As for 'the chosen people' --- all people think they are special. When white Europeans asked Native Americans what they called themselves, they responded the equivalent of 'the People'...

I believe in evolution. I don't believe 'Abraham' ever lived, much less 'talked' to god... I don't believe in a 'Creator' ---

I realize my comments are offensive to some. But frankly I hear other people talk about god all day long... every day that I venture out of my woods... and I feel it's time for others of us to express ourselves. If they had a good day, god made it happen. If they had a bad day, they need to 'do' better. And on and on...

I was angry when millions of people shouting No to the invasion of Iraq did not stop * --- I'm moving past anger. Now I'm simply disgusted that people are just going through their day like they are 'special' and bad things only happen to those Arabs and other folks, but not Americans or Brits... or Aussies or... that Uranus energy turns on a dime. I respect it.

I reached my limit yesterday and thought seriously of releasing my head from this political sewer. The deciding moment came when I read Grover Norquist's statement about Democrats being neutered barnyard animals now that Republicans are destined to rule indefinitely and that they would soon learn to be docile and content. I became physically ill.

But knowing Sally's way with words and knowing something was brewing in her pot of wisdom, I logged on today and immediately came to Astroworld. What a relief and comfort to read this.
Truth without sentimentality and also in a way that can be absorbed by the body and senses without all the pain.
Thank you so much, Sally.

I'm not even looking at the future right now but just mulling over this universal need for punishment... and the creation of these religions that perpetuate it. And the elevation of horrible men who hate themselves and hate life to positions of leadership.

At the moment the only hope I see is to come to terms individually with right and wrong and seek the part of the brain that verifies the goodness of life and our personal position in all of this. If we can connect and send illumination outward, maybe we can conrtibute in a tangible way to the healing of this gaping wound.

For me, I think maybe I have been too focused on the other, the environment, rather than entirely on the projection of what I know is good.
I am about to adjust that.

Sally, how wonderfully you have captured and experssed the context of these times. You've reached out once again with just what is to be said. Superb, really.

I have to say how much I soaked up and enjoyed Nancy's wonderful article here too. I actually just read it. Thank you Nancy!

I have been so saturated, that I have not been able to read and absorb much at all lately. I am just plain tired, and am having a hard time keeping up with the next outrage. Life has been just too darn full, and waaaay too interesting.

But we here at Astroworld are so lucky to be treated to so much skill, and beauty of thought. This site is a treasure.

Thank you Sally!

JM,

You have something there... Karen said earlier we need to focus on love... I was in the store today and the piped music was playing "all we need is love"....

I love the members of my family that are Fundies... the problem is, they are 'praying I'll be saved'... if they used that same energy to love EVERYONE, not simply those who see the world as they do... then they could take back their power that they have given up to these politicians in preacher clothing... As Timothy said upthread, 'Christianity' is not about faith but about 'practice'...

Indeed if the Religious practiced more and worshipped less, what a change there would be... Timothy, do you get many 'takers' when you talk? I studied comparative religion as a 'mature' student (translate old lady) and the young people I talked with were of your philosophy...

Judi Gemini - you're right - Bolton hasn't been confirmed yet but I'll bet dollars to donuts he will be especially since Voinovich backed down and said he would, despite his resevations, most likely vote for Bolton's confirmation on CNN this afternoon.

Love Dylan Thomas and am a big fan of Alan Ginsberg. Watched a program awhile ago on I think either the History channel or Discovery about how the books for the Old and New Testament were selected, Also why various other ones were rejected (believe it or not "moral values" was the rationale even though most of those rejected were not by a wide stretch immoral). Also how those who interpreted Jesus teachings manipulated and distorted them to fit their views. There was also speculation that Abraham practiced incest and Mary Magdelene was either Jesus's wife or lover and they had children together. All who were on the program were well known, well respected religious historians.

Don't get me wrong. Have the utmost respect for people who
practice love, compassion, understanding, tolerance and empathy - the true heart of all religions. But so many preach one thing and do another that you have to wonder what God they are worshipping. Not mine that's for sure.

Sally, I don't know whether you write better than you think/inutit, or think/intuit better than you write. A tremendous article. Have you thought of removing the astrology and submitting it as an op-ed? It needs a wider - much wider - audience. Everything you say rings bells, and the way you say it is magnificant.

Absolutely Donna

................................

I just can't keep up.

http://www.truthout.org/index.htm

I intend to knit this evening, no matter what. It's very zen.

There are calls to make and letters to write, tomorrow.

You gotta love it. Cat Killa gets whupped using facts and logic, and what's his response? He runs away from Bob Byrd!

http://tinyurl.com/9z4ub

Irritated by Democratic chiding, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday defended the "fairness and principle" of pressing a confrontation over judicial filibusters. During an hour-long exchange, Senate dean Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., told Frist, "Don't leave this as your legacy."

That was a reference to a Republican plan to eliminate minority Democrats' ability to block President Bush's judicial choices with just 41 votes in the 100-member Senate.

"You have a shirttail full of nominees, and you're going to wreck Senate tradition," said Byrd.

Annoyed, Frist pointed out that Byrd also had talked about the Tennessee Republican in front of Bush on Wednesday and had promised to support holding confirmation votes.

[...]

Frist has been looking for two years at doing away with the 60-vote requirement to cut off debate in what members of both parties have called the nuclear option. Democrats have promised to retaliate by thwarting Bush's legislative agenda.

"Don't travel that path because the leader of his party may some day be executed on the same gallows," Byrd said.

Republicans have argued that the Constitution requires confirmation votes, though Frist conceded Thursday there's no language in the document that specifies that.

"But when you have a nominee that comes over, all you can do is shine the light, you examine him, unlimited debate," Frist said. "And then to give advice and consent — which is in that Constitution — how do you do it? Vote yes, no. Confirm, reject."

Byrd noted that the Senate has rejected dozens of nominees over the years by simply never voting on them. "Now to give consent, we may vote. But to deny consent doesn't require a vote," he said.

The West Virginia senator kept talking but Frist eventually walked out of the chamber, leaving Byrd surprised. "Where's my adversary?" (Senator Byrd also questioned Frist on where was it stated in the Constitution that pending judges must be voted up or down? Frist mumbled something about...well, nowhere...and then walked away.....N.)

And let's also make mention of how a slightly younger man - Harry Reid - has been taking Frist's lunch money for a couple of weeks now:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has been offering Frist deals on less controversial nominees to try and avoid the showdown.

Reid on Thursday promised that Democrats would not block confirmation votes on Michigan nominees Richard Griffin, David McKeague and Susan Neilson to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals if Frist didn't force a showdown. He made the same offer on former Senate lawyer Thomas Griffith, who wants a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

"Do you want to confirm judges or do you want to provoke a fight?" Reid challenged.

Note to Doctor Senator: You may be rich, you may be able to diagnose medial patients by watching video tapes - but as Senate Majority Leader, you're in way over your head.

I think so much of the problem is this anthropomorphizing of the diety.. worshipping this entity that looms out there, and assuming it is watching and judging everything we do. In fact, no one is doing that. We are the ones who are monitoring our own actions. Others are too busy and preoccupied. No one else could possibly keep track. The mere act of attributing power to a god/man or others is a setup for rage, feelings of powerlessness, and transference of these emotions to people who are not the perpetrators. I am trying to get to the source of why we do this. Is it learning or is it in the programming? This constant fear that the ax will fall. Pinning the blame and believing that erradication of other people will remove the source of suffering. All the while, no one else can remove the impulse to act with care, grace, goodness, respect for life, etc. Maybe this is the challenge. To see how we can perservere with good intent in the face of this malefic force.

One case in point here. Many of the liberal blogs are engaging in another horrible round of Kerry bashing now in the face of this malaise that Sally so accurately described. But Kerry is hardly the enemy. It's insane to me. And I'm supposed to be counting on these people as allies in this political struggle. This is very very counterproductive. I wish so much this rage could be harnessed, if not into action, at least into pdoductive discourse so we could come up with solutions to our problems. Instead of withrawing the illusion of power from one and transferring to another. Any one but the self.

Thank you, Sally.

RIVETING!

John Pilger: Let's Face It = The State Has Lost
It's Mind....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8821.htm

There is SO much information to be found here, and SO many amazing insights here. The articles are A LOT in themselves. I'm not able to take it all in right now.

Everyone is struck by and responds to something in particular in these threads. It really can be overwhelming, yet I can't not read it all.

I love the piece about Byrd and Reid getting on Frist. Timothy, I don't believe there are currently any Christians walking the earth. Were there ever? There are many names that could apply to the group (Old Testamentians, ignorant idiots...) but I've taken to calling them "crosstians." There's nothing remotely about them that relates to Christ. And the cross, being an instrument of darkness and death, seems to fit well.

Jo said, "I feel it's time for others of us to express ourselves." MOST DEFINITELY!!!!! Do we, in our own lives, keep our mouths shut for fear of offending or ruining the peace? THEY don't! It isn't a matter of tit for tat or starting a fight. It's a matter of respect and that there's no reason whatsoever that those of us who aren't crosstians should not express OUR views and feelings and opinions and thoughts, as well as the FACTS we know. If there are true Christians out there, speak up, loudly, to those who soil your name through misrepresentation. Let's all speak up. Let's all speak our truths and the truths we know. Let's all be our own authorities and model what that is to all the followers.

Is the time of Neptune in Aquarius the time of mass delusion? Because there's mass delusion -- in this country, at least. Like the woman who, when told of Dr. Hagen raping his wife, spoke of what a man of integrity he is. HELLO???

The sexual weirdness of that crowd is completely understandable when we consider how the psyche works. Repress something, and it will leak out in the strangest of ways. The hypocrisy of those folks is absolutely stunning to me. Leaves me speechless.

I've never understood why both evolution and creation can be true. Why one or the other? I think both are true, though I don't think of "God" as the "big guy in the sky." I sense an essence in the energy that enlivens us all, and all living things. It flows through us. I don't care what we call it, nor that some disagree that it exists. I've found that atheists tend to be quite upstanding folks!

My view of life is that each of us embodies some of this essence in order to experience the vast number of possible experiences. This life I'm riding the roller coaster, next life I might be on the merry-go-round, or in the bumper cars, or getting a snack -- cotton candy? Or maybe I only get one ride, and everyone else gets a different one. I'm not privy to the details. haha ;D

I think that after we die, there's no reward nor punishment; only understanding of what it was all about and perhaps what we might have done differently. So in a sense, nothing here on earth matters. Yet EVERYTHING here on earth matters. That's why we're here -- to have the deepest, most intriguing experience at the carnival that is the earth.

But what do I know? I could be wrong. I could go straight to hell tomorrow. haha!

I'm not sure whether I should do this, and I apologize in advance if some are offended (just scroll on through) (or if you think it is just too long Sally, you can feel free to delete it) but I was inspired by a response to my post above to write what turned out to be a little essay about Nietzsche since he is so often so greatly misunderstood. I don't have anywhere else to put it as I just wrote it, otherwise I'd post it as a link. At the end I make some remarks about Nietzsche's astrological chart which I've always thought very interesting.

Jo-- I do enjoy teaching because I am blessed with many bright students. I always enjoy your posts, by the way, and think it would be great to sit and talk with you someday.

OK, with apologies here it is:
The controversy surrounding the philosophy of Nietzsche continues to rage on in contemporary scholarship but I don’t think there is anyone who has read Nietzsche carefully who accepts the myth that he was a proponent of the Nazi ideas of Aryan superiority, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and genocide. This myth can largely be attributed to his younger sister, a woman who had married a proto-Nazi, anti-Semitic member of the Wagner cult and who understood nothing of her brother’s philosophy.

Nietzsche had become close to the great composer and his wife when he had first left Germany (then Prussia) in his early 20's and taken a position at the University in Basel, Switzerland in the early 1870's. Wagner had been living outside Basel for some time after having been expelled from Germany for participating in revolutionary activities in 1848. The charismatic Wagner would have been about the age of Nietzsche’s father who had died of a brain hemorrhage when Nietzsche was five.

A decisive turn in Nietzsche’s life took place after returning home from the Franco-Prussian War. When the war began he was patriotic as might have been expected of any young Prussian at the time. Just a generation earlier Napoleon had waltzed through Prussia and the Prussian army was still thought to me no match to the French. As Nietzsche had resigned his Prussian citizenship to take the Basel position he was prohibited from a military position and thus served in the war as a medical orderly. Surprisingly, Prussia won the war, which soon led to the creation of the nation-state of Germany.

Just as unexpectedly Nietzsche came home from the war convinced that victory was about the worst thing that could have happened. Some of his writings from the mid-1870's up until his final collapse in 1889 read like warnings to the world to watch out for what was happening in Germany. Nietzsche broke with Wagner just upon Wagner’s triumphant return to Germany. The story goes that Nietzsche brought a Jewish friend to the first Bayreuth opera festival in 1876 which precipitated a confrontation with Wagner. Nietzsche stormed out of Bayreuth and for the rest of his career he never tired of criticizing Wagner and the hateful anti-Semitism, and the vitriolic nationalism that had grown up around the Wagner cult.

For the last ten years of his sane life, after having to retire from teaching at the age of 34 due to ill health, he refused to set foot in Germany, spending his summers in the Swiss Alps and winters in Italy. Instead of praising “the fatherland” he talked about being “a good European.” His penchant for an aphoristic style in his writings was adopted in part to contrast as markedly as possible with German-style philosophical writing. When his sister married the anti-Semite Wagnerian and moved to Paraguay to help found a German colony there Nietzsche, in his letters, expresses his complete exasperation and just about gives up all hope for her.

In January of 1889 in Turin, Italy Nietzsche’s mind suddenly broke. The story goes that he collapsed on the street after pulling a horse away from a man who had been savagely whipping it. The townsfolk carried him back to his apartment and when he came to, his brilliant mind was shattered. It was thought for a long time that it was syphilis, but recent scholarship has raised doubts about that considering his lifelong ill-health (terrible headaches from his early youth) and the circumstances of his father’s death.

In any case his best friend came from Basel where he was examined, and not long after his mother came and took him back to Germany. He lived those last eleven years in Germany and completely insane. Friends would come to bring him books, and he would say “I used to write books, didn’t I?” A couple of years after the collapse, after his books had suddenly started being read widely, his sister returned from Paraguay after her husband had died. This woman, who had loved it during the early Basel days when her brother was close to Wagner and thus at the center of this exciting high set culture, ended up taking over his literary estate and to the end of her days in the 1930's, did everything she could to bring him back within the Wagner cult. After the mother died she took care of her brother for the last eight years–and sometimes used to dress him up in a toga and have the high society of Germany pay to see the famous philosopher. Nietzsche’s own story has to be one of the greatest tragedies in the history of philosophy. It was the sister who put forward the completely perverse idea that Hitler was the Nietzschean superman. There is a famous picture of Hitler placing a wreath of honor at her grave.

For these reasons Nietzsche was not taken seriously as a philosopher in the English speaking world until scholarship produced better translations and also revealed the blatant falsifications that the sister and her editors had put forth in working with his unpublished notes. Now it is clear that Nietzsche was repulsed by everything the Nazi’s stood for. He was certainly no Nazi.

But just because one takes him seriously, as someone that should be read, doesn’t mean that one should necessarily agree with everything he wrote. Such slavish discipleship would be against the very spirit of his philosophy. He saw himself as a dangerous thinker, who asked questions that hadn’t been asked, and who took up thought-experiments that challenged the most unchallenged beliefs. He once wrote to a friend that “It is not at all necessary or even desirable to side with me; on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as if confronted with some unfamiliar plant, and an ironic resistance would be an incomparably more intelligent position to adopt.”

What really sets him off from perhaps all previous philosophers is that he never claimed to have “the Truth.” His philosophy is marked by a much more epistemologically modest position that begins with a questioning of the very notion of truth. The traditional idea of truth as universal and absolute rests upon what is known as the correspondence theory of knowledge which assumes that knowledge is the result of a merely passive contemplation. True knowledge, in this theory, is an exact copying of the way the world as it is in-itself. This assumed the idea of the mind as a merely passive mirror of nature. But this whole conception of knowledge had already, since Hume, been shown to be unsustainable. And since Kant at the end of the 18th century the idea of the mind as a passive mirror of nature had been abandoned by most philosophers.

Nietzsche merely radicalized this Kantian insight that the mind actively shapes experience. This led Nietzsche to put forth a “philosophy of the future” that understood the philosopher as an artist in some sense. This is a radical challenge to the traditional notion of philosophy that comes foremost from Plato. For Plato the philosopher and artist are very much opposed. The philosopher has the very serious task of the discovery of the truth while the artist, consigned to appearances, can only play with fictions. Nietzsche’s response to Plato, and to the whole Western tradition of philosophy, is to say something like: “Sorry Plato, we philosophers, whether we have realized it or not, have always been artists playing with fictions.”

Nietzsche sometimes used the metaphor of lucid dreaming to convey this conception of philosophy as art. Just as the difference between a regular dream and the lucid dream is that the lucid dreamer is aware that he is dreaming, Nietzsche suggests the philosophers of the future will be lucid dreamers in the sense that they will be aware that philosophy is fiction, that it cannot be anything more than interpretation of reality. Traditional philosophers are the non-lucid dreamers who think they have discovered the truth, but are really only just dreaming but not aware of it.

This is really the basis of his critique of Christianity, his posing of an opposition between Christianity and art. The problem with Christianity is that it does not recognize that it is the result of interpretation. We would still have the problem even if Jesus had left us a corpus of his own writings, but the problem of interpretation of Christianity is made all the more problematic because all we have are interpretations of his life and the meaning of his life that were written down after the fact. The earliest texts of the New Testament date from at least a generation after his death–and these are included in the New Testament only as the result of the decisions of the great ecumenical councils in the 4th century. There were many competing “gospels,” many competing interpretations of the “good news” of Jesus in the first couple hundred years of Christianity. How can we be sure that those that made the decisions determining which “gospels” were to be included and which were not really understood the teachings of the one who didn’t write anything down several centuries earlier? The earliest texts of the New Testament are Paul’s letters, but how can we really be sure that even Paul, someone who never met Jesus, really understood? The polemical style of Nietzsche’s text The Anti-Christ might give the reader the impression that Nietzsche thinks that he has understood the “truth” about Jesus that nineteen centuries have misunderstood; but put in the context of his other writings, it should be obvious that he can only offer his perspective as another possible interpretation (though I think there can be good reasons for suggesting that his interpretation is preferable).

