Buckwheat Zydeco & Turgay Yildizli

A little bit about Fat Tuesday:

First of all, the festival is called Fat Tuesday because every year it falls on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. It is supposed to symbolize the last day in which a person can indulge before Lent starts. While Fat Tuesday is the official day of celebration, parades and other events such as debutante balls can start as early as the first week in January.

Each parade is organized and led by a “krewe,” which used to consist solely of older aristocratic men. Each krewe elects a king to reside over their parade, and in present day parades, elaborate beaded necklaces and colored coins, called doubloons, are thrown off decorated floats to throngs of cheering people.

The krewes also name “debutante queens,” who are young women of high aristocratic standing. Balls were created in the 19th century to formally present the young women to society. While the idea of debutantes and ‘presenting women to society’ seem outdated, these debutant balls are still held every year and are a way for New Orleans to turn back time and embrace its heritage.

The traditional colors of Mardi Gras are purple, green and gold and stand for justice, faith and power, respectively. While typical dishes like seafood gumbo and jambalaya are abundant during this time, the true food of the carnival season is the King Cake. This sweet treat is a coffee cake type dough that is woven into an oval shape and decorated with icing and Mardi Gras colors. A plastic baby is hidden in each cake, and it symbolizes the difficult search the Three Kings endured to find baby Jesus. Bakeries have added twists to the traditional King Cake by having it filled with things like apple, cream cheese, praline, lemon, and strawberry.

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Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq. Mr Blair is due to make a statement about the 7,000 British troops serving in Iraq at the Commons on Wednesday.

The BBC’s James Landale said 1,500 troops were expected to return home in months, rising to 3,000 by Christmas.

Downing Street has not confirmed the reports but Whitehall sources have told the BBC the process could be slowed down if the situation in Iraq worsens.

A Downing Street spokesman said: “It is right that the prime minister should update Parliament first.”

However, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe confirmed that President George W Bush had spoken to Mr Blair on Tuesday. Mr Bush recently announced plans to send 21,500 more US troops to Iraq.

Mr Johndroe said: “While the United Kingdom is maintaining a robust force in southern Iraq, we’re pleased that conditions in Basra have improved sufficiently that they are able to transition more control to the Iraqis.

Read more at BBCNews

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Crossposted from JoeWo.com

One of the great military Generals of the last century saw it. This kid and a stuffed tiger see it. Why don-t the people running this war see it when so many do see it? The reason is because of this ugly fact and this is another reason which is equally obscene. But they have had a pretty good history in doing such things and have become experts at it and actually expect it and when they don-t get it they are shocked. So when you see a child asking such a stupid question as that kid to his tiger you may want to walk over to the child and tell them that one person can make a difference.

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I’d say donating money to the Republican party is, in itself, aiding terrorists…….

WASHINGTON –A New York man accused of trying to help terrorists in Afghanistan has donated some $15,000 to the House Republicans’ campaign committee over three years.

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to charges that include terrorism financing, material support of terrorism and money laundering.

From April 2002 until August 2004, the man also known as “Michael Mixon” gave donations ranging from $500 to $5,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to Federal Election Commission reports and two campaign donor tracking Web sites, http://www.politicalmoneyline.com and http://www.opensecrets.org.

More at Boston.com

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling upholding a key provision in President Bush’s anti-terrorism law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding foreigners.

Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a key provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

The ruling is all but certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which last year struck down the Bush administration’s original plan for trying detainees before military commissions.

The Military Commissions Act was crafted in response to that decision and the president hailed it as a necessary tool for bringing terror suspects to justice.

Civil libertarians and leading Democrats decried the law as unconstitutional and a violation of American values. The law allows the government to indefinitely detain foreigners who have been designed as “enemy combatants” and authorizes the CIA to use aggressive but undefined interrogation tactics.

But the most criticized provision of the law was the one stripping U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who said they were being held illegally.

Read more at CNN.com

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For the past three years, Michael J. Wagner directed the Army’s largest effort to help the most vulnerable soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His office in Room 3E01 of the world-renowned hospital was supposed to match big-hearted donors with thousands of wounded soldiers who could not afford to feed their children, pay mortgages, buy plane tickets or put up visiting families in nearby hotels.

But while he was being paid to provide this vital service to patients, outpatients and their relations, Wagner was also seeking funders and soliciting donations for his own new charity, based in Texas, according to documents and interviews with current and former staff members. Some families also said Wagner treated them callously and made it hard for them to receive assistance.

Last week, Walter Reed launched a criminal investigation of Wagner after The Washington Post sought a response to his activities while he ran the Army’s Medical Family Assistance Center, a position he left several weeks ago. Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, the commander at Walter Reed, said the probe by the Criminal Investigation Command (CID) “reflects the seriousness with which we take these allegations.”

Read more at MSNBC

This is the charity he was pimping for.

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Ok, call me crazy, but the Russians were in Afghanistan for 10 years and couldn’t win. I believe the NATO force in Afghanistan is about 35,000. And we think we’re going to beat these whackos? Look for the blood to pour this spring.

From Wikipedia

Between December 25th, 1979 and February 15th 1989 a total of 620,000 soldiers served with the forces in Afghanistan (though there were only 80,000-104,000 force at one time in Afghanistan). 525,000 in the Army, 90,000 with border troops and other KGB sub-units, 5,000 in independent formations of MVD Internal Troops and police. A further 21,000 personnel were with the Soviet troop contingent over the same period doing various white collar or manual jobs.

118 jet aircraft
333 helicopters
147 main battle tanks
1,314 IFV/APCs
433 artillery and mortars
1,138 radio sets and command vehicles
510 engineering vehicles
11,369 trucks and petrol tankers

KABUL: A suicide attacker disguised as a health worker blew himself up at a hospital opening ceremony in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, wounding at least two NATO soldiers and a hospital staff member, the provincial governor said.

Afghan security forces had blocked the attacker from approaching a crowd of about 150 people who had gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open an emergency ward at the main government hospital in the city of Khost, said Governor Arsalah Jamal.

He said U.S. troops who took the man away shot him in the leg when he tried to escape. As the crowd took cover, the attacker blew himself up, Jamal said. He said two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan hospital staff member were wounded.

Sergeant Dean Welch, a NATO spokesman, said a number of the organization’s troops had been wounded in the blast, but the extent of their injuries was not immediately known. He did not give their nationalities.

Most of the forces serving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in eastern Afghanistan are American.

Read more at the International Herald Tribune

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It’s damn sad these revelations can’t come to light BEFORE thousands of our troops lives were lost. They seem to only occur during election cycles.

Our current batch of leaders have sold their souls as often as they’ve sold out our country. They no longer represent us.

What’s it going to take to kick these worthless, two-faced politicians out of government and elect in people who genuinely give a damn?

McCain: Rumsfeld was one of the worst

BLUFFTON, S.C. - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Monday the war in Iraq has been mismanaged for years and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be remembered as one of the worst in history.

“We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement - that’s the kindest word I can give you - of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war,” the Arizona senator told an overflow crowd of more than 800 at a retirement community near Hilton Head Island, S.C. “The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously.”

McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, complained that Rumsfeld never put enough troops on the ground to succeed in Iraq.

“I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history,” McCain said to applause.

Source: Yahoo! News

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