Barry White & Pavarotti
You’re My First, My Last, My Everything

9 US Deaths on Easter, and 4 yesterday. 48 this month. And Bush wants to meet with the Dems to talk, but not negotiate. I say cut the funds. It’s the ONLY way to end this shit.

BAGHDAD - A raging, daylong battle erupted in central Baghdad on Tuesday and four Iraqi soldiers were killed, 16 U.S. soldiers were wounded and a U.S. helicopter was hit by ground fire at the close of the second month of the massive security crackdown on the capital.

Sixty miles to the north, in the mostly Sunni city of Muqdadiyah, a woman with a suicide vest strapped beneath her black Muslim robe blew herself up in the midst of 200 Iraqi police recruits. The attack killed at least 16 men waiting to learn if they had been hired.

The security crackdown, which began Feb. 14 and will see nearly 170,000 American forces in Iraq by the end of May, has curbed some sectarian attacks and assassinations in the capital. But violence continues to flare periodically in Baghdad and has risen markedly in nearby cities and towns.

The fierce fighting in central Baghdad shut down the Sunni-dominated Fadhil and Sheik Omar neighborhoods just after 7 a.m., the U.S. military said. After American and Iraqi troops came under fire during a routine search operation, helicopter gunships swooped in, engaging insurgents with machine gun fire.

More at Yahoo News

I’m sure most of us agree that Don Imus’ recent comments about the Rutgers Womens
Basketball Team were racist and way out of line.

I’m also sure that most of us will agree that Al Sharpton, a champion against racism,
was absolutely right to ask Imus to come on his radio program. Imus agreed.

Now, if all of this was Divine Intervention, it’s wonderful. If all this has been
thought up by one or more individuals, it’s a case of sheer genius.

Don Imus was not an easy target for being called out for his racist hatred speech, he was a better target.

I mention this because the right wing hatred machine of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh,
John Gibson, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and many, many others too numerous to
mention, have been getting away with this kind of hate spewing on the radio and
television airwaves for years.

So has Imus. But Don is trying to be funny. The rest aren’t.

They make their hatred known on a daily basis by saying things such as “Whites need to breed more babies”, “if more black babies were aborted, the crime rate would go
down” and after Katrina with thousands of black New Orleans residents holed up in the
Super Dome after being flooded out from their homes, “this is working out for these
people” (and that’s from the President’s mother).

Don Imus’ being called out by Al Sharpton and the nation-wide flack that has
followed, hopefully has given pause to the radio and television networks that employ
the hosts of hatred spewing daily and relentlessly, whether it’s degrading to women,
blacks, Hispanics, welfare recipients, etc. The light is now turned on not just Imus,
but all the others as well.

What these corporate heads now need to decide is if the hatred spewing is where they
want their 21st Century Business Model to be based. Can they afford it? Will the
advertisers realize that they are contributing to hate? Do they care?

Only time will tell. But before you shake your head in agreement while watching Fox
News’ John Gibson or anyone else calling for Imus to be permanently removed, you should take a longer look at the bigger picture.

Fear breeds hatred. Fear is lack of knowledge. Educate yourselves…daily.

Be well.

Jim Swanson

It’s hard to believe in this day and age that a high school is having its first integrated prom. Good for these kids for changing the tradition.

ASHBURN, Ga. - Breaking from tradition, high school students in this small town are getting together for this year’s prom.

Prom night at Turner County High has long been an evening of de facto segregation: white students organized their own unofficial prom, while black students did the same.

This year’s group of seniors didn’t want that legacy. When the four senior class officers - two whites and two blacks - met with Principal Chad Stone at the start of the school year, they had more on their minds than changes to the school’s dress code.

They wanted a school’sponsored prom. They wanted everyone invited.

On April 21, they’ll have their wish. The town’s auditorium will be transformed into a tropical scene, and for the first time, every junior and senior, regardless of race, will be invited to an official prom.

The prom’s theme: Breakaway.

“Everybody says that’s just how it’s always been. It’s just the way of this very small town,” said James Hall, a 17-year-old black student who is the senior class president.

“But it’s time for a change.”

More at Yahoo

And rightfully so!

From Yahoo News

The Bush administration appears on the list, compiled by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, for its efforts to discourage, modify and sometimes censor government scientists’ reports and studies to be more in line with the administration’s political policies, notably on global warming, the center said.

“The number of major scientists who have come forward and indicated they were constrained by the administration viewpoint is quite worrisome,” center director Robert M. O’Neil told The Associated Press. “There have been similar concerns arising in other areas but we wanted to focus specifically on climate change as the most invaded or intruded area.”

The Defense Department won a Muzzle for its covert investigations of organizations that conducted peaceful anti-war protests, most of which were against military recruitment for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the center said. Created in 2003, TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) also monitored e-mail messages among members of anti-war groups. Its activities were uncovered last year after the American Civil Liberties Union filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests.

“We recognize that our government appropriately gathers information,” O’Neil said. “Anything related to genuine terrorist activity is of legitimate concern, but we’re troubled when it extends to innocuous groups that oppose the war.”

Well kudos to Governor Strickland for voicing his concern! Too bad he can’t refuse to have them deployed!

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ohio’s governor said Tuesday he is worried that National Guard troops who have been told to prepare for a possible deployment to Iraq won’t have proper training and equipment.

“These men and women are going to be paying the price, I think, for failure to adequately plan, to predict, and it troubles me,” Gov. Ted Strickland told National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”.

National Guard troops in Ohio, Arkansas, Indiana and Oklahoma are preparing to serve as replacement forces in the regular troop rotation for the war.

The 37th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Columbus is being called up for the second time in two years, though past practice would have dictated they not be called again until 2009, Strickland said.

“There are so many concerns that I have - the effect on employers, the effect upon families of these men and women - and I just think this is an example of the government not keeping faith with the men and women who have volunteered to serve in the Ohio National Guard,” the Democratic governor said.

He called on the Bush administration to take steps to assure that the soldiers are properly trained and given the most up-to-date body armor, night