In any case I think his thought is at the very crux of the cultural debate today between the fundamentalists and absolutists of all stripes and “postmodern relativism.” Pope Rat, for example sees himself as the defender of the “Grand Inquisitor’s” Church, which claims to have the truth, and which would like to take away the terrible burden of freedom of conscience in the knowledge of good and evil. The fundamentalist Christians who have taken over this country portray themselves as “defenders of faith” and think that they do indeed possess the truth about Jesus and will stop at nothing in forcing their interpretation, with all its destructive consequences, upon all of us.

The philosophy of the lucid dreamer, however, implies the widest possible tolerance and acceptance of differences: “Are these coming philosophers new friends of ‘truth’? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman—which has so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it—that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say of himself.”

Now I will share some astrological observations about Nietzsche’s chart. He was born at 10:00 am in Rocken Germany (12:08 E 51:15N) on the 15th of October, 1844. By astrolog computations that gives him a very late Scorpio Ascendant (29:20). His chart is marked most by an almost exact opposition between an 11th house (22:07) Libra Sun and 5th house (22:58) Aries Retrogade Pluto. A stressful aspect to be sure but one that might suggest penetratingly deep self-awareness. Nietzsche was the one who opened up the whole idea of depth psychology, with his conception of consciousness as merely a surface phenomenon, and the depths of the unconscious. His writings had a profound effect upon both Freud and Jung and Freud was known to have said that perhaps noone had greater self-awareness.

He had Mercury in the 10th at 4:09 Libra trine to Saturn in the 3rd at 0:46 Aquarius. This would suggest his ability to write well (often considered one of the very best writers of German prose) and his career as a writer. He had in fact unusually large 3rd and 9th houses, which perhaps would suggest the great volume of letters (a famously reclusive man who kept in touch with his friends through letters) and, of course, his books which have had such a 9th house impact on philosophy and literature and religion in the 20th century.

He had the Moon at 9 Sag in the first house almost exactly conjunct the north node. This moon was also square to Venus 6:22 Virgo. It is well known that he had troubled relations with women, beginning with his mother and aunts who raised him, and then, of course, his sister. He did though have friendships with a number of intellectual women but never any kind of real relationship. There is the story of his great unrequited love for Lou Andreas-Salome, a very interesting woman in her own right, which provided the underlying passion for probably his best known book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the primary theme of which concerned a potential transformation of humankind, a “spiritual” transformation that would lead to the capacity for a “gift-giving love”).

But most striking of all is perhaps the Retrograde Uranus at 3:33 Aries almost exactly opposite that 10th house Mercury and sextile to Saturn. This perhaps would suggest both the revolutionary nature of his thought, his “philosophy of the future,” as well as the instability of his mind. This would also be reflected in the style of his writings, the quick aphorisms and sharp wit. He once said he wished to say in ten words what took others a whole book. And it is the transit of Uranus through his chart that is really interesting. It first enters the 9th house in 1870 about the time his career as a writer begins with The Birth of Tragedy (published 1872). During the long transit of Uranus through his 9th house and a couple of years in the 10th he is writing the books that would prove to have such a revolutionary impact on the “philosophy of the future.” And finally, on January 4, 1889, the day his mind broke on that Turin street, Uranus was at 21:47 Libra, exactly conjunct that natal Sun which lie in opposition to Pluto!

Just dropped in to thank all for the good thoughts re my spider bite. Think everything's going to be fine.

SO not supposed to be in here [all work and no play is what pays the mortgage], but I couldn't resist this one thought:

jm: Many of the liberal blogs are engaging in another horrible round of Kerry bashing now in the face of this malaise that Sally so accurately described. But Kerry is hardly the enemy. It's insane to me. And I'm supposed to be counting on these people as allies in this political struggle.

vcz: Kerry missed every opportunity to "put his case forward" during the campaign. In print, he could be brilliant [but Americans don't read], and in person he actually seemed to be TRYing not to pull too far ahead of bush.

Then the night of the [s]election came, and after spending months promising that every vote would be counted, as reports began pouring in re voter fraud, he raced to tell us it was over and we should all go home and support bush. Say what?

OUR VOTES WERE NOT KERRY'S TO GIVE AWAY! How dare he...and didn't he vote for confirmation of Condi? Think I remember he at least voted no on Gonzalez.

To support Kerry, for me, is no different than sheeple supporting bush, "just because." Kerry IS "the enemy!" He wants to lead us to...acceptance of the status quo?

I don't see how I could count on people who'd support Kerry after the last coup. He folds without a peep. Hell, joe lieberman's a democrat. Am I supposed to support him, too?

In my mind, there is NO hope for a democratic party willing to re-run someone we already KNOW won't fight for us. I'd support Boxer. I'd probably support another Dean run. If Kerry's the nominee in 2008, I won't even pretend to vote...

FYI in case anyone's interested.

Former Lt. Gen. Janis Karpinski (is it Karpinski? I mix her name up)...the woman who was "in charge" of Abu Graib at the time of the torture photos, and the highest up person to be disciplined (demoted to Colonel) quit the military and tonight will be on Nightline with Ted Koppel (ABC) to discuss the situation. In the clip I saw, she says that the military see the National Guard and Reserves (of which she was one) as disposable. Also, that "the MPs didn't come to Iraq with dog leashes" and statements that higher ups on up to and including Rumsfeld KNEW -- HAD to know -- had to have given some instruction.

Could be interesting. Just thought I'd let you all know.

Timothy: BEAUTIFUL!! Thank you very much!

VCZ: You poor spider-bite person! You totally missed the "political confusion" on the last thread. Good points you make here. Happy to hear you're doing well!

Uh-oh, Timothy's posted a good one and I've got to go read it carefully so I can benefit fully from it. Nietzsche has always been one of the most misunderstood philosophers. And, of course, Hitler & Co. took a bit of his work, twisted it up real nice and fine and thus made him appear to be what he was not. Remind you of a current crowd that twists things--heck, turns them inside out ("Blue Skies", "Healthy Forests", "No Child Left Behind" and so on down the hot tarred road to hell)?

Before I go to Timothy's essay, however, I wanted to share that the one single absence we have today is of A Leader. We have no leader. We have Dean, we have Kerry, we have Byrd, we have Kucinich . . . and on and on. But we have no leader. No one has come forward and said (and I'd even take a leadership committee, if they'd put one together) "Folks this is what we're going to do to take back this country!" Nearest we have is Dean, who's doing all he can to get us to work locally and build the Dem Party back. That's excellent, but what troubles me is this: Do we have the time? Is there another, more immediate option to stop, or at least hinder severely, this roll toward fascism here in our beloved country?

"Don't follow leaders; watch your parking meters." All mine tells me is I've been parked way over time and it is time to M-O-V-E!

Luv you all.

Another great article by our Captain Sally and her "fingers of fury" on the keyboard! The list of immoral doings by the Repugs does seem to be endless and frustrating as you say. Thanks for your glimmers of light and reason.

Karen, I agree with your view that being and projecting unconditional love is what people are meant to do in these difficult times. We are lightworkers here on Earth - spiritual beings on a human path.

Judi Gemini, I dropped out of the Baptist church when I was 18. The cruel Christian's god with his sadistic demands for the slaughter of innocents sounds too much like a blueprint for the crazies running our country.(Read "The Born Again Skeptics Guide to the Bible" by Ruth H Green). Since heartless friends of the crazies own the media it is very difficult to reach the vast majority whose only source of news is TV. I know if the public were informed and educated about the truth that they would be very angry. No one likes to be duped and made a total fool. Even the poor farmer with a 10th grade education will want to retaliate for a dead son in Iraq! It has been way too slow getting through to them though.
How long does it take for the wolf-in-sheep's clothing to be spotted by the sheep, especially when he's eating them??

Wake up calls....well, UA and the pension dump is one wake up call to Americans....since I live in the home area of UA, there are many retirees here...and one fellow emailed a friend of mine that he had been getting $1604.00 plus medical/....he said "one thing they have not bothered to tell anyone is there is no more medical
coverage either or life insurance...."
In a previous email he said he will only be getting, now, $534/mo. (He won't be able to live in this area now, that is for sure). Now, what the press has been saying, and the lawyers and bankruptcy people, is that it is only a 25% reduction in this settlement for the retirees...you do the math....Phil has been monitoring all the people checking in, and it is a 2/3 reduction...and as he said, you can be sure the other companies are watching this....licking their chops.

Not that it matters so much to me....I have $0 amount in savings....all gone because of the things that happened under the first G B in 1990. Like I said, you cannot trust anyone at this point.....

Jill G....so many of us at this site saw the cruelty in the so called 'word of God' so early on that one can only attribute it to real growth spiritually on an accelarated basis or many past lives having opened our eyes . (I vote for DNA memory.....all of us witchy women and their children burned to death in Europe and hung (my 13th gr. grandmother for one) or drowned here in the name of God.

I say....BITE ME to the xians...

Timothy, 2 really good posts....will copy and print out....Thus Spake Zarathustra .....2001....never read Nietzsche .... it didn't come up for me as I was at Art Center School in LA...but did we not absorb some of the message in 2001? hahahahah

I was more of a Sartre person.....and Camus. Nausea!

PatC, none of the above...but I do have an answer and I show my work. Guido, a Sun of Gawd

Creationism:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00008438V.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
Don't think so!

Intelligent Design:
http://hinessight.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/paris_hilton2.jpg
Oh yeah, f'ing brilliant

Evolution:
http://www.paxtonland.com/archives/bush_monkey.jpg
This starts to make sense but...look at the results.

Nah, it's all a big joke by the true Over Lard:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v474/autorank/triumph.jpg

Promoting True Brotherly Love:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v474/autorank/money-for-beer-42.jpg

JM...Norquist has been telling us for years that they were intending to strangle government....he just did not mention strangling all the people, too....it does make one physically ill...I suddenly thought....all those pictures of Japan and Germany leveled after WWII....that is what they want to do to America.

Mike....although Timothy wrote earlier in the post on evangel that there is no 'kingdom of god' or any of the other 'names'....I was remembering when I had my first experience with....what....spirit? channeling? the thing which makes you realize there is more going on than we thought? when I channeled an entity who had been predicted one year earlier to be coming to me....and here is a bit of what was written...
Sept, 1991...Identifying self as
Michaela:
"I am she who is a visitor from the velocity of light, from the kingdom of God...I am Michaela. I am not an angel."
After a few weeks of me writing furiously about many other things, this was given to me, as it was seen that I was not living with a philosophy which was at all supportive (this was when I lost everything from my home to my career plus entering bankruptcy and almost being homeless)

THE FIRST RULE OF THE EARTH PLANE IS TO VALUE YOUR CONTRIBUTION. DO BE CAREFUL OF NOT FOLLOWING BASIC SURVIVAL INSTINCTS; BARELY CHARGING IS NOT THE WAY TO RUN A BUSINESS.

THE SECOND RULE IS TO USE YOUR TALENTS TO CREATE PROSPERITY.

THE THIRD RULE IS TO ORDER YOUR THOUGHTS. BE ORGANIZED. TRUST YOURSELF.

THE FOURTH RULE IS TO MAKE A HAPPY HOME.

THE FIFTH RULE IS TO RESTRAIN FROM GREED.

THE SIXTH RULE IS TO BECOME CONSCIOUS OF YOUR SPIRIT.

THE SEVENTH RULE IS TO BE COMPASSIONATE FOR YOUR FELLOW BEINGS.

THE EIGHTH RULE IS TO LOVE LIFE EVEN WHEN LIFE DOES NOT LOVE YOU (OR SEEM TO).

THE NINTH RULE IS TO COME TO YOUR LIGHT WHEN YOU ARE GOING DOWN THE PATH YOU HAVE CHOSEN.

THE TENTH RULE IS TO DREAM. A GOOD RULE FOR YOU TO REMEMBER IS: EVOLVE TOWARD THE LIGHT.

I have since written on each ot these rules and my thoughts of what they meant over the last 15 years. They are MY 10 commandments!

Go here to the May 12th entry for some wonderful quotes illustrating what we know only too well about BushCo-speak (up is down, black is white, etc.)

http://planetwaves.net/

http://www.moveonpac.org/lte/lte_t.html?lte_campaign_id=21&id=5515-5712050-RhXfXBYuQDcGquG0hkKicQ&t=1&zip=94066

MoveOn members have already published thousands of letters to the editor in nearly every sizable paper in the country. You've reached more people than a multi-million dollar ad blitz ever could – and with a far more powerful message because it comes directly from American voters. We have one more week to beat back the Republican "nuclear option" and if you submit your letter today it will be perfectly timed to run next week – when we need it most.

To build support for their "nuclear" power grab, the radical Republicans and their allies have increasingly resorted to the disturbing tactic of demonizing and threatening federal judges.

On May 1st Pat Robertson took this appalling strategy to new heights when he declared that these judges pose a more serious threat than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."[2] In the next week nearly 200,000 Americans called on Bill Frist and Tom DeLay to reject these comments and insist that the dangerous hate-mongering against American judges come to an end. They refused.

Robertson's comments are just the most egregious example in a consistent pattern of threats and incitements against sitting judges from Republican elected officials and prominent supporters of the "nuclear option." (See the excerpt below from this week's New York Times ad for more details). Beginning with the exploitation of the Schiavo family tragedy, Republican leaders and their allies have worked to hide their grab for power behind a cloud of anti-judge hysteria.

This tactic is especially disturbing in light of the growing threat to the physical safety of judges. Within the last month the Supreme Court has had to request 11 new dedicated police officers, and the Judicial Conference of the United States has ordered security systems installed in the homes of 800 federal judges. The president of the Federal Judges Association has written about the danger posed by elected officials' "fervent judge bashing."[3]

It's time to expose this dangerous strategy directly to the American people, and protect the independence of our judges from the radical Republican quest for power. Please take a minute to write a letter to the editor of your local paper opposing the nuclear option and demanding an end to the intimidation of judges.

Thanks for all that you do,

Wow! Don't know what happened, but the message above suggesting you go to planetwaves was from yrs truly.

another email from the fellow who lost his UA pension, via a friend of mine:

im loading ammo and gonna take a trip to world headquarters for united and go postal....

Is this mars/uranus or what?

Thank you for your kind words this was not an article born of anger or frustration over God, only a frustration over an unwillingness on the part of man to think beyond the vail. There was a ton I cut out of this article, the truth is I do believe there is a "thinker beyond the thought" but I don't believe in the thinker presented by men who were trying to express the unexpressable through their cultural filters. I believe many thought they were talking to or experiencing God, but Abraham's God and Moses and all the other old testamont writers were trying to find and express their own inner frustrations at being poor, enslaved, treated badly by the "elite" of their day. God did not create us in his image, we created him in our image. Many times in history and in the individual experience we needed to believe in a God that would "smite" those who hurt us. And ultimately as energy moves everyone feels the hand of a harsh wind, and it's easy to say it was God's hand.

There has always been a need to define God in terms of greater than, ready to strike us down or our enemies down at a whim. Those who would rule by power and might (a human desire) have used that need to have someone "out there" to keep us following their meglomanical agenda's. We bought a bill of goods even as they bought their bill of goods that they were descended from men greater than they and the torch was passed to them. Not true.

I still think we are being given a front row seat to the "truth" of the last 2000 years and more "those that have eyes see, those that have ears listen" Whether it's Jesus Christ or UFO's from Orion the "Thinker behind all thought" is letting us see the worst of ourselves and there is a reason for it.

wow, sally, i'm blown away: "Pluto squaring US Neptune, opposing US Mars makes the United States ground zero in this particularly fight for control of the one and only God." Why us? So we're like Iraq, the war started here so itdoesn't have to take place elswhere? Creepy but I suspect true.

I love this: "I still think we are being given a front row seat to the "truth" of the last 2000 years and more "those that have eyes see, those that have ears listen" Whether it's Jesus Christ or UFO's from Orion the "Thinker behind all thought" is letting us see the worst of ourselves and there is a reason for it."

OK, here's my message to UFO's coming from Orion, "contact me first, I have something to tell you." From AW to the alien's ears (and I'm sure they can hear.

This is a wonderful article and I'll have to re-read it a few times to get the whole picture.

Thank you Sally.

And, thank you for sharing that judi gemeni. Those will stay with me.

OK, you all know what time it is: 2:02 EDT. Bed check in five minutes.

Mike "bed check in 5 minutes" just cracked me up. and I am going right now. By the way Mike, do you think you might be channeling Douglas Adams? Your thinking is absolutely boundary expanding

Someone on DU just posted that the DC news is reporting a fire in the capitol building. Reminds me of the old joke about the flood and the guy who wouldn't leave his house. First came a car to get him and he said no God would save him, then came a boat and he said no, God would save him, then came a plane and he said God would save him, and as he was drowning he said "God I thought you would save me and God said "I sent a car, a boat and a plane, what do you want?"

I can hear the GOP saying now "God I thought you wanted us to do the things we were doing" and God says "I sent you a granade, a plane and a fire, what kind of message do you need."

Kerry voted against Condi.

Yeah, Sally. Uranus is messing with the wires.

Some insights on the last time Pluto was in Sagg in North America:

http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/merritt_at.html

"The savage frontier war in Pennsylvania did not necessarily come to pass because of racial divisions between Indians and whites. The violence that broke out in 1755 and 1756 was not between strangers; it was between people who had become neighbors, if not kin. Rather than a sign of essential differences between communities, the conflict, instead, was born of their familiarity, even similarity. By the 1750s, both physical and cultural boundaries between Indian and white communities on the Pennsylvania frontier had been blurred. Indians and whites grappled with common social, economic, and political concerns. Peoples across Pennsylvania experienced a noticeable revitalization of religious activity, they wrestled with shifting gender and social relations within the household, they struggled to subsist in an expanding transatlantic market economy, and they hoped to create alliances with more powerful political forces without losing the integrity of their own communities."

The French and Indian war cemented English control over North America - a very early echo of NAFTA if you think about it. By the way China was doing very well during this era:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianlong

"The Qianlong emperor was a successful military leader, presiding over a huge expansion in the territory controlled by the Qing dynasty. This was made possible not only by Chinese strength but also by the disunity and declining strength of the Inner Asian peoples. Under Qianlong, Chinese Turkestan was incorporated into the Qing dynasty's rule and renamed Xinjiang, while to the West, Ili was conquered and garrisoned. The Qing also dominated Outer Mongolia after inflicting a final defeat on the Western Mongols. Throughout this period there were continued Mongol interventions in Tibet and a reciprocal spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Monglia. Qianlong again sent armies into Tibet and firmly established the Dalai Lama as ruler, with a Qing resident and garrison to preserve Chinese suzerainty. Other than that, no attempt was made to integrate Tibet into the empire after the manner of Xinjiang. Further afield, military campaigns against the Vietnamese (Annamese), Burmese, Nepalese, and Gurkhas forced these peoples to submit and send tribute."

Ahhh Sally, the continuing fountain of wisdom. Thanks so much.

Perhaps with the tensions that may be coming over the next week or so, viewing this from time to time may lower the levels a notch or two ...
Enjoy, and spread your light around
http://www.youarethelightmovie.com/thelight/TheLight.html

I just noticed something.

On Tuesday, November 4th, election day '08, when Pluto is a couple of weeks shy of leaving Sagittarius for good... The Sun and Mars will be in Scorpio, and the Moon and Jupiter will be in Capricorn. Looks like a rather sober and serious moment.

Helluva a way to acknowledge the entrance of Pluto into Capricorn.

Another thing I thought of is Uranus in Pisces electrifying the waters. Maybe that's why we are feeling so emotionally jolted a lot recently.

I can see everybody's on a roll! Still haven't been able to sit down for a minute! But I did run into this on the internet ... :)

Quote of the Day – Message from Barbara

TODAY [5/11/05], WE SAW A SMALL PLANE ENTER THE SPACE OF THE WHITE HOUSE, AND LOOK AT HOW THEY HANDLED THE SITUATION. FIGHTER JETS MET THE PLANE WITHIN TEN MINUTES.THAT'S STANDARD PROCEDURE. HOWEVER, ON 9/11, THERE WERE NO FIGHTER JETS TO MEET ANY OF THE HIJACKED PLANES OVER A PERIOD OF 1 HOUR AND 45 MINUTES. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT!!!!!!!! PRETTY OBVIOUS ANSWER. DOESN'T TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO FIGURE THAT OUT!!!!!!!!

They were in fact ordered to stand down.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2452

Dilip Hiro on the Iran Nuclear Crisis

http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=D4C4B766-DFCC-2E55-AE83F5342839AC31

Judge Who Let Cheney Off Linked to Major Oil Companies

Federal Judge A. Raymond Randolph yesterday ruled in favor of Vice President Dick Cheney in Cheney's efforts to keep his energy task force records secret. Cheney has already been cited by the GAO for allowing energy companies to write much of the task force's documents. So why would the judge make this ruling? Could it have anything to do with a sympathy for energy companies brought on by his close proximity to America's oil industry giants?

Check out the details. Randolph serves on the Judicial Advisory Board of George Mason's Law & Economics Center (he has apparently served there for at least a few years, and may still currently). This is the same Law & Economics Center famous for taking judges on training junkets, and for being financed with huge amounts of cash from oil industry giants like Exxon. Raymond is also an adjunct law professor at George Mason University, a place that has taken millions from Koch Industries - another major oil company (for more on Koch's multi-million dollar ties to George Mason, see Media Transparency's special site).
For more, see this other site that looked into this at bottom.

Sources:
Judge Randolph lets Cheney off: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-05-10T185527Z_01_N1013959_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ENERGY-CHENEY-DC.XML
Cheney already cited by GAO: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44891-2003Aug25?language=printer
Randolph serves on the board of the Law & Economics Center: http://www.law.gmu.edu/lawecon/2004 Programs brochure.pdf
Law & Economics Center funded with Exxon cash: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=37
Randolph is an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School: http://www.law.gmu.edu/faculty/bio.php?fac=58
George Mason funded with millions from Koch Industries: http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/reports/TortReport.pdf
Media Transparency's special site: http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/koch_family_foundations.htm
More information: http://www.legitgov.org/news_cheney_task_force_judge_051005.html

MICHAEL JACKSON IS STILL ON TRIAL

and Jesus wept!

FONDA ON FAITH AND POLITICS
By LIZ SMITH

'TRYING TO define yourself is like try ing to bite your own teeth," said Alan Watts.

And here we continue our talk with the incredible Jane Fonda.

LIZ: Jane, many people are interested in your having become a Christian after being an agnostic most of your life. What kind of church do you go to in Atlanta?

Jane: I am searching for one, but have not found one yet. And, Liz, I am a feminist Christian.

Liz: So maybe you see Christianity in a broader sense than the fundamentalists?

Jane: I don't want to offend anyone. But I believe people have different ways of approaching The Word. For me, it's metaphor, written by people a long time after Christ died. And interpreted by specific groups. I read the gospels that aren't included in the Bible. These make me feel good about calling myself a Christian. What we are seeing today are policymakers who say they're Christians.

Budgets are a religious matter. War is. Poverty is. Health care is. Jesus said, "Look after the least of us." But there is a separation between professed faith and the practice, and I'm not seeing too many policies coming out of Washington that are, in my opinion, informed by the teachings of Jesus."

Liz: It seems Jesus surrounded himself with women and depended on them.

Jane: Real women . . . and prostitutes. Samaritans and outcasts.

Liz: Yes, publicans and sinners. Or was that Republicans and sinners?

Jane: (Laughter) I was at the White House correspondents' dinner the other night, and Laura Bush was really funny. Her approval rating is way up, as it should be.

Liz: Did you see the president's press conference before that; I thought he was floundering.

Jane: No, I thought he was very impressive. I don't know him, but I have always thought if I were alone in a room with him, I would really like him.

and so it begins. Makes me wonder what it takes
to qualify....anti-gay and misogyny comes to mind...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5193425-110881,00.html

Rules, schmules! Who needs 'em? Not the Senate, not the Rez, not the new Poop Rat.

Oh, and apparently not JP2, either. D'ya s'pose his body being "so well preserved" after only a "light" embalming will count as an after-death "miracle?"

Ugh. Spare me the theatrics and political brouhaha!

Rules, schmules; saint, schmaint. Who made this whole "saint" business up, anyway?

E-mail addles the mind...

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/04/BUGOSCJGA41.DTL&type=printable

Jane Fonda = sell out.

She also hangs out with her ex and his girlfriends!!! Low self esteem to not see oneself as the #1.
Likes Bush and Pickles?
Puhleeeze.

Jane, I have great shape thanks to you. Want some tabbacy?

http://tinyurl.com/dehgc

The GOP's Attack On Voting Rights

John Conyers, Jr. is a United States Congressman representing Michigan's 14th district.

190: The number of days since Election 2004 and the second consecutive presidential election in which the integrity of this nation’s democracy was questioned. This past November, this country witnessed a flawed election process in which there were biased election officials, overt voter suppression tactics and improper ballot counts and recounts. We know too well the stories about the illegal demands for voter identification, the voting machine shortages, the voting machine malfunctions and the improperly disqualified provisional ballots. More than six months after the election, now is the time to ensure that our second very sad election in a row does not become a third. There is agreement in America that real election reform is necessary and a consensus and focus is needed to guarantee such election reform.

12: A conservative count of the number of election reform proposals currently pending in Congress. While we must continue to assess and debate the accounts of Election 2004 improprieties and irregularities for the sake of history and truth, we must move forward. We need to come to agreement on what election reform should encompass and pursue that agenda with a single-minded focus. The Republicans have made clear the parameters of an election reform bill they will advance this Congress—one that does nothing or even takes us backwards by imposing onerous new requirements on voters. As we go back and forth on paper ballot or no paper ballot and assign ourselves to the pro-theft camp or the anti-theft camp, are we devoting the same energy to developing a consensus about what must be done to reform elections?

22: The number of times the phrase "voter identification" or "voter ID" was said at the first Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform hearing on April 18, 2005. The mantra of Republicans is that dogs, dead people, and cartoon characters are allowed to cast fraudulent votes. Republicans are advancing that strict voter identification requirements are the means to eliminate such voter fraud and state legislators are passing voter identification legislation as fast as they can with little debate or delay. In recent months, Indiana and Georgia have enacted voter identification requirements that have been characterized as some of the most severe and unreasonable voter identification requirements in the country. Several other state legislatures have similar legislation pending. At this first Carter-Baker Commission hearing, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Barbara Arnwine told of the real-world consequences of these measures: More than 10 percent of eligible voters currently lack government-issued photo ID, and would be arbitrarily disenfranchised.

6: The number of days the American Center for Voting Rights, a new, "non-partisan," "voting rights" organization, had been in existence before it was called to testify by Republican members of Congress before a House Administration Committee hearing on March 22. The American Center for Voting Rights was formed by a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the notoriously anti-voting rights Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, who described the group as a non-partisan, voting rights advocacy group. He testified and submitted a report on Ohio election irregularities, which highlighted the Mary Poppins Conspiracy in this country. If you haven't heard about it, the Mary Poppins Conspiracy consists of many, many ineligible voters—using the names Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive F. Turkey—fraudulently voting in elections.

Unfortunately for advocates of this conspiracy theory, a precinct has yet to report that a citizen by the name of Mary Poppins showed up on Election Day and voted. Searches for Dick Tracy votes and Jive F. Turkey votes have also come up empty.

598: The number of days left in the 109th Congress to pass election reform legislation. The debate over whether voting machines were hacked or there was deliberate suppression of minority votes will continue. We should all agree—given the shoddy, unaccountable and unverifiable state of our election machinery and procedures—that, unless we act, the next close election will prompt the same debates and public confidence in our democracy will suffer a potentially fatal blow. Of even more importance, we must be vigilant as Republicans try to roll our voting rights backwards.

Newt and Hillary...what a pair!!!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/13/MNG1MCOHM91.DTL&type=printable

The US-Arab situation is boiling like mad. The US-Latin America thing seems to be heating up rapidly also:

http://www.thelondonline.co.uk/theline/article.php?articleID=2

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and
do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature.
They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
Thomas Jefferson

From Crystalinks, as was the Jefferson quote above...

The Tests of Time
Reality is a series of ongoing tests in time. Wednesday - an incident in the nation's capitol left us to examine our preparedness for a final exam. "A pilot and a student pilot were released without criminal charges Wednesday after their plane flew within three miles of the White House, prompting evacuations throughout the capital, officials said." - CNN.

The test allowed us to see flaws in the system - which is a metaphor for flaws in our grid system programming. No system is perfect no matter how many system anaysts we have. these souls are crossing the bridge from left to right brain and discovering a new source of stored memory.

On Wednesday - true to form - there was President Bush taking a bike ride in Maryland. Does that man ever work? If I didn't know he was in place as a pawn in the Masonic Program - I could never make sense of him being in office and running a country - or does he?

You could say that we are more prepared for a terrorist attack than before 911 - but there are too many cells operating in the country and too many ways for attack to prevent another attack on US soil. For now - it's not in the grid. As time and reality are lucid - as in a dream - anything goes in the tests of time and illusion - especially events that create fear factor.

Justin - Iraq Falls Apart - and Washington
scares easily over small plane...

http://antiwar.com/justin/

Should the filibuster be banned?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7844829/#survey

Arrrrrrrrgh!

Much to consider here...

http://www.bigeye.com/losingit.htm

The coming revolt of the guards...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/RevoltGuards_PeoplesHx.html

The Difference between Judaism and Zionism...

http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/differencejudzion.html

Religion: The Golden Rule and Revolution...

http://www.bigeye.com/religion.htm

I havn't had time to read the posts here yet, need to watch the local evening news.
those *(&^ @$#) are closing the Portsmouth naval base & a facility @ Loring airfors=ce base.
Remember the FUSS over Clinton's closing military bases??????
The rebellious Repup. Senators are being punished~!!!!!!!
PQ

Sally, please see my blog-report on and interviews with East Waynesville Baptist Church members (as well as others in the area). You will find they offer some new insight into the Church/State Debate and some scary as well as fresh developments in Southern Baptist land. See Blog-Report in a newspaper at:
http://www.chattanoogapulse.com/vnews/display.v.
And see Blog Interviews at:
http://dailybailout.chattablogs.com/archives/023405.html.

Bailes, I read the site and found it interesting and really liked your article on the Waynesville Baptist Church, I especially liked the story of the woman who wrote the church bulletin, she is awesome.

Thank you for the site and for pointing me in the direction of your articles, although the two URL's didn't open but I found it when I clicked on your email name.

Here are the corrected links for Bailes sites.

http://www.dailybailout.com/

http://dailybailout.chattablogs.com/archives/023405.html

http://www.chattanoogapulse.com/vnews/display.v

Sorry, everyone. Post above about End of Empire did not have the correct link. Here 'tis:

http://www.thelondonline.co.uk/theline/article.php?articleID=221

For those who can watch HBO, Gore Vidal will be on Bill Maher's show tonight, to talk about the Conyers Report!

http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000087.htm

(The publisher's site is here: http://www.academychicago.com/conyers.html)

Amazon's page: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/089733535X/qid=1116013620/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-5873938-6587344?v=glance&s=books

http://www.academychicago.com/conyers.html

National Conference for Media Reform - Live Streaming Video

http://www.freepress.net/conference/

http://www.davidsirota.com/2005/05/abc-news-were-not-interested-in.html

ABC News: We're Not Interested in Covering the Iraq War

Why do Americans think journalism is a complete and total joke? Maybe because news organizations treat the most serious, somber news as a a complete and total joke. Just look at this from ABC News's "The Note" today:

"Brides gotta run, planes gotta stray, and cable news networks gotta find a way to fill a lot of programming hours as cheaply as possible...We say with all the genuine apolitical and non-partisan human concern that we can muster that the death and carnage in Iraq is truly staggering. And/but we are sort of resigned to the Notion that it simply isn't going to break through to American news organizations, or, for the most part, Americans...What is hands down the biggest story every day in the world will get almost no coverage."

Let me reiterate how unbelievable this actually is: A MAJOR AMERICAN MEDIA OUTLET HAS NOW DECLARED THAT THEY SIMPLY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN LETTING THE CARNAGE IN IRAQ "BREAK THROUGH" IN THEIR NEWS COVERAGE - AS IF IT IS SIMPLY NOT NEWSWORTHY. You can just imagine the pathetic newsroom attitude: we don't cover cats getting stuck in trees, we don't birthday parties at the local McDonalds, and we don't cover America's multi-billion dollar war in the Mideast.

More...

Another one, this one on Wild Vile Bolton:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7833135/#survey

Ha! 80% NO for Bolton.

.........

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/opinion/13krugman.html

Paul Krugman: 'Always low wages. Always.'

Last week Standard and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees a significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts.

Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.

Standard and Poor's downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather than later because it believes that the public is losing interest in S.U.V.'s. But the companies were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and offer good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees has gone out of style. In particular, they are weighed down by health care costs for current and retired workers, which run to about $1,500 per vehicle at G.M.

So the downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.

In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today's dollars, a solidly middle-class income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.

Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.

Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.

The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.

More...

The True Purpose of Torture - Naomi Klein

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5193682-103677,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/14/national/14kyoto.html?

Rebuffing Bush, 132 Mayors Embrace Kyoto Rules

another reason we are considered a joke in some
parts of the world....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5193598-110878,00.html

This is an interesting walk down memory lane.

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/brambles/499/Special_Reports/US-Iran/us-iran.html

U.S.-Iran: 20 Years of Secrets

In August, President Clinton sent a secret letter to Iranian President Mohammed Khatemi, seeking Iran's help in solving a fatal bomb attack against a U.S. military compound in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

If Iran cooperated, Clinton held out hope of better relations between Washington and Teheran, two capitals at odds for two decades, since Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. [WP, Sept. 29, 1999]

Yet, while Clinton asks Iran about the 1996 bombing, he reportedly resisted earlier Iranian proffers of evidence about Republican complicity in prolonging the kidnapping of the 52 American hostages in 1980, as part of a scheme to ensure Ronald Reagan's election.

On at least two occasions after Clinton's victory in 1992, Iranian emissaries told Clinton insiders that Iran was willing to turn over evidence about secret Republican contacts with Islamic radicals close to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, according to sources involved in those overtures.

But on both occasions -- once as early as the Clinton transition period in late 1992 and again in 1994 -- Clinton spurned the offers, the sources said. He apparently feared the contacts could open him to charges of playing politics.

More...

It took me a long time to read these posts to find out if anyone had posted the raw story http://rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/conyers_war_crimes_513

'WAR CRIMES'
51 House members call on Gonzales to appoint special counsel on alleged U.S. 'war crimes'

"What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty." Gandhi

The flushing of the Koran down a toliet in one of our prisons, Gitmo, I think, is big stuff over here on the news. Pakistan, even Bangladesh, Indonesia, just about every Muslim country in the world is having a problem with this behavior.We saw Condi on news saying it would not happen, but we are seeing a lot of distrubance that I do not think you get to see. Also the Russians look a lot better on tv over here.BJT

Yes, Betsy. I think this is going to be a big story. I don't think they will be able to suppress it. I wonder if it will lead to the closure of the detention center. It should.

Maybe this is Pluto's sweet revenge... the Koran down the toilet. I wonder where the Bible will be going?

BTW, I think the WH is really spooked right now. Condi looks terrified, but then to me, she always looks like she just shined her flashlight on a coiled up rattler.

One more little thing. When Jupiter goes into Scorpio in several months it will go into mutual reception with the Pluto in Sagittarius.
My book says "tests deal with compulsive religious attitudes, bigotry, and intolerance.

So what else is new?

I wonder if it will intensify. Good Lord.

Sally...excellent vision. Well done.
The posts brief comments on the possibilities of Jesus traveling east to study Buddhism did not consider one possibility that would transcend the need for the battle between religions. Perhaps Jesus&Buddha were reincarnations of the same blessed soul. Not an unusual thought for those familiar with the stories of the Ascended Masters. Their message was clearly the same. Something to consider.

May 14, 2005
Separation of Church and Air Force
Whatever is ailing the Air Force Academy, and the academy has had its share of ailments over the years, campus pressure on cadets to adopt a particular set of religious beliefs will not cure it. Last year, academy officials promised to do something about widespread complaints of unconstitutional proselytizing of academy students by evangelists whose efforts were blessed by authority figures in the chain of command. An authorized investigation by the Yale Divinity School and local news reports documented numerous instances of pressure on cadets to adopt Christian beliefs and practices. Such pressure came from dozens of faculty members and chaplains, and even the football coach, with his "Team Jesus Christ" banner.

One chaplain instructed 600 cadets to warn their comrades who had not been born again that "the fires of hell" were waiting. Pressure to view "The Passion of the Christ" was reported, extending to "official" invitations at every cadet's seat in the dining hall. Nonevangelicals complained of bias in the granting of cadet privileges and of hazing by upper-class superiors, who made those who declined to attend chapel march in "heathen flights."

The cure for this blatant abuse of God and country should be obvious. But it turns out that the academy's remedial program of religious toleration is running into resistance. The Air Force's chief chaplain expressed displeasure at the object lessons dramatized in a multidenominational educational videotape. "Why is it that the Christians never win?" the chief, Maj. Gen. Charles Baldwin, demanded to know after watching the give-and-take of instructional encounters. General Baldwin had segments cut out on such non-Christian religions as Buddhism, Judaism and Native American spirituality.

Capt. MeLinda Morton, a campus chaplain charged with helping to fix the problem, was thoroughly disheartened by the response. She warned that the altered video program would do little to cure what remained "systemic and pervasive" proselytizing. The captain, a Lutheran minister, was removed last week as executive officer of the chaplain office.

Right now, it is hard to believe that there can be true reform from within. It is time for the higher chain of command to deproselytize this institution of national defense.

wv, isn't that the same place that has had all those accusations of rape (by male cadets against female cadets)? I'm assuming it's so (as in "it figures"), but wanted to check with you to make sure I'm not confusing two academies. Thnx.

Heh, I grew up in the military, and came across more than one family where the "head of household" was a religious fanatic. They terrorized their families and were generally macho sh*theads. At the time I thought they were unfortunate oddities, but maybe not. It fits that those who want to know what they are suppose to think, take orders and be told what to wear would also require spiritual mandates.

http://downingstreetmemo.com/takeaction.html

This is a very interesting read on the evolution of today's situation.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/11645512/

City Clerk sought /received a court order to open the voting machines. What might we learn here? can we get other folks checking on voting machines to ask for info for us?

June 14 runoff contest set for Camden Council

By Elisa Ung

Inquirer Staff Writer

Camden will have a runoff June 14 for the three at-large City Council seats.

snip
Because election workers in 13 districts did not have the total number of voters who cast ballots for Council, the City Clerk's Office yesterday morning sought and received a court order to open the voting machines and determine the final count.

snip
Sloan El said yesterday that in response to reports he received of voter irregularities and machines acting improperly, he plans to seek a court order next week asking for a full recount and seeking maintenance reports on the voting machines.

http://tinyurl.com/cc2we

Resident: Firing unnecessary

A Patterson man who was stopped by the FBI and police in Scarsdale, after he was spotted driving near the Kensico Reservoir wearing a military-style helmet, said yesterday that authorities overreacted when they shot him with a Taser and blew up his knapsack.
"I think they all acted like idiots,'' 43-year-old Michael Jansen said of the incident Wednesday, when police evacuated about 12 houses near Post and Gorham roads and diverted traffic from the area for four hours while members of the Westchester County Bomb Squad searched his car and used a water cannon to destroy a knapsack containing batteries, wires and electronic equipment.

Authorities also seized what they described as "canisters, including one containing an unknown liquid.'' Jansen said the "canister'' was a thermos filled with cranberry juice. No explosives were found, and police confirmed yesterday that tests showed the liquid was not dangerous.

"None of this would have happened if they would have asked me a few questions,'' Jansen said during a telephone interview from Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, where he is being held for psychiatric evaluation. Jansen said he has undergone brain surgery four times since 1999 to remove a tumor and wears the helmet to protect his head.

"I've been stopped by police in northern Westchester and Putnam several times," he said. "They ask me why I'm wearing a helmet, and I show them a form I have that says I've had head injuries. Until now, they've always been polite about it and let me go.''

An FBI spokesman, Agent James Margolin, could not be reached for comment yesterday but said Thursday that the case is closed and no charges will be filed against Jansen. White Plains police would not comment, saying the case belonged to the FBI.

Police said an FBI task force member started following Jansen through White Plains after spotting him on Route 22 wearing the helmet and with a camera mounted on his car's dashboard. The FBI contacted White Plains police for assistance, and Jansen was stopped in Scarsdale.

Jansen said he works as a freelance photographer and was on Route 22 when he noticed he was being followed while he was driving through White Plains.

At that point, he said, he turned on a video camera mounted in his car and taped the entire incident. White Plains police said the tape was seized and is in the custody of the FBI.

"When I got out of the car I thought it was just a traffic stop, but the police started yelling and screaming at me on a speaker and they were pointing all kinds of weapons at me," he said. "I was holding up the paper I have with a picture of my head injuries.''

Police said Jansen was shot with a Taser after he ignored several orders to stop walking toward them. Jansen said the police were about 50 yards away from him and that he couldn't understand them. He said when he did hear them say to get on the ground he didn't want to because he was afraid he might hurt his head. At that point, he was shot with the Taser, he said, and several officers took him to the ground and ripped the helmet from his head.

"Would you pull a person out of a wheelchair to arrest him? I don't think so,'' Jansen said.

Once at White Plains police headquarters, he said, "they treated me well, but they wouldn't let me call a lawyer or make a phone call. They questioned me for about four or five hours. But they acted more normal, and a few of them apologized and said they made a mistake.''

Jansen's mother, Christina Jansen, said police came to the apartment she shares with her son Wednesday afternoon and searched his room.

"They were sent by the FBI, and I think they were embarrassed,'' she said yesterday.

Jansen said he expects to be released from the hospital Monday.

"When I get out the first thing I'm going to do is put my helmet on,'' he said.

Wow, Sally! Wonderful article ... much food for thought! Saw a great bumper sticker yesterday ...

Abolish Mad Cowboy Disease! wonder what they were referring to ... :)

LOL! I wonder what Mr Frist's planets looked like?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/13/22223/5986

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/051305.html

Solving the Media Puzzle

American progressives finally are taking seriously the threat posed by the U.S. news media’s swing to the right, which – perhaps more than any other factor – has transformed the U.S. democratic process into a mess of disinformation, fear and irrationality.

Many of the depredations of the last four-plus years – from the war in Iraq and the collapse of America’s image abroad to assaults on the teaching of evolution and inaction on the looming global-warming crisis – can only be understood by factoring in the Right’s powerful propaganda apparatus and the mainstream media’s complicity.

Still, there remains widespread confusion on the Left about what can be done and how to get the most value from investments of money and talent.

From our perspective as a 10-year-old independent investigative Web site and my own personal experience of more than three decades in journalism – mostly at mainstream news outlets, such as the Associated Press, Newsweek, PBS Frontline and Bloomberg News – here are some suggestions:

More....

This poem was posted in the comments by Apian at DailyKos, here is the link:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/14/11273/9922

Anyway, I thought it was so beautiful. Apparently it has music written for it too. Enjoy.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed

And the people in the streets below
Were dancing 'round and 'round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.

words and music by Ed McCurdy
TRO-©1950,1951 & 1955 Almanac Music, Inc.
New York, N.Y. Copyrights renewed
Used by permission

I believe, Laurie, the first time I heard that song it was sung by The Weavers. Simon & Garfunkel took it out for a great spin, too, and I'm sure Arlo did. Great song. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention. I had almost forgotten about it.

They act as though Alfred E. Neumann is Preznit. Laugh? Cry? Whatever.

America "Kept In the Dark" About Rising Carnage
in Iraq...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8836.htm

Oops! Here's the Alfred E. Neumann link:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/13/143032/127

Shylurker

Yes it is the same place, and in Colorado Springs
home of James Dobson and his Family group

Much to ponder here...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

Dear Anonymous (I think it's our dear wv), thanks for clarifying that the AF Academy that has become so heavily gawd-ridden is the same one where the rapes are occurring. Hmmmmm. Why do these gawd-freaks hate women so? Misogyny seems to be a major pillar of their existence.

Ooops, it was me re the AF Academy...

Now for more news - God help us...

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20050514.shtml

The Man who may get DeLay...

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Michael Jackson is still on trial....A Chorus of
Holy Fools.....

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Blame the Crusades...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-heaven14may14,0,3782968,print.story

wv, thank you for posting the fonda interview. i wouldn't have seen it were it not for your post. well, she had exceedingly bad judgement back in the viet nam war (NEVER sit a anti-aircraft gun in the capitol of people killing american soldiers...better ways to protest that war). now she's just a jackass. no wonder ted turner dumped her. they call the press media whores; what do we call finda, a hollywood whore? (ouch)

shylurker, i used to havfe an 'alfred e. newman for president' poster in my room as a kid, a true believer. mad magazine, before it was bought out, was a great educaitonal tool; the 'jon steward show' of it's era, and more.

happy weekend. you can all stay up an hour later tonight 3:00AM (local time!). the bed check is voluntary

http://www.blueoregon.com/2005/05/assassinating_t.html

A few weeks ago the World Affairs Council's Young Professionals met in the upstairs room of a Portland brew pub to ponder the definition of "civil society." The conversation wandered like a Bedouin, touching on questions of health and elder care and personal freedom vs. social order. But by the third microbrew all had agreed on one thing: a civil society cannot exist unless critical thought is promoted, from kindergarten through the university level.

The subject came up again last weekend at PSU, where a panel of academicians spoke calmly but urgently on the matter of "Academic Freedom Under Siege." Unbeknownst to most of us, the neo-conservatives have been taking a mighty swipe at academia, that last American bastion of critical thought. They've targeted female, foreign and minority professors, "outing" them as leftist liberal intellectuals. If you don't believe it, check out a popular new web site, www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
Like any other "Bushism," the title is a gross misnomer. Instead of opening a discussion of academic freedom, the site has created a forum for conservative students to rail against faculty and "inform on" controversial professors who criticize the US policy in Iraq. The site also suggests that legislative funding for public universities should be linked to the promotion of "equal" agendas, including those of the Christian right, who feel disenfranchised by the liberal bent on most campusesŠ
Hostility toward intellectuals is nothing new among power-hungry regimes. Take, for example, the Khmer Rouge, who, emulating Stalin's model, murdered thousands of doctors, lawyers, philosophers, writers and university professors a mere 30 years ago. As for Stalin, the "intelligensia class" was among the first groups targeted in his Great Purges of the 1930s and 40s. Survivors (and those with the foresight to flee) came, in large part, to America, where they found thriving academic and scientific communities. With the exception of the McCarthy era, the US has always been a refuge for inventors, innovators and progressive thinkers. Although the NEH, acting under the influence of the current administration, cannot be compared to the tyrannies of Stalin and Pol Pot, we would be wise to watch this issue closely. Otherwise, the result could be similar: a brain drain, or dumbing down of American higher learning, which would leave us struggling for generations to regain the civil society we have lost.

[Don't forget the group formed by Lynn Cheney and Joe Lieberman, either, a group dedicated to purging academics (pdf) who dare bring up the historical facts of wrongdoing by our country.-Caro]

More...

Y'all are really going to like this:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html

There is some perspective there shy!

Yessum, Pat C. And I've been thinking about perspective. Since Snarly is the person actually in charge in the WH (and over all the Repugs), should we concentrate more on looking at things through that perspective rather than through the perspective of Smirky? Just askin'.

Have been catching up on about a week's worth of posts and thinking what a really bright, very thoughtful, highly educated (by one means or another-lol), and passionate bunch of people are on this site. It's easily the most consistently interesting site I've ever found on the web. Food for the brain, and food for the heart. Just want to say thank you to all of you, but expecially Captain Sally. Your article here is perfect, Sally. Each thought is preceisely how I see things, and you write really, really well....so it's a joy to read on 2 levels.....form and substance both.

The hypocracy...we support a man who boils people...

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5194001-102275,00.html

Excellent posting by all!!! Wonderful article, Sally.

I read a comment somewhere saying that the seven swing Republican senators will either vote down Bolton or oppose the "nuclear option" of ending the judicial filibuster, but not both. Personally, if I had to choose between the two, I'd keep the filibuster and let Bolton take the job. I saw another post where someone said they hope Bolton gets the job so that the world community will get a clear-as-day view of the kind of foreign policy we are conducting. Bolton will inevitably piss off ALOT of foreign diplomats if he gets the job, accelerating the growth of anti-US sentiment possibly to the point where the nations of the world realize the need for a coalition to counter-balance our destructive ways. Maybe the Democrats can't stop Bush, but hopefully the rest of the world can.

From your piece wv on church & AF... "national defense?!?!?!?!!" WhaddaHOOT!! The reality is "national OFFENSE" ... & certainly "offensive" as in terminable stinky.

AJ....I thought of the same thing, and I am familiar with the ascended masters....! I've always thought, since I read Blavatsky and others, that Jesus was that incarnation.

WV....I think I posted once before that it is as if the AirForce emulates the commander in chief: under Clinton, sex scandels...under georgie boy, it is religion. Wonder what would happen if Hillary becomes pres?

And Sally, going back to the Mars/Uranus conjunction, this link was on RawStory tonight...Uzbekistan on the brink as clashes spread
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1484252,00.html?gusrc=rss
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Sunday May 15, 2005
The Observer

The violence that has reportedly killed hundreds of protesters in eastern Uzbekistan appeared to be spreading to neighbouring towns last night, raising fears that the volatile Central Asian state could erupt into a full-scale revolution.

As human rights workers in the flashpoint town of Andijan warned that the death toll there could reach 500, an official from the neighbouring country of Kyrgyzstan said sporadic rioting had broken out in the border town of Karasu, with government buildings and police cars on fire and military helicopters circling overhead.

Hello, Dave. Somewhere up there I posted an article about Latin American and Arab countries having a summit. The US was not invited. Not even to observe. Meanwhile, of course, lots of maneuvering worldwide is going on regarding the Euro, oil, "understandings," arming-up and so on. I think when I posted that article I made some reference to our witnessing the end of empire and what the aftermath of that will be for all of us. It does seem to be happening. Hope all is going well with you.

Uzbekistan (09.01.1991, Tashkent) counts Sept. 1, as their Independence Day that was the day they gained their independence from Russia. Their Sun is at 8 degrees Virgo. Uranus has just finished its first opposition and Mars was opposing exactly when the violence. Their attempts at a revolution from the Dictatorship ruling them has been building for several weeks. I expect there will be a clamp down, but Uranus is going to retrograde and go back over the opposition and Mars will blithly travel on to Gemini making another stress aspect to that Sun. These people are so desperate and are dying anyway under this government, they have decided to die for something and that something is their freedom from their oppressive repression. The progressed Sun is being squared by Pluto, that would signal a change, a big change and I don't think they will be willing to go back to the way things were. They've set government buildings on fire and are demanding the resignation of President Karimov, whom I expect is cowering even as I write in an undisclosed location. Mars/Uranus has placed "freedom on the march" in Uzbekistan that's for sure. Puts the US government in a heck of a position of openly helping and supporting a dictatorship, and a nasty one at that. Course George uses their prison and torture rooms and he may feel he owes them something.

Dave, I agree if the Dems can only have one thing, save the filibuster, but it's one heck of a choice. Uck, I would love to see Bolton being sent off to foam in a corner.

Finally we have this burst upon the scene, happy days and good news.

http://www.freepress.net/

From my perspective Dave & Sally, I would rather the filibuster go than Bolton get in. With the US controlling almost everything the United Nations does, most particularly the security council's voice, I think if Bolton has his way, the rest of the world will be very effectively silenced totally. It is interesting that when the UN was formed and the question of the Security Council first came up, the then NZ prime minister fought hard, unsuccessfully, to limit the power of the US on the security council. His reasoning that, it went against the fairness of giving small countries a voice in world affairs - same thinking as gives each small US state the same number of senatorial representatives as some of the larger ones.
How right he was.

Hi, all, haven't posted in quite some time.

Looks like the quote from Nietzsche really drew some interest. It certainly made me smile (the Antichrist is a great book, and yes, it probably ought to be translated as the "Anti-Christian"). I think Timothy did an excellent job explaining much of the history and philosophy, and I am certainly glad to see others out there with an interest in astrology who appreciate great German philosophy and literature.

Nietzsche was not only a philosopher, but also a great metaphysical writer. And despite the intellectual rejection and torment he suffered during his short adult life as he rebelled against the growing fascism in European society, he still created some of the greatest philosophical literature ever.

Fast forward to 2005 - what can we learn from Nietzsche's works and personal struggle that applies today? Why pay any interest to a man who died 100 years ago a broken, impoverished outcast?

The fight for rational discourse, fair political process, and truth is lost when faith becomes law - that is the wisdom in Nietzsche's quote and Sally's article. In America today, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly (and a whole priesthood of others) have become the preachers of the new gospel and have overwhelmed the truth as they demand faith in, and obedience to, the new government religion.

Still, never underestimate the power of music, art and literature. Some independent film, incredible book, or amazing website could create undeniable masterpieces of spiritual truth, which infect our souls and help us to open our eyes collectively. If an Eminem can draw incredible massive appeal and artistic praise, there is still hope for even better. Even if great work is ridiculed, censored, or suppressed from publication, it eventually will come out - often in ways that the party in power doesn't realize, understand and can't control. The East Germans created some of the best literature under strict communist control, and their works helped keep alive the spirit of hope and freedom which enabled the collapse of communism when the time was right. Rock n' Roll changed the hearts and minds of young America and ended the rise of militarism and industrial oligarchy in the US. And to some extent, I believe that rap music in the early days helped oust HW Bush and enabled Clinton to win the presidency.

I also believe that some great techno-metaphysical art is waiting to be born, and it will someday help lead us out of our great delusion. Astrology can help bring forth the spirit of truth in ways which are yet unrealized - as happens here on this site all the time. Who knows, the next Nietzsche may just be a lady poet and rapper with metaphysical/ astrological lyrics.

Well they are arming the south and their most favored conservative western states. The northeast is being stripped.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bases14may14,0,5201893,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
LA Times

The Pentagon presented a plan Friday to close 33 major domestic bases and shrink 29 more, a cost-saving makeover that would slash the military's presence in the Northeast and save nearly $50 billion over 20 years.

If approved without major changes, the closures proposed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld would move thousands of troops and their equipment from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and, to a lesser extent, the West.

California, which was greatly affected by the last four rounds of base closures, would lose 2,018 jobs under Friday's recommendation — a fraction of the 93,000 military and civilian positions the state lost in prior rounds. California avoided deeper cuts in the new recommendations because the most obvious ones had been made, officials and analysts said.

The latest round of proposed closures includes several well-known Northeast installations that employ thousands of troops and civilian personnel: the historic New London submarine base in Connecticut, the Portsmouth naval shipyard in Maine and Ft. Monmouth in New Jersey. The Pentagon also proposed closing Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, one of two B-1 bomber bases in the country. ...

... "Today's decision by the Department of Defense is nothing short of stunning, devastating, and above all, outrageous," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said. "It is a travesty and a strategic blunder of epic proportions."

The recommendations partly reflect a U.S. military that is shifting away from heavy formations needed to counter large military adversaries and moving toward joint operations and highly mobile forces for battles against terrorist networks and so-called rogue regimes. Following Rumsfeld's prescriptions to become lighter and more lethal, the military has trimmed submarine and naval destroyer purchases and cut back on jet fighters. ...

... Although the planned cuts were far smaller than Pentagon strategists had forecast a few months ago, they hammered many Northern and Midwestern states and gave the military an increasingly Southern accent.

The biggest loser in terms of jobs was Connecticut, which would see 8,586 military and civilian positions disappear. Maine would lose 6,938 jobs, while the District of Columbia would lose 6,496. South Dakota would lose 3,797, New Jersey 3,760 and Missouri 3,679.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island defied the regional trend, modestly gaining 491 and 531 jobs, respectively.

"I am shocked by the Pentagon's decision this morning to target the sub base here in New London for closure," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "It is wrong. It is shortsighted. And it is cruel and unusual punishment that Connecticut does not deserve and our national security cannot afford." ...

... The decision to shutter Northeastern bases was due in large part to the lower cost in most of the more spacious Southern and Western states, Defense officials and military analysts said.

Georgia would gain 7,423 jobs and Texas 6,150. Some states gained at the expense of their neighbors. The storied base at Ft. Knox, Ky., would lose its armored force military school to Ft. Benning, Ga.

The domestic realignment was coordinated with an overhaul of the Pentagon's overseas troop deployments. The Pentagon is relocating the bulk of two Army divisions based in Germany — the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Infantry — back to the United States. Most of these troops will move to Ft. Bliss, Texas, and Ft. Riley, Kan., Defense officials said.

Western states fared comparatively well in the Pentagon's recommendations. Colorado would gain 4,917 and Washington 760. Oregon would lose 1,083, Idaho 659 and Utah 446. Alaska would be the exception, losing 4,619 jobs. ...

http://www.fox23news.com/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=F511DD39-5F55-43A3-AB50-E657C6EAFA4E

Wesley Clark says base closings mean military isolation

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said Saturday that the Pentagon's plan to close military bases around the country and reorganize troops will isolate the military from the American people and the rest of the world.

Clark said the plan to pull U.S. forces back home from abroad and centralize bases takes jobs away from smaller towns.

"We're losing influence abroad when we bring those troops home, and we lose the interaction with America when we create these super bases," Clark said in a speech to the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors Association.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has proposed closing 33 major military installations in the United States and reorganizing hundreds of others. Tens of thousands of troops in Europe and East Asia are expected to come home.

Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are to testify Monday before a congressionally chartered commission that will review the proposal before sending it to President Bush this fall.

Clark, a former NATO commander who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination last year, said it worried him to see the military planning to close national guard armories. He said shuttering bases and moving jobs from smaller cities shatters an important connection between the military and civilians.

"Small communities lose sight of the armed forces," he said. "I like for the Army and the armed forces to be representative of the people they protect, not an elite organization."

Clark also voiced his concerns about Bush's nomination of John Bolton to United Nations ambassador, calling Bolton "somewhat of a bully."

"He's going to have a very tough time in the United Nations," Clark said. "When you come in with that much overhang, with all this reputation against you, it's that much more difficult. And all that's known in the United Nations.

"Personally, I don't like bullies," he added. "Just because you outrank somebody doesn't mean you don't respect them and their judgment."

Bush's nomination of Bolton was voted out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday but is unlikely to come before the full Senate before the end of May.

"I am shocked by the Pentagon's decision this morning to target the sub base here in New London for closure," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "It is wrong. It is shortsighted. And it is cruel and unusual punishment that Connecticut does not deserve and our national security cannot afford." ...
So much for ****'s judas kiss Joe!

The biggest loser in terms of jobs was Connecticut, which would see 8,586 military and civilian positions disappear.
Maine would lose 6,938 jobs, while the District of Columbia would lose 6,496. South Dakota would lose 3,797, New Jersey 3,760 and Missouri 3,679.
.. "Today's decision by the Department of Defense is nothing short of stunning, devastating, and above all, outrageous," Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said. "It is a travesty and a strategic blunder of epic proportions."
Sen. Collins is singing the same blues on local news!
This gives me some excellant talking points for my next letters to them both!
Wesley Clark:
"I like for the Army and the armed forces to be representative of the people they protect, not an elite organization."

But Wesley, honey, they might be exposed to Quakers or Unitarians in the North!
On a different topic altogether..I thought this VERY INTERESTING!
SHANGHAI - China is not only a place where fortunes are being made, but increasingly a place where they are being given away, as the new wealthy become the philanthropists of today and tomorrow. more...........
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GE14Ad06.html
Maybe Betsy could get us jobs there?
Sally; a very well thought out article. I have printed it out to re read/refer to and pass along to my friends. My portfolio of print-outs from A W is getting very fat!
With mars conjuncting uranus / pices in my tenth house; working their way toward my jupiter there.........I'm focusing on my artwork.
PQ

Whoever is pulling the strings behind the strings, the Bilderbergs, the Iluminiti, the shadow government, the Holy See in Rome, or born again Nazi's, they are moving fast and loose and protecting their stooges in their wake.

It isn't just Bush they are holding up, the entire world is in the grips of these people and those who aren't are going to be removed by force. There is no loyal opposition anywhere, only people playing assigned roles.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=638552

Frank Rich: How Gay is the Right?

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Shylurker, one of theterms you have always used for Rez is 'Snarly' and it has always cracked me up. Today I got an email from a friend in which he wrote:
Today's Word: Contumely (Noun)

Pronunciation: [kên-'t(y)u-mê-lee or kên-'t(y)um-lee]

Definition 1: Rudeness whose roots are in arrogance; an arrogant remark or action.

As in: President Shrub Contumely?

AND I wrote back and mentioned your 'snarly' and wrote
ONE OF THE FUNNIEST NAMES FOR THE REZ I'VE HEARD IS 'SNARLY'......SNARLY CONTUMELY....SOUNDS LIKE A NAME OUT OF DICKINS, OR A MEL BROOKS MOVIE.
:

Judy Gem, I use Smirky for the Shrubster and Snarly for the one who is really in charge. You use the terms however you wish, however.

German Lit Student....oh boy oh boy, you are SO right....and it is just as we are in the winter of our discontent, that the seeds are sown for the next spring. When I was in school, both lower and higher levels, we had very strict laws on what was pornographic....the Catholic church had their lists of 'bad' bad stuff (ha!)...look for the return of those lists....and no one except smugglers from Paris could read Lady Chatterly's Lover or Henry Miller ....those were the days of real brown paper wrappers. And let us not forget the lessons .....it isn't about the money....it is about the legacy. Years from now some broken novelist (a young break thru novelist about 36 years old, whose name I can't remember, struggled like crazy to be published, was, was hearalded as the coming 'thing' ...hung himself last week.) while the Michael Crictons of the world live the good life and no one reads them or cares about them later. A lesson for all those struggling to remember.

This should keep you busy for awhile and deep
in thought...

http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/pro-freedom.co.uk/index.html

Shylurker, thanks, IT WORKS FOR BOTH OF THEM....

TWEEDLE DUM AND TWEEDLE DEE HAVE BECOME
SMIRKY CONTUMELY AND
SNARLY CONTUMELY!

A few more things to think about....

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
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WV....re mind control....who knew my dad, my friends' dads, my great grandfather, AND ALL THE FOUNDING FATHERS were actually satanic devil worshopers and child killers? muahahahahaha

Jm
You've given me an idea for my 50th birthday on Tuesday. I'm going to get the bible out that my fundamentalist, sexist, Repug Mother gave me on my 17th birthday (the only book she ever gave me) and BURN IT! You don't happen to know any good chants I can sing while I dance around the fire tossing those pages of lies in, do you? I want to make a very freeing ritual out of it. Hmmmm--this is a great idea--I can feel it.
Jill

....lots of goodies here....

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/signs.htm

Sally,

On the puppet masters... why the big rush, do you think?

LOL, Jill G!

I just read your Bible idea. That's a brave move. And you can say good-by to all that crazy mother stuff, and still love the mother, of course, if you so chose. You just gave me an idea. I might cut up mine and make a collage .

BTW, Happy 50th!! It's a landmark.

Jill,
Use sage when yuou burn it!
PQ

I meant cut up my bible, not my mother!

Author of this book, Jon Ronson was on CSpan
(Book Notes) today. Interesting....

http://www.anomalynews.com/phorum/read.php?f=3&i=59&t=58

Does someone know how one might figure out where the Galactic Center was 250 years ago? I'm trying to get a sense of what Pluto traveling over that spot might portend. :-)

Another $44l.6 billion for defense...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_051505A.shtml

Shylurker

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
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Thanks, wv. From forcing their unwilling wives to participate in sexual activities the wives found repulsive, to "doing it" with livestock and talking about it on the tee-vee (can you believe that????!!???), to being virulently anti-gay by day but soliciting (including under-18 yo) gay liaisons by night, to punishing a military officer trying to investigate cadet rape and intrusive "evangelical" proselytizing inside a military academy--how much lower will these people go? And the general citizenry just ignore or simply shrug their shoulders upon being told of these things? This is stuff very reminiscent of the depravity of the Nazis.

Arrrrrgh! I'm going back under the bed and see if I can't find some trivial on-line polls to post.

Massacre in Uzbekistan....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8841.htm

jm, the "puppet masters" keep everything rushed. You cannot let the "masses" sit and think too long or they figure it out and join forces. Remember we outnumber them and they can't take the chance of people regrouping or joining forces. That's why they are in a hurry

The Women Targeted by Clinton (Bill)...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20050510/bs_prweb/prweb238437_5

Cheery thought!

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000920885
PQ

Is it just me, or is there a decided increase in the level, frequency, and direction of Clinton bashing begining once again? Is 2006 that close?

Just be aware that this new Clinton book is being published by one of the "West Coast's premier publisher of conservative and libertarian books". Probably has just as much credence as a daily tabloid!

I know this would create a major, hyterical backlash, so it's really only a fantasy, but inspired by Jill's post, we should create a solidarity movement with Muslims and flush the Bible, Old & New Testament... (I can't even say where, boy am I brainwashed and guiltridden).

The courage of this woman should be an inspiration to all. I pray that her voice will eventually be heard by many, and that g-d protects her and gives her the internal fortitude to continue ..... and Michael is still on trial!!!
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/05/con05170.html

I just thought of what we could do with the bibles.

We could crush them all into a pulp and then make building materials and clothing out of them.

Is there a Doctor on this blog?
I need some medical advice ( EMERGENCY BASIS) and it has struck me that no one, of all these brilliant minds here, has mentioned being in the medical profession!???
My son has a suspected parasite, from a vacation in Cancun several years ago, He went on line last night, researching it.
Probability...tapeworm.....or trichinosis?????????
The Dr. has done blood tests....chest xrays, and made an appointment in 2 weeks! The blood tests ruled out HIV, cancer, I guess the xray ruled out pneumonia, or the Dr. would have called.
But E. has been awake all night.......skinny as a rail, body functions not working as they should............muscles ache..........
He has to go to work today ( cleaning at the fish factory) & tomorrow is scheduled to work with a local contractor. If that is satisfactory, he will quit the sardines and work with the contractor. But he is barely able to function at this point!
He is NOT substance abusing.........How cruel is karma to be resisting that problem, only to be confronted with another!
A friend in Phila's daughter almost died, when mudslides on MT. Ranier, polluted her water supply, several years ago. Then tragically she did die of breast cancer, 2 years later. ( at 42)
It has struck me that this is another looming problem we need to deal with, in terms of survival!!!!!, Are there homeopathic remedys for this sort of thing??????
When I was a kid, my Mother who had taken nurses training
in Jersey City, would tell us a horror story about treating a patient with tapeworm; to keep us from drinking out of the stream, when we went fishing in the city park.

( What a different world that was!...........2 young kids riding their bikes across town, unsupervised.......to spend time in the woods fishing!!!!!)
Hope someone can help.........another painting day down the drain for me!!!!!!!
PQ

Pat QOP go here http://www.abchomeopathy.com/ and type in all the symptoms. When you are done and have been given a remedy name, go here http://tinyurl.com/6pnmu and do some reading. The remedy Sabadilla may be the remedy you are looking for, but I do recommend that you do the footwork and put all the symptoms logged in.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you need more help.

Pat QOP, at the second link, type in the first three letters of the remedy you were given at the first link. If you use more than three letters it tends to confuse the software.

Feel free to e-mail me if you get confused.

The youth have left the church in Wayesville -
nasty little bastards...

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/national/16church.html?pagewanted=print

Here is a very interesting site. http://www.bvalphaserver.com/article8151.html

Scroll down to September 29th, 2001. Very interesting indeed.

Open-minded • Open-hearted
A new approach to spirituality
When asked your beliefs, you could answer 'Holistic'

All life is sacred, interdependent and growing to fulfil its potential.
Love, Support and Protect all beings.
Connect. Grow. Serve.

William Bloom

Rove guided career of Texas nominee involved in
filibuster fight...

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/politics/16owen.html?pagewanted=print

I saw it WV. Karl Rove seems to be behind a lot of things in the Bush White House. We should keep a "very" close eye on him.

Thanks Pat C,
That's a great resource! I've bookmarked those sites, so E can type in his symptoms when he gets up.
Also I made an appointment with his Dr. this afternoon. Apparently he wasn't clear in describing the urgency of the problem the other day. That's the basis of this whole picture....communication! I'm going to astrodienst to see what aspects he has.
PQ

Posted on Salon by Phoenix Woman:

By the way: The same right-wingers in places like RedState.org and LittleGreenFootballs who only days before were cheering the Newsweek story of torture at Guantanamo -- and in fact coming up with new ways to defile the Koran -- are now hypocritically accusing Newsweek of lying about the Koran part.

But DailyKos diarist Susan Hu shows here http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/15/211444/985 that the stories of Koran desecration at Gitmo are not only well-sourced and come from multiple sources, but have been reported on for months, such as in this January 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer article. http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10685611.htm

Remember, Newsweek apologized, but did not retract the story. They in effect apologized to Bush for making him look bad. And Bush's White House did not call the Newsweek story "inaccurate". Instead, it used the term "irresponsible", which is the word the Bush administration uses to describe media coverage that forces the Bush administration to face the fruits of its own bad actions.

Guilty people blame the messengers, never themselves. If the Bush White House didn't want to take the heat for wrongdoing, they should never have done wrong in the first place.

Defense Dept. Scrubs Report Criticizing Rumsfeld
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051605Z.shtml

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0505160123may16,0,5515147.story?coll=chi-newsopinionvoice-hed

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (LETTER)

The deafening sound of media silence

Robert Koehler, Syndicated columnist
Tribune Media Services
Published May 16, 2005
Chicago -- The Chicago Tribune has done a lot of tough, courageous investigative work over the years, and is a paper I have long admired and relied on for my news. So my disappointment at its lack of coverage of the well-documented irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 elections, and its unconcern about the security of future elections, is profound indeed.

This disappointment turned into active dismay after public editor Don Wycliff chose to write a column ("When winning isn't everything," Commentary, April 28) dismissing the concerns of a substantial number of readers who had e-mailed the Tribune recommending it publish a column I had written, "The Silent Scream of Numbers," discussing those irregularities and reporting on a national election-reform conference in Nashville last month.

Wycliff's column placed anyone deeply concerned that massive election fraud had occurred on Nov. 2 on a moral plane beneath Richard Nixon, who swallowed his narrow defeat in 1960 without noticeable protest.

Many experts have sounded the alarm about unverifiable electronic voting and U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has written a 102-page report on the massive disenfranchisement that occurred in inner-city and college precincts in Ohio on Nov. 2. But despite that, in an e-mail to me Wycliff said the issue would only be worth media attention if John Kerry "and all the other folks who had the most to gain from the election" were crying foul, not ordinary citizens.

Of all my objections to what Wycliff has written on this issue, both in his column and to me personally, I find this contention the most dispiriting. It reflects the wrongheaded, "horse race" coverage of elections the media have shoved down our throats for as long as I can remember.

Wycliff even used a sports analogy, pointing out that "it's not the pregame prognostication and expert opinions that count, but the numbers on the scoreboard after the contest has actually been played."

The Bush team won; the Kerry team lost. And the voters must be the equivalent of sports fans then, either jubilant or disappointed when the game is over, but couch potatoes either way, not participants.

Anyone else just a little bit offended?

As one of the hundred or so readers who responded to the column put it:

"Winning isn't everything, but fair elections are everything."

In my column, I quoted exit-poll analyst Jonathan Simon:

"When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death."

Excellent blog
http://www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_17682.shtml

Global Empire
Stop the Crime of the Century

In Iraq, there is a crime of breathtaking proportions taking place. Breathtaking, but not necessarily surprising. We know from the historical record that governments will lie and deceive, and we've rarely seen one as immoral and venal as the Bush administration.

What has turned this crime into an astonishing demonstration of the depth of American democracy's decay is the complicity of the media establishment in hiding the original crime, and in thus doing so, ripping a gaping hole in the fabric of our political system.

Did you know that there now exists in the public domain a 'smoking gun' memo, which proves that everything the Bush administration said about the Iraq invasion was a lie? If you live in Britain you probably do, but if you live in the United States, chances are minuscule that you would be aware of this.

Think about that for a second. Apart from 9/11, has there been a more important story in the last decade than that the president lied to the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq, and then proceeded to plunge the country into an illegal war which has alienated the rest of the world, lit a fire under the war's victims and the Islamic world generally, turning them into enemy combatants, locked up virtually all American land forces in a war without end in sight, cost $300 billion and counting, taken over 1600 American lives on top of more than 15,000 gravely wounded, and killed perhaps 100,000 Iraqis?

Could there be a bigger story? "How Do Japanese Dump Trash?", perhaps, which ran on page one of today's (May 12) Times?

Of course not. But then how is it that this is not being reported in the American mainstream media? How is it that the two organs most responsible for coverage of political developments in this country - the New York Times and the Washington Post - have failed to splash this across their front pages in bold headlines, despite the fact that they clearly know of the story? How, especially, could these two papers sit on a story like this after both recently issued mea culpas for their respective failures to critically cover administration claims of bogus Iraqi threats during the period leading up to the war, thereby contributing to the war themselves?

More...

Krugman: Staying What Course"

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/opinion/16krugman.html?pagewanted=print

If there is ANY way you can see or hear Bill
Moyers on Democracy Now today - DO IT!

He is fantastic! We have a Leader - Bill Moyers
for President!

If there is ANY way you can see or hear Bill
Moyers on Democracy Now today - DO IT!

He is fantastic! We have a Leader - Bill Moyers
for President!

Jm, look what just popped into my email. How did they get my email address??? Did you get something from Roxanne Fontana [etoilerecords@earthlink.net]?
This is her letter....
**********************************************
first off there is no "cruel christian god" whoever taught you this, is
the devil himself. killing, and coveting, and caring about material
pleasures leads to cruelty. not the opposite.

if you burn your bible you are doing what george bush does every day, he
burns the word of god..which is the word of love, do not be fooled. this
is the american problem.

my mother was a pseudo religious repug too....but that was/is part of the
game of the devil, to distort everything..to have people say they are into
the bible, when they are not, when they prove not in deed. ...and they set
bad examples, so that any one who may find the word, discards it
immediately, because of the bad example of the hypocrites. this is part of
their plan, and by burning the bible, they win! because they hate the word
of god in their souls.

if you burn the bible you burn:

love one another.

and anyone who burns that, burns, everyday and forever, with misery. just
like bush, and his lot. you are with them if you burn that. the only
difference is you will admit it, that you hate God, as oppose to them who
lie and say they are of God, when they are not.

think about it. don't dare confuse republicans with the word of god, they
are of death, they are the word of death, masquerading as the word of god
so that people will not discover the word of god, and of love. it's a
trick as old as the hills...the crusades, all that...it's the oldest trick
in the book to make you think that God is the devil. and then you lose all
your inner beauty. that's what sally's whole article is about. how can
you not get that, at fucking 50?????????
**************************************************

So far I've decided to envoke a Goddess for each element that originates in a different parts of the world that have experienced the cruel slaughter and suppression of the Christian system. Will have sage and copal as Pat C recommended too.

It's going to be great!

I think that was someone else Jill. As much as I can understand your feelings, I just could never burn a book.

I just glanced through this thread to catch up on what everyone's been up to (HI EVERYONE!) and I see that I'm not the only one who is tending to other matters these days. Sally, great article as always & you sound plumb perturbed. I found a totally superb, incredibly wonderful book to share with ya'll in case you haven't read it yet:
Destiny of Souls by Michael Newton. I so highly recommend it for a general lifting of spirit.

The Moyers speach was also on C-Span this morning
and will probably be repeated tonight according
to them - so go to www.cspan.org to see when they
will repeat it. They also may do it on the weekend.

Here is another option on viewing/listening to Moyers. He is WONDERFUL.

In an historic speech on Sunday, legendary television journalist Bill Moyers blasted Kenneth Tomlinson of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB) for launching a partisan witch hunt at PBS and called for a series of town hall meetings across the country.
"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House," Moyers told a packed room at the National Conference for Media Reform. "And that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

You can now watch or listen to Moyers' entire speech on the Free Press Web site:
An audio recording can be downloaded at: www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/moyers.mp3
Or you can watch the video at: www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/freepress-closing40515.mov
Transcript online (as soon as it's available) at www.freepress.net/conference.
In his first public statement since the controversy at PBS emerged, Moyers endorsed a call by media reform groups for a series of town hall meetings nationwide so that Americans can speak directly to station managers and policymakers about what they want and expect from public broadcasting.
More than 50,000 Americans have already signed the Free Press petition calling on Kenneth Tomlinson to resign and demanding that the public be put back into PBS.
Please add your name to the petition by clicking www.freepress.net/action/pbs.
"That great mob that is democracy is rarely heard, and that's not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and Capitol," Moyers said. "There is a great chasm between those of us in the business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much like audiences and not enough like citizens. They are invited to look through the window, but too infrequently to participate and make public broadcasting public."
Please support Bill Moyers, public broadcasting, quality journalism and democracy by signing the petition and passing along this message to everyone you know.
Onward,
Robert W. McChesney
Free Press
www.freepress.net
P.S. The conference was a rousing success. Visit www.freepress.net/conference for audio and video recordings of the sessions, new episodes of "Media Minutes" and news reports. New content is being added daily.

Outlandish!

By Toby Zakaria
WEST POINT, Va (Reuters) - The United States must find alternative energy sources to boost domestic supplies and help fast-growing China and India become more energy efficient, President Bush said on Monday.

"It's in our economic interest and our national interest to help countries like India and China become more efficient users of oil," Bush said in a speech while visiting a biodiesel production plant in rural Virginia.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050516/sc_nm/energy_bush_dc
PQ

More on Moyers...see this speech

From The Nation, a review of Moyers' speech at the Media Reform conference. Includes links to video and audio recordings of the speech.

Bill Moyers Fights Back
John Nichols Sun May 15, 3:40 PM ET

Bill Moyers is not taking attacks by Bush administration allies on public broadcasting in general and his journalism in particular sitting down.

"I should put my detractors on notice," declared the veteran journalist who stepped down in January as the host of PBS's Now with Bill Moyers, who recently turned 70. "They might compel me out of the rocking chair and into the anchor chair."
Moyers closed the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on Sunday with his first public response to the revelation that White House allies on the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have secretly been holding PBS in general -- and his show in particular -- to a partisan litmus test.

"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. And that's what (CPB chair) Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

Recalling former President Richard Nixon's failed attempt to cut the funding for public broadcasting in the early 1970s, Moyers said, "I always knew that Nixon would be back -- again and again. I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

That was a pointed reference to Tomlinson, a Republican party stalwart, who contracted with an outside consultant to monitor Moyers's weekly news program for signs of what Tomlinson and his allies perceived to be liberal bias. Moyers ridiculed the initiative first by reading off a long list of conservatives who had appeared on NOW, then by reading a letter from conservative U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, praising the show, and finally by noting that Tomlinson had paid a former Bush White House aide $10,000 to do the monitoring.

"Gee, Ken, for $2 a week you can pick up a copy of TV Guide," he joked, before suggesting that the CPB chair could have "watched the show."

"Hell, Ken," Moyers finally said. "you could have called me collect and I would have told you."

Moyers said he wasn't buying Tomlinson's claim that the results of the monitoring were not being released to protect PBS's image. "Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that stuff every day," said the man who came to Washington as a press aide to former President Lyndon Johnson and was present when the Public Broadcasting Act was written in the 1960s.

Moyers revealed to the crowd of 2,000 media reform activists that he had written Tomlinson on Friday, suggesting that the pair appear on a PBS program to discuss the controversy. He also revealed that he had tried three times to meet with the full CPB board but had been refused. Expressing his sense that the board had "crossed the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out," Moyers said, "I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can't."

The man who has won 30 Emmy Awards for his hosting of various PBS programs was blunt about his critics. "They've been after me for years now and I am sure they will be stomping on my grave after I'm dead," he said. As the laughter from the crowd of 2,300 media reform activists quieted, however, he added, "I should remind them that one of our boys made it out 2,000 years ago."

Moyers was even blunter about why he thought Tomlinson and other allies of the administration were so determined to knock his groundbreaking news program off the air and to replace it with more conservative fare such as a weekly roundtable discussion featuring Wall Street Journal editorial page staffers. Joking that, "I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it." Speaking of the investigative reporting NOW did on everything from the war in Iraq to offshore tax havens and ownership of the media, Moyers said, "Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line."

"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," he explained. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

The broadcasting giant was greeted with cheers when he declaration that "the quality of our media and the quality of our democracy are intertwined. But the loudest applause of the day came in response to his invitation to the crowd to join him in the fight to "take public broadcasting back from threats, from interference."

"It is," Moyers said, "a worthy goal."

Moyers has endorsed a call by Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Media Access Project for town hall meetings nationwide that would allow Americans to speak directly to PBS station managers and policymakers.

That call came in the context of a broader appeal for media reforms and a fight against manipulation of the news in the public and private sector.

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical," Moyers said. "And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too."

A video of the speech is available at http://www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/freepress-closing40515.mov

An audio recording can be downloaded at http://www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/moyers.mp3

(John Nichols is a co-founder of Free Press, the national media reform network that organized the National Conference on Media Reform.)

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=2484

wv,

Who is William Bloom? I love the way he has described spirituality. Also, I would love to find a way to give heart and comfort to the people left at the Waynesville church as well as express appreciation for their courage. It doesn't matter who leaves, what matters it the message given by those who stay. Undoubtably others will join. It's too bad that the religion has so brainwashed these young couples. I hope they see more of the truth one day, not just one limited aspect of it.

Re: Bill Moyers, now I understand why he stepped down. He is another heroic patriot (one of the reincarnated ones?). And the Krugman column is an especially good one because it is so succcint. I will circulate it, and I will sign the petition located at www.freepress.net/action/pbs.

Yes, indeedy, witchhunts are on the rise. Jill, I totally understand your plan and it is a beautiful one. Ashes to ashes...we come with nothing (material), we leave with nothing. I love and revere books, also, Pat C, and it is not the book but the limitations of the readers that are the obstacle; however, some symbolic gestures are important, i.e. G-d is not in a book! G-d is right here right now and we cannot fathom she/he with the sureness and the arrogance that some do.

Namaste.

Pat C, thanks for posting all that great information. I am now going to install as my automatic email signature: "Winning isn't everything, fair elections are - " annon.

Vis a vi the Mars Uranus conjunction, I thought this was interesting -

NOAA ISSUES SPACE WEATHER WARNING

May 15, 2005 — Forecasters at the NOAA Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo., observed a geomagnetic storm on Sunday, May 15, which they classified as an extreme event, measuring G-5—the highest level—on the NOAA Space Weather Scales. (Click image for larger view of the sun from the SOHO spacecraft of the intense solar activity taken May 15, 2005, at 7:50 a.m. EDT. Click here to view high resolution version, which is a large file. Click here to view latest images. Please credit “SOHO.”)

"This event registered a 9 on the K-Index, which measures the maximum deviation of the Earth's magnetic field in a given three-hour period," said Gayle Nelson, lead operations specialist at NOAA Space Environment Center. "The scale ranges from 0 to 9, with 9 being the highest. This was a significant event."

Possible impacts from such a geomagnetic storm include widespread power system voltage control problems; some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage. Spacecraft operations may experience extensive surface charging; problems with orientation; uplink/downlink and tracking satellites. Satellite navigation may be degraded for days, and low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours. Reports received by the NOAA Space Environment Center indicate that such impacts have been observed in the United States.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2437.htm

Vis a vi the Mars/Uranus conjunction yesterday 5/15, I thought this was interesting -

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2437.htm

Sorry to mix up my Pats and verb usage. It Was Pat QOP that recommended sage.

When I was a kid my Mother forced me (and a sister) to listen to endless HOURS of bible tapes and take notes. Her God and his favorite followers are cruel and think nothing of having newborn babies at their mother's breast slaughtered along with children and elders (1Sam15: 3, De20: 17 are typical).
My Mother has a good heart and was a nurse but has been brainwashed by the patriarchal rhetoric of our dominator culture. I simply feel it is way overdue for me to free myself of her beliefs. I apologize if any astroworlders are uncomfortable with my breakout measures.
But think of this... Does everyone remember playing "telephone" when they were kids? The first person whispers a sentence into the ear of the next person and on done the row. It's a big laugh to hear how garbled and silly it is at the end. Well how can anyone believe a story written 200+ years after it supposedly happened just like the bible is?

Light to all.

Pat QP
I have a doctorate in homeopathic medicine and am a fellow of British Institute of homeopathy....you may e-mail me.
tseka

Sharon

http://www.williambloom.com/

thanks, wv. I went there and he is really great. I feel a special afinity to him. He is on the faculty of Findhorn, a favorite of mine, and he also writes about Eileen Cady, one of the founders. I like what he has to say under Practical Advice about diet, exercise, and helping the dying :-)

Christianity at work once again: Priest
Denies Communion to Supporters of Gay Catholics

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050515190109990003&ncid=NWS00010000000001

Sharon - I have been getting his newsletters for
several years. I also have his book on the Endorphin Effect.

wv, i'll respond to that priest. i REFUSE communion, period, now and forever, may gawd rest my soul.

(((((((((((((((((((((( INTRODUCING SWAMPRAT ))))))))))))))))))))))
an artist for our times...

http://www.seedsofdoubt.com/distressedamerican/swamprat.htm

enjoy!

There IS global warming, and here are the pictures to prove it....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/sci_nat_how_the_world_is_changing/html/5.stm

Peg -
I LOVE Destiny of Souls by Michael Newton!!! After reading that book - I no longer am able to get much out of religion because he seems to go so much further. I even wrote CNN begging them to interview him. I think he is getting pretty old.

Christopher Hitchens: Why I am Rooting Against
The Religious Right...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006649

Jill, I truly sympathize. In my humble opinion, you owe no one an explaination. We all have serious experiences to work with from this lifetime or another, and work with those experiences, we must. I send you all of my best thoughts in overcoming the experieneces you are working on now. Congratulations to you for your determination to overcome!

Namaste

ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!

Bill Moyers will be on C-Span 2 at 8 PM EDT
tonight May 16, 2005 - WATCH HIM!

There is a LEADER in the Progressive Movement
and he is Bill Moyers...

Printer-friendly version
Hillary vs. Allen
Robert Novak (back to web version) | Send

May 14, 2005

wv, Re your post ... see ... it's all according to plan ... a democrat gets the 2008 nomination, stays for 4 years, then the rethugs get it back ... even Newt Gingrich was complimenting Hillary in the NYT the other day. Nah, it's all smoke and mirrors. They all bat on the same team and just wear different jerseys. Think about it ... they have this huge kitty bank called our tax dollars (we are a nation of serfs!) that they get to spend as they like as long as they can gull us into thinking that we control the money through controlling elections (yah sure, uh huh, uh huh!). So meanwhile our tax dollars go to work to divide and conquer all in the name of democracy (corporatocracy ... we pay so they can continue to shill us) ...

-------

WASHINGTON -- Members of the inner circle of high-ranking House Republicans privately agree that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is an absolute lock for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and will not be easy to defeat in the general election.

The same lawmakers believe the Republican race to oppose Clinton is wide open but regard Sen. George Allen of Virginia as having the edge over Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee. The consensus among them is that Allen is a better candidate than Frist and will the advantage over him in GOP primaries. The House members see little or no prospect for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. John McCain of Arizona or Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The Clinton-vs.-Allen forecast by the leading House members duplicates the National Journal's poll of insiders from both parties.

Sally, re your post about Blair's education reforms ... remember, the first thing any totalitarian government does is take over the education of the young so they can "instill" them with the correct "propaganda". Anyone heard of vouchers in the US? They've (in the US) been pretty good about it in public school, but only on the grand themes .. i.e. nationalism posing as democracy ... Call them vouchers, privatization, whatever ... they have to control the education system (and what is taught) if they want to avoid an eventual revolt of the populace! That's why they want to start testing children for mental health here in the US too (mandatory testing) so they can SOMA them up. Half the kids in the US are being doped anyway and unbelievable as it is ... the parents go along. I have a friend who is constantly saying her kid is AD&D and the other one needs counseling for depression (neither of them have any problems). I feel like slapping her! But people read that stuff from "experts" and hear it so much that it becomes like every single other "truism" ... not true at all if you test the validity of the statement.

Sort of like that statement, "staying the course in iraq". Well, if you made a bad decision, like deciding to drop yourself off the side of a cliff because someone told you (erroneously) that a flash fire was coming and the only way to get out of it was to drop yourself off the side of this "cliff". If after the fire did not come, would it still make sense to continue to dangle off the side of the cliff? Hell no, of course. But that's what's being sold. And bought full scale (except for lovely Paul Krugman in the NYT).

It's unbelievable. Of course, people who have not been taught to think (or read or write ....) do not have the means to test the initial premise. And that's how they get away with it (with a little help from network news, media, etc. too natch).

An interview with Richard Clarke

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/05/15/the_insider/

A year ago, Richard Clarke blew the whistle on the Bush administration's failure to take Al Qaeda seriously. He's still whistling -- but how long will the public listen?

Scenes we'd like to see.

http://billmon.org/archives/001864.html

Jill G, that e-mail came to you from Roxanne, a woman who used to post here. She is fanatically religious (and very "educated" religiously) and had a bit of a temper. A few year's back she vowed to never, ever post here again because we wouldn't back Ralph Nader for president. So now, she has posted here, in a round-about way.

I think I'll go burn my bible. hay. It's just paper.

Pat QOP, if your son has the tapeworm it's totally treatable ... In Chile (where I'm from) it used to be quite common ... called it "el lombriz solitario" (the solitary worm) 'cause just one can grow into quite a phenomenom. I don't recall what the treatment is ... just that it's treatable. I'll see if I can dig something up for your son.

Jill G, Unlike you email writer, I personally don't consider the bible to be G-D. It's just a book written by men for men. Jeez! Don't worry, you're not gonna burn. Fire and damnation! Sounds like you have been threatened with ... the wrath of G-D or someone else's version of it!

I don't think this is the place to be threatening people for their ideas ... sorry, whoever sent the email ... I found it totally inappropriate. We come here to discuss and impart our views about things that are important to us on many different levels and do so in an environment that is without sanction or censure. If you don't agree with somebody's posting that's fine. That's also everybody's right, but with respect, not with threats, with the power of intellect and reason.

This one needs your help:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,156634,00.html#poll

Your frustration is certainly shared, but I'm not comfortable with burning books. Of any kind. If we start, could Ephemeride be far behind? Sigh.

I have always had a hard time with religion. As a very very young tike, my parents sent me to Sunday School, although they were not very religious themselves (I guess they thought it wouldn't hurt me). At the time we were Presbyterian. Well, one of my teacher proclaimed that whoever does not get "saved" will be subject to an absolute endless Hell, even those that don't "know" about Christianity. At the time I was maybe six, I could not believe this to be true, I announced to my parents that I would no longer go to Sunday School, and they said okay! Thank God for good parents. Both my parents were very Saturn-ruled, both Capricorns, with this little rebellious Virgo.

When I was about 10, my mother introduced me to a book about reincarnation and I was absolutely fascinated. I never looked back.

Anyway, one picks his/her parents, no?

Jill,

Just logged on... Roxanne's letter is silly and simplistic. I found it hard to emotionally react except to the last insult about turning 50. Pay it no mind. If the bible holds all that meaning for her, so be it. It's just a book in the end, written by men and full of contradictions. Too wordy, long, rambling, and to me, ultimately boring, although I like some of the scriptures. Sometimes it seems like an extended gossip column. And I have a tendency to doubt its divinity if it is so subject to all this argument and failure at interpretation. Inspired thoughts appear everywhere all throughout literature. It comes spontaneously. Roxanne is entitled to her respect for the book, but not to judge others so vehemently in the name of it.

Turning 50 is a big event, and I know that I felt like celebrating in some symbolic way. I felt like it was a turning point in that I realized that I probably had less life ahead of me than behind. I felt like I wanted to make the most of what remained of my life and live it on my own terms.

The bible is just another man-made image of his conception of God and it is limited in its power. Religions teach us not to confuse these material items with God, but to use them as guidelines and reminders if we need them. Gibran's book, The Prophet, says many of the same things in concise language that I prefer. It's beautiful in its simplicity. It's all a matter of personal preference.

Your relationship with forced religion was traumatic and some people don't understand. Leave it at that. They will figure it out in time. So many times people have realized their folly in worshipping icons and Have destroyed them in some way. When the bible is used as a weapon, then it has strayed too far.

Burning has always had a lot of spiritual significance. Fire is the element of spirit. If burning the bible releases your own spirituality, to me, that would be a magnificent thing.

But by now, others have probably stolen the joy from your idea. They do that sometimes. And it is all about intent. Just because someone else wouldn't burn a book, or is afraid of the devil, certainly doesn't make it wrong for you, if your purpose is good. So many of the details don't matter. People make such a big deal over things they really know nothing of. So often thay fail to see it from the other's perspective.

Remember when the ladies burned their bras?

There are a great many Republicans out there who are incensed that we aren't talking more about Saddam Hussein's corruption of the Oil for Food program, since his circumvention of oil sanctions was yet another of the ostensible reasons we had to launch a preemptive war. So, fine, let's discuss. From the Houston Chronicle:

Panel says BayOil key in Saddam scheme

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3183233

By David Ivanovich

WASHINGTON - Houston's BayOil (USA) was the "puppeteer" in a scheme to help Russian politicians profit illegally from the United Nations' oil-for-food program and pay kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime, Senate investigators say.

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contends the trading firm, led by Houston's David Chalmers Jr., played a key role in helping Saddam curry favor with Russian leaders. At the time, Saddam was trying to win friends on the U.N. Security Council.

"They are involved in Iraqi oil from soup to nuts," a Senate investigator said. [...]

BayOil, hoping to get some Iraqi oil, contacted several Russian companies, Senate investigators say. Bulgarian-born Dionissiev, the investigators said, was "well-known to the Russian oil industry."

In December 1998, BayOil signed an agreement to purchase Zhirinovsky's crude, the subcommittee said. Zhirinovsky informed Aziz of the deal, and he objected. The Iraqis were not doing business with American firms.

So BayOil found a Russian agent, called Nafta Moscow or Nafta Moskva.

To facilitate a transaction, Chalmers coached Zhirinovsky on the language he should use in a letter to BayOil, according to one of the panel's reports.

Dionissiev, meanwhile, advised Nafta Moskva how to negotiate with the Iraqis.

"BayOil is orchestrating this whole thing," one investigator said. Another dubbed the company "the puppeteer."

This has been your Iraq Oil-For-Food fact for the day.

BTW, your books are your own to do exactly what you want with. It won't hurt a soul, as long as it's not the other's property.

Laurie,
When I was around or 8 years old I sincerely/innocently told my grandfather how I was going to take my beloved pet cat “Tiger Lilly” with me to heaven. Gramps told me that cats/animals didn’t have souls like humans. Only humans had souls and the privilege of entering into heaven.
I told him I would never; never go to some dumb/awful “heaven” that didn’t have animals ~ Even at 8 years old I knew that idea was just wrong ~ I never looked back either ~

jm, no I do not remember when ladies burned their bras. We just quit wearing them, pretty much. I never saw anybody spit on a soldier returning from Vietnam, either. Making fun of women for burning their bras has been a source of great jocularity among America's real deal heels. Spitting on soldiers is a myth that will not die thanks to the same group. Can you imagine what a soldier returning from the nightmarish combat of Vietnam would do if somebody spat on him? Are we to believe that those guys were a bunch of wusses and cry-babies? If spitting had occurred, there would have been mini-riots, tee vee footage and published accounts to document such. Let us move forward and away from the myths of the oppressor.

SN - me too. I think I was born knowing there was more to life that meets the eye. Maybe some can see through "spin" and others can't. I am happy that there are others like me.

Jill,

Burning a book (or anything else, for that matter) can not take away the lessons one learned from it. Like most books, we take from the Bible what our Souls, in this lifetime, need and discard the rest. In the end, it's just paper and ink and, for the most part, outdated ideas bastardized from their original source.

If you find a glorious sense of release in the act of cleansing eg. burning, then by all means do it. I think what many people have a problem with is the completely ingrained sense we have -- beginning generations ago, I suspect -- that the Bible is sacred and, therefore, worthy of respect.

But, in the end, it's a book. Not that different from a Tom Clancy novel or a Danielle Steele story. Paper, ink, maybe some leather binding ... a book.

Again, this is all about what makes you feel good and free. If burning the bible helps you to release the painful memories of your Mother, then, by all means, take that step and do it. It'll be emotional, maybe even scary (most journeys worth taking are), but, in the end, it'll be a necessary step to feeling whole, healthy and, more importantly, happy again.

No one can judge you but you and when you pass on and look back at all of this, your Soul will maybe realize how silly all this worry and fear was.

Happy 50. Many, many, many more.

Jonathan

Shylurker,

OK.

Promising........................
A total of 36 of the world's top thinkers in economics, medicine, physics and literature are expected to attend the May 18-19 conference, being hosted by Jordan's King Abdullah II and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Jimmy Carter isn't on the list of those Nobels attending. I havn't heard much about him lately, I hope he is in good health!
the story.................
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050516/1/3sjz9.html

Tseka,
I would love to e-mail you but.......................
My computer isn't configured to Outlook express. I had had my hotmail account for 8 years and the address is on all my business cards etc. so the tech set me up without outlook.
It is psharpart@hotmail.com if you would contact me please.
The Dr, was responsive today once he understood the problem ............. He leans toward alternative medicine, and E says he spent some time working in Africa..................

PQ

One more thing, this came up this week and I would like to share with you. I had a very intensive dream one night last weekend that I was at an important conference. There were six people in charge, four men and two women, who were running the conference, and I was part of a very large audience. I remember distinctly that I was agreeing with all the talk - but I cannot remember what the talk was about. I was so utterly happy that there were wise people among me and I remember enjoying talking to others that were at the conference.

The next morning, my daughter, bless her, announced to me that we had SIX Eastern Screech Owls in our tree directly behind our home. She said they must have been here at least a full day, because she saw their waste on the ground that had to be there for a while. So now every day we spend a few hours very quietly sit under the tree and watch the owls. There are two parents and four children. They are absolutely beautiful, and I do believe, wise.

Oh, Jm, you are a treasure!

Shylurker, you remind me.I do believe this major Pluto transit I am experiencing has lead me to the hidden treasure in the world around me. It's enough to make you believe in the power of mythology. This sharing of treasures is my dream come true. We are rich.

jm, so many great truth are told through mythology and fairytales. I have to say they are my favorite things.

Lol, that should have been "truths", but even one truth will do.

Thanks Jm and Jonathan and everyone for your nice words.
Technically I can start partying tonight at 9:35 pm here in Seattle (giggle, I was born at 12:35am in Florida), I'll open my mini champagne bottle and toast you good folks.

Goodnight

Many happy birthdays Jill!

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16459843.htm

LA PAZ, Bolivia, May 16 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Bolivians joined street protests on Monday to demand nationalization of the country's natural gas riches, defying President Carlos Mesa's push for an investment-friendly energy law.

In one of the biggest protests this year, marchers carrying multicolored indigenous flags descended from the militant city of El Alto to a heavily policed Congress in the capital below.

"We are demanding nationalization of our hydrocarbons without compensation (for companies)," said Edgar Patana, executive secretary of the El Alto labor association.

The latest round of unrest in South America's poorest nation was triggered by Mesa's veto last week of an energy bill that introduced a 32 percent tax on foreign oil companies on top of an existing 18 percent royalty.

Mesa, fearing a repeat of a bloody 2003 uprising over gas policies that toppled his predecessor, has vowed not to quash protests violently. But he beefed up police security around government buildings.

Several protesters were injured after trying to kick down police barricades and police fired tear gas and water to break up the crowd.

Evo Morales, the radical coca farmer who leads the main opposition party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), led another protest on Monday, a 120-mile (200-km) march from the Andean highlands to La Paz to demand a straight 50-percent royalty, which would preclude the possibility of tax breaks.

"Every minute that goes by is one minute less for President Carlos Mesa in the government palace," the left-wing leader told local radio.

Bolivia's poor Indian majority wants more state control over the country's 54 trillion cubic feet of natural gas -- the second largest reserves in Latin America -- and accuse Mesa of bowing to pressures from foreign investors and Washington.

The U.S. government has said the energy bill would "inhibit" foreign investment. Gas and oil production is now controlled by 12 foreign firms including Brazil's Petrobras , France's Total and Spain's' Repsol , which have invested $3.5 billion since 1997.

More...

http://www.yesmagazine.org/

Jm, have you had the exquisite experience of reading Joseph Campbell or watching some of the videos? If you haven't, you might want to look into it. He was one of those great gifts/teachers the universe bestows on us from time to time.

(Chuckle. He also said that the Grateful Dead were the only antidote we had to nuclear war.)

Star Wars Wins at Cannes: 'Wake Up, America'

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051605L.shtml

....................

The Pew poll shows Bush's approval at a new low with 43% approving, 50% disapproving and 7% undecided.

http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm

Pat C., do you think the WH will make the Pew people pull and repudiate the poll results? We are so headed in that direction!

Nothing would surprise me shy. At the very least, they may buy them.

MAJOR ALERT! A brave patriot has spoken (well, written). Do not miss this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240

You might want to consider writing him some gratitude and congratulations while you're there.

shy, I read it and I wrote him. Outstanding!

Pat C....I found your little intersting bit from that site you posted (http://www.bvalphaserver.com/article8151.html) for sept 29, 2001

hmmmmm ..... too many quacking (a new word for the old word which I decided needed to be used arouond my house since my 4 year old grand daughter has started liberally spouting 'f**k:".....) co-incidences in those short lines, Pat C.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm

This is the Moyers speech...and I agree WV, it is time for a Moyers for President speech...

Listening to Air America today in little bits between other stuff going on....OMG...it really is accelerating....

The conferance of Nobel Laureates is such a beautiful idea, bringing together evolved humans of many races, religions & ethnicities. I hope something wonderful comes of it that catches the public eye and overshadows the warmonger mentality.

Shy, I graduated HS in '68 and I seem to remember women burning their bras in protest, although it wasn't widespread and was probably just a few publicity stunts. Am I being dense about your comments? Did I miss something? (Your name reminds me that my mom's maiden name was Scheyowitz - shy of wits or something like that)

I apologize for taking up so much bandwidth, but did anyone every see this before?

ZEN JUDAISM

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip... joy. With the second... satisfaction. With the third, peace. With the fourth, a Danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes.
The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: Get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal
illness.
The Torah says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self." So, maybe you are off the hook.
The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens
to be Jewish?
Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain, though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away, yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full Enlightenment. But, first, a little nosh

Happy Birthday, Jill. May your spirit run free! May you experience true joy

I had a feeling this Koran flushing story would take off. And as I recall, one of our Astroworld writers predicted something turning up about this time concerning prison abuse.
The old Uranian jolt has hit. Wonder where the shock waves will deposit us this time.

Shylurker, I love Joseph Campbell. I was going to become an anthropologist and I know I would have ended up a mythologist. One thing I love is being reminded that not all societies have been white, patriarchal, slave master ones. Something to hope for though I can't begin to count the number of lifetimes it will take before I can enjoy something reasonable here.

Sharon,

One of my Jewish turned astrologer turned alien universe type friends sent me that a while back and I found it adorable. It reminded me of the Lithuanian Jewish side of my family.

Sharon, here is the "scoop" from snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/burnbra.htm

I've owned some I would love to have burned!

That "Zen Judaism" is wonderful, Sharon. I'm gonna copy it for some of my dear friends. Many thnx.

Jill G...happy birthday to you, it was my mother's 96th birthday today, May 16....she was born in 1909! I hope your days are equally numbered!

And hey, I decided that the church (presbyterian) was too hypocritical by far at 15 yrs of age....at 50 I decided to read the bible which I had from Wailuku Union Church on Maui....Got thru Exodus with a new appreciation for why Jewish people have such incredible sense of humors....OMG...I was laughing out loud. I could see Woody Allen and Mel Brooks and Billy Crystal, hear there voices as I read.... I like the old testament.....it has some absolutely beautiful writing in it, especially Psalms....there is a glory in some of the writing, speaking in a creative mode. Real glory of words put together in a mysterious and lyrical way which is like being in church at those times when it is inspirational. But that can mean just sitting there, not listening to some yahoo on a pulpit pumping pounds of poo poo onto our heads.

It is how the bible has been used to wound and kill which makes it burnable. And I do believe we are in a burn baby burn mode of the 1960's ....or perhaps a people burning mode of the 1690's. none of it is surprising when you look at our history.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.....we forgot that.

Well, I never burned any, but I did stop wearing them until I got to be of a certain age and discovered that they could be useful after all.

JM...and not all slave masters have been white. Just to keep things straight.

A great many African tribes, especially in the northern sahara region, enslaved many of the neighboring tribes and sold them to white slavers.

I heard on Air America tonight a story from Afghanistan (Randi Rhoades) by a released Gitmo prisoner from Afghan. that after the Americans paired up with the local war lords, the Afghans who didn't want to fight the Americans were SOLD to the US .....the local Afghan general sold the names for money to the US and then put them into a container. He shot the container with Uzi's to make airholes. They were in there for 24 hours and of the 1000 who were sold, only 20 men survived. And they went to Gitmo, where they were tortured some more.

The US is on a par right now with the worst of the Reich.

I just watched Bill Moyers on the c-span site. He is truly wonderful and the prime reason I ever donated to PBS. It was through him I found the work of Joseph Campbell - who provided the spiritual AhHa moment for me.
I had a very discomforting thought though .....
Cspan is funded by mandated contributions from for profit cable for "the public" - what if they silence that remaining voice of non-partisan speech? I truly hope we can change things before that ever happens.
Sharon, I loved your zen buddhism - I shall have to forward it to my Jewish friends.

Glad you enjoyed the Zen Judaism, guys. There's nothing like humor to help get you through. Shylurker, I stand corrected. I had no idea the bra burning was just a Madison Avenue stunt (or something). I could have sworn I saw pictures, but maybe it's draft cards I'm thinking of! The next thing you know, we'll be burning flags again. I don't think that's going to happen, though, this time around, as we all love our country and cherish its true ideals and principles. (I remember staying in my seat one night in 1969, while the rest of the audience stood to say the pledge of allegiance. I was 18 and not too popular that evening.)

Hey all-
Great posts as usual, I love this place!!! Sharon, that Zen Judaism is priceless and a much needed shot of relief from more of the same by the bullies at B*shco.....

and, for anyone who didn't see this at Buzzflash, buy gas at Citgo and help Venezuela...
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

peace/white light/namaste all and HAPPY BIRTHDAY JILL, I hope it ROCKS!!!!! :)

A development that I'm fascinated in and to watch: the rise of home churches.

http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/moyers/print.html

"A democracy can die of too many lies"
Television journalist Bill Moyers blasts flag-wearing phonies, reporters who parrot the government line, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's "dangerous" campaign to silence dissenting voices.

Editor's note: This is excerpted from an address given by Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo., on Sunday. It was broadcast on the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!

More...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/04/07/moyers/print.html

The Salon Interview: Bill Moyers
The conscience of American journalism speaks his mind about Bush, LBJ, Iraq, Vietnam, the triumph of America's global power and the withering of its democracy.

More...

http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/cpb_ombudsman_controversy/print.html

Making PBS as "fair and balanced" as Fox
Critics blast the CPB's unprecedented move to hire competing, "Crossfire"-style ombudsmen, saying the move is intended to make public broadcasting toe a right-wing line.

More...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/10/cpb_bias_campaign/print.html

Pushing PBS to the right
Republicans have launched a heavy-handed campaign to correct public broadcasting's "liberal slant." There's just one problem: Most Americans don't think it has one.

In the early 1970s a civil war erupted inside the fledgling world of public television. Upset with what they saw as its liberal news and public affairs programming, and particularly its tough coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings, Nixon administration officials moved to rein in public television by stacking the board at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which acts as a governing body for the hundreds of local stations nationwide. The board then sought to control national programming decisions and curtail news programming.

"There were tremendous fights, with the Nixon Administration trying to prevent public television from doing any public affairs programming at all," former PBS president Lawrence Grossman once recalled to the New York Times. But Nixon's end run ultimately failed. In 1979, Newsweek quoted a PBS executive who insisted, "The war between CPB and PBS is over."

More...

http://tinyurl.com/agcfj

MONTANA OUTLAWS TOUCH SCREEN VOTING MACHINES

REPRESENTATIVE BRADY WISEMAN, BOZEMAN, MT - I saw your link to the Accuview story on IRV. I thought you might like to know that here in Montana, we just outlawed touch screen voting machines. House Bill 297, sponsored by
myself, passed the Montana Legislature by wide margins. It simply requires that paper ballots be used in all elections. The ballots may be counted by machine, and may be marked for the voter by a machine, but we will not allow electronic ballots, with a tiny exception for handicapped voters.

My profession is software engineering. I was able to convince my colleagues in the Legislature that touch screen voting machines are unreliable, badly flawed, insecure, and require massive amounts of acceptance testing that typically is not done or even thought about.

But the real winner was the suggestion that in a close election, the candidate on the short end of the count could not examine the ballots or the voting systems, because they are private property protected as trade secrets. A blatant appeal to the self interest of elected officials carried
the day, helped by a two-month recount in a House race last November and December, not decided until the weekend before the Legislature convened, that swung the balance of power. Spread the word, we can kill these machines....

Happy 50th Jill G !!!!!!

Now, I tell everyone I'm $49.99 and getting cheaper every year. It's that Jewish humor. Anyway, I believe the Zen Judiasm crosses all religious boundaries because it's Zen. Why send it only to Jewish friends? We all need a good laugh these days.

Burn baby burn disco inferno. It's your personal property Bible. Do as thee shalt wishesth with it. Apparently some old ghosts are still lurking on AW (because it's so fantastic). Even in the afterlife they are still on/off their meds. Send sympathy for that sorry old fashioned thinking that they took to their grave. Can you imagine carrying that around in your mind/soul for lifetimes. Euuuuu.

George Bush has someone new to hate....by Greg
Palast.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050530&s=palast

Hope you had a Happy Birthday Jill!
Got a letter from Sen. Collins with the Bu****t about Bolton's qualifications, professional experience, & leadership capability.
I called her DC office to comment; what about Integrity on that list?
And asked about Bolton's little trip on Sept. 29 2001, to that country that is now experiencing riots,
Also suggested she might join Boxer's team!
Think I am going to sign up for the satellite TV offer I received in the mail. It's cheaper than cable was and includes CSPAN2 as well as CSPAN 1! I want to watch the Senate in action in the next few weeks....better than any ballgame!
PQ

Pat QOP

Get DirecTV and you can also get LinkTV - it is
great - good documentaries, world music, etc.

Pat QOP

LinkTV is a channel (375) on DirecTV - you also
get NWI (CBC) and BBC

THE STUFF OF WHICH DREAMS ARE MADE
by Paul Levy

Spiritual teachers of every tradition have taught exactly the same thing- that this life of ours is a like a dream. The great teacher Paramahansa Yogananda even goes so far so as to point out that the purpose of our dreams at night is to awaken us to the dream-like nature of the universe. Our dreams at night, in other words, are re-presenting and revealing to us that the nature of our waking life is the stuff of which dreams are made.

Quantum physics itself is pointing out that this seemingly objective universe of ours is more like a dream than we have previously imagined. Upon further inspection, to quote noted physicist, mathematician and astronomer James Jeans, "The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." Quantum physics points out in the Observer Effect that, just like in a dream, in the act of observing we affect and actually evoke the very universe that we are observing.

Being like a dream, we have much more power to creatively give shape and form to our waking reality than is generally realized. The discoveries of the new physics point to the hitherto-unsuspected powers of the mind to mold seemingly external reality rather than the other way around. This God-given power of how we co-create reality with this universe of ours is being shown to us night after night in our night dreams.

I had a dream a number of years ago that revealed this to me. In the first part of the dream I didn't know that I was in fact dreaming, which is to say that it was just a 'normal' dream like many of us have on most nights. By not realizing I was dreaming, I was walking around in the dream and was experiencing the dreamscape as if it objectively existed 'out there,' separate from myself. I was experiencing the dream-universe as quite real and solid, which I could prove by, for example, pinching myself and it would hurt. I felt awake and fully conscious- never suspecting that in actuality, I was dreaming. My experience in the dream was very similar, I might add, to how many of us experience the seemingly mundane, 'real' waking world.

All of a sudden, the dream somehow reminded me that I WAS dreaming. I became lucid and excitedly began flying through the air in meditation posture. I spontaneously began chanting the mantra OM MANI PEME HUNG. Or, to be more accurate, it was like the mantra was chanting itself through ME! I wasn't feeling afraid at all, but felt victorious, as if I had vanquished an adversary.

OM MANI PEME HUNG is the mantra of compassion, which is to say it is the embodiment, in the form of sound, of the quality of compassion. Buddhism points out that awakening to the dream-like nature is always expressed by the conjunction of two factors: emptiness and compassion (OM MANI PEME HUNG). Emptiness refers to the realization that this dream-like universe of ours does not intrinsically exist independent of our own consciousness. Realizing emptiness is to become lucid in the dream. In other words, the energetic expression of the experience of becoming lucid in a dream is compassion.

In the dream, as I was flying through the air and chanting, I was overwhelmed with love and compassion for my fellow dream characters, whom I recognized as being parts of myself. It was a truly ecstatic experience in which I felt free. It felt like I was an open vessel and the bliss of the universe was flowing through me. I felt like something deep inside of me was truly healing.

And then, I saw a tree. "Uh-oh," I thought and began making a bee-line right to the tree, like it was magnetically pulling me towards it. Unlike everything else in the dream, the tree seemed totally real and solid, and it seemed like it was going to abort my magical journey through the sky. As I came to it, I wrapped myself around its seemingly very real trunk and woke up.

When I first woke up, I thought "too bad that tree was there, it stopped my lucid dream." As I've contemplated this dream over the years, though, I have come to realize the gift that the tree was revealing to me. The tree was showing me a process that was going on deep inside of my psyche- it was as if the tree was the instantaneous materialization of my own unconscious, fear-based thought-form of limitation.

While this experience with the tree was happening and I was falling back under the spell of the dream, I was experiencing fear because of something other than myself 'out there' (the tree). I was feeling like the tree was the problem. The dream was reflecting back my inner state by instantaneously supplying all the evidence I needed, in the form of the tree, to justify my experience of fear, limitation and victimization. In the dream, the seemingly outer tree was my inner state giving shape and form to itself.

Over time I've begun to realize that the appearance of the tree in my dream was exactly the opposite of the problem that I first thought it was. My perception of the tree has gone from "if only it hadn't been there" to a feeling of gratitude and appreciation for it being in my dream. The tree was revealing to me, in fully objectified form, my own unconscious fear with which I stop myself.

To quote Jung, "Everything unconscious, once it was activated, was projected into matter- that is to say, it approached people from outside." When the unconscious is ready to be metabolized it gets projected outside of ourselves, which is to say that it gets dreamed up into materialization, be it in our night dreams or waking dream. The fact that in the dream my own inner process of limiting myself was getting projected outside of myself so as to become visible was an expression that this unconscious part of myself was in the process of being consciously integrated. I simply had to recognize what was being revealed to me to make it so.

This is analogous to our situation in waking life, too. Events that seem to obstruct us are actually a revelation of something deeper, and are hence, a disguised or hidden form of blessing. Interestingly, one of the inner meanings of the word 'Satan,' is that which obstructs. We are living in a time where the darker, obstructing powers are revealing themselves to us and are becoming visible for all who have eyes to see. The emergence of these darker, obstructing forces is an expression that they are available for conscious assimilation in a way that they had not been previously.

Jung openly wonders whether, "..in this very power of evil God might not have placed some special purpose which it is most important for us to know." Jung realized that in the manifestation of the dark side was the potential revelation of a higher good, as the emergence of the darker powers could potentiate an expansion in and of consciousness itself. Whether the darker, obstructing forces are on the personal level, or are manifesting as global events that seem to be getting in the way of the highest unfoldment of our species, these obstacles are simultaneously revealing something to us. How these obstructing forces actually manifest depends on whether or not we recognize what is being revealed.

Just like in my dream, things that seem to be obstructing our journey through life are actually getting dreamed up, so to speak, to reveal our own unconscious propensity to limit ourselves SO THAT we can shed light on this unconscious part of ourselves and thereby stop limiting ourselves. Secretly encoded into the fabric of the obstacle itself, whatever form it takes, is the key to its resolution and integration. The obstacle itself is, in disguised form, the very catalyst we need to transcend the obstacle, which is to say that it is initiatory.

If I continue to think about the tree in my dream as something that was an obstacle that got in the way of my lucidity, then, as if a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is exactly how it will manifest in this very moment. And yet, if I recognize that the tree was an expression of my lucidity, as it was waking me up to something asleep inside of myself, then in this very moment that is how it will manifest. To quote the great teacher PadmaSambhava, "As a thing is viewed, so it appears." To talk about the objective nature of the tree makes no sense whatsoever, for the nature of the tree is not separate from my experience of it in this very moment. And how I experience the tree depends on how, out of the field of open-ended, unmanifest potential, I 'dream it up' in this very moment.

This is a 'dreamed-up' universe, and it is manifesting in such a limited and problematic way because this is the way most of us have been conditioned, based on fear, to dream it. Fear itself is nothing other than the expression of the separate self. The separate self feels itself disconnected and alien from others as well as the universe as a whole, which it experiences as unsafe, and hence, feels afraid. If we identify with the separate self, by definition there is an 'other' who we relate to through fear.

If we have fear in a dream, the dream will just reflect back our fear and manifest in a fear-full way, giving us all the evidence and justification we need for why we should be afraid in a never-ending and self-generating feedback loop which has no "exit strategy." If enough people are coming from fear, collectively we will dream up a living nightmare, as we will create or dream up the very thing we are afraid of in a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is nothing other than the repetition compulsion of the traumatized soul being unconsciously and collectively acted out on the world stage, as we create the very thing we are fighting against, and dream up the very thing we don't want to happen.

We are a species gone mad. And yet, secretly encoded within the compulsion to ritually re-create our trauma is the key to its resolution. To say it differently, we, as a species are destroying ourselves as a way of learning how not to destroy ourselves. We certainly haven't learned any other way, or we wouldn't be destroying ourselves. What is crucial is whether or not we recognize what is being revealed to us as we act out our unconscious in a self-destructive way. The inner meaning of the word apocalypse is 'something hidden being revealed.'

How are we going to dream up what is playing out in our waking dream? Will we, as a species, destroy ourselves? Or, will we wake ourselves up? Is light a wave or a particle? The answer, of course, depends on how we are observing. Recognizing what is being revealed to us invokes the universe to reflect back this realization, which is to say that it is through the agency of our consciousness that we can literally transform the world.

This dream-like universe of ours is truly a work in progress that we are all moment by moment collaboratively dreaming up into materialization together. How this universe of ours manifests is dependent upon enough of us recognizing what is being revealed. We can then get into phase with each other and put our collective realization together so as to lucidly dream a much more grace-filled universe into incarnation. This is literally within our God-given power. We are the engines, the dynamos so to speak, through which the universe is evolving. Imagine that!

From one point of view, that tree in my dream aborted an incredible lucid dream. From another perspective, however, that tree showed me that the only limitation is nothing other than our own lack of imagination.

© Copyright 2005.

A spiritually informed political activist, Paul Levy is also an artist and healer in private practice, helping others who are spiritually awakening to the dream-like nature of reality. He can be reached at paul@awakeninthedream.com. Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul's website at www.awakeninthedream.com, where his article "The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis" is available.

The Religious Right: Pushing a Deadly Addiction...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8856.htm

Physicians for Human Right Torture Report

http://www.phrusa.org/research/torture/news_2005-05-01.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7883488/

British lawmaker blasts U.S. on Iraq allegations 'Mother of all smokescreens,' he says of claims he got oil vouchers

Ripping into the Bush administration and a senator who called a hearing on the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, British lawmaker George Galloway rejected charges he profited from the U.N.-sanctioned program and called the allegations "the mother of all smokescreens."

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf,” he told the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as he began refuting the committee’s accusations that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gave him credits to export Iraqi oil.

“I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf,” Galloway said, claiming that the documents the Senate subcommittee relied on had been forged and were proven as such in Britain.

Senator called 'cavalier' Addressing the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, he added: “Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice.”

Galloway was a witness before the committee that is examining how Saddam used oil to reward politicians, particularly from Russia, France and Britain, under the United Nations oil-for-food program.

He called the Bush administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq "a pack of lies" and said investigators should instead focus on U.S. companies that dealt with Saddam. "The real sanctions busters were your own companies," he told senators.

Galloway, a maverick kicked out of the British Labor Party for his fervent opposition to the Iraq war and for personal attacks on Prime Minister Tony Blair, has dismissed allegations by the committee that he benefited from the program.

The committee last week released documents it said showed Saddam gave Galloway the rights to export 20 million barrels of oil under the defunct humanitarian program.

'Republican lynch mob' Pursued by a crowd of British journalists, Galloway arrived at the hearing just minutes before it began reviewing testimony.

“This group of neocons (neoconservatives) is involved in the mother of all smokescreens,” he said of the committee. “I want to turn the tables on this neocon, pro-Israel, pro-war, Republican lynch mob.”

He earlier told Reuters that he had "no expectation of justice from a group of Christian fundamentalist and Zionist activists under the chairmanship of a neocon (President) George Bush who is pro-war.”

“I come not as the accused but as the accuser,” he added.

More...

Newsweek Got it RIGHT....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8851.htm

***BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JILL!!!***

That was a really nasty e-mail you received. I recommend burning one bible in addition to the one you already did, to make up for that crap! Oh, and dance naked around the baby bible bonfire.

Jill wrote: "Her God and his favorite followers are cruel and think nothing of having newborn babies at their mother's breast slaughtered along with children and elders (1Sam15: 3, De20: 17 are typical)."

and I say: Ah, well, at least they popped the kids out. Aborting them would've been MURDER!! Eek!

Marta, love your "same team, different jerseys." I TRY to be positive, but can't help coming back to that time and again!

I had heard years ago that the bra burning thing was not true. I'm with JM, ya get to middle age and you start feeling conspicuous out in public without support! Kind of like being female with hairy legs. Unless you're in San Francisco (haha, lucky you, Judi Gem!)

Way too much information on this post. My head's about to 'splode!! Moon's in Virgo...gotta go weed the garden.

Buy Your Gas at Citgo: Join the BUY-cott!
by Jeff Cohen

Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.
And tell your friends.

Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call him "the Anti-Bush."
Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela -- not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (Click here http://www.citgo.com/CITGOLocator/StoreLocator.jsp to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.

Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does, Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn't have 60 percent of its people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That's why large majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to overthrow Chavez.

So this is the opposite of a boycott. Call it a BUYcott. Spread the word.

Of course, if you can take mass transit or bike or walk to your job, you should do so. And we should all work for political changes that move our country toward a cleaner environment based on renewable energy. The BUYcott is for those of us who don't have a practical alternative to filling up our cars.

So get your gas at Citgo. And help fuel a democratic revolution in Venezuela.

Jeff Cohen is an author and media critic (www.jeffcohen.org)

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

The conservative coup underway at PBS is spilling over to NPR. Read Ari Berman's Daily Outrage for details. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?bid=13&pid=2521

And read Bill Moyers's keynote address from this past weekend's National Conference on Media Reform for some inspiration on how progressives should respond to this assault on public broadcasting. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm

Moyers closed out an inspiring three days for media activists in St. Louis. See the ActNow weblog for a look at some of the innovative projects discussed at the conference. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?pid=2514

These days, more than ever, organs of dissent are critical to the prospects for positive social change in America, as Nation publisher Victor Navasky argues in his new book A Matter of Opinion. Please join Navasky in Michigan at three special events this weekend.

This Friday, May 20 at 4:00pm, Navasky will discuss "The Journal of Opinion--Past Relic or Present Counterforce?" at 200 Reuther Library, 5401 Cass Avenue on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. The event is free and open to the public.

Then, on Saturday, May 21 at 4:00, Navasky will be in Ann Arbor at the Shaman Drum Bookshop stage as part of the AA Book Festival (Main Stage East, Modern Languages Building, Auditorium 4, 812 East Washington Street). http://www.aabookfestival.org/

Navasky will also be part of the Detroit premiere of Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman on Sunday, May 22 at 3:00pm in 100 General Lectures Building, 5045 Anthony Wayne (3rd Street) at Warren, on the Wayne State campus. The festivities will begin with a reception for Victor at 2:00pm in the Polish Lounge of Alex Manoogian Hall. A discussion with Navasky, director Judith Montrell and film participants will follow the film. Admission is $20 for the film and reception.

Click below for more info and details on sliding scales and benefactor tickets. http://www.professionalrevolutionary.org

Navasky will also be appearing in Cambridge on Monday, May 23, and in New York City on Wednesday, May 25 at the CUNY Graduate Center along with E.L. Doctorow.

Monday, May 23, 6:30pm to 8:00
Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachussetts Ave., Cambridge
http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=1466

Wednesday, May 25, 7:00 to 8:30
With E.L. Doctorow
Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
$5/ Free with student ID
Call 212-817-2005 for reservations

You can get a small taste of A Matter of Opinion by reading a recent Nation magazine excerpt, in which he discussed the critical role of journals of dissent. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050516&s=navasky

And check out the book's website for more info and to order copies online. http://www.amatterofopinionbyvictornavasky.com/

Go to the BBC site and listen to the testimony given by Galloway of the U.K. concerning the oil-for-food scandal. You will not be disappointed!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

From DU

Mark Warner attends the "Kingmaker" annual Bilderberg Meeting

Does this mean that our Democratic nominee has been picked for us already?

Warner confirmed Monday that he took part in the annual
Bilderberg Meeting the weekend of May 6-8 at a resort
hotel near Munich. Other U.S. participants included Henry
Kissinger, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken
Mehlman, Ford Motor Co. chairman and CEO Bill Ford and
Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations.
snip
"My sense was you had the opportunity here to interact
with the leading business leaders not only of the United
States but in all of Europe," Warner said in an interview.

Participants are forbidden to disclose what they discussed.
"I think I should honor the ground rules," Warner said when
asked for details.

The organizers closely guard the identity of those it invites
and the venue and times of the meetings.

"Out of deference to the inviters, this was something we
weren't volunteering," said Warner's communications
director, Ellen Qualls.
snip
The Bilderberg Meeting was not on Warner's public
schedule, and reporters were not told of his trip more
than a week after his return. First word came in an unguarded
remark from an administration official Monday. Warner's
office confirmed the trip when asked by The Associated Press
more
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename...

More about about Bilderberg http://www.crystalinks.com/bilderberg.html

List of attendees
http://www.bilderberg.org/2005.htm

More.... http://www.rense.com/general24/biul.htm

http://www.americanfreepress.net/06_01_02/BILDERBERG_MEETS/bilderberg_meets.html

Pat C, I read on www.Bilderberg.org, under the last entry, "the Bilderberg Group," that:

A few of the Bilderberg permanent U.S. members are: George W. Ball, Gabriel Hauge, Richard C. Holbrooke, Winston Lord, Bill Moyers, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Bill Moyers is one of the few Liberal/Progressive names that I noticed.

Pat C, I read on www.Bilderberg.org, under the last entry, "the Bilderberg Group," that:

A few of the Bilderberg permanent U.S. members are: George W. Ball, Gabriel Hauge, Richard C. Holbrooke, Winston Lord, Bill Moyers, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Bill Moyers is one of the few Liberal/Progressive names that I noticed.

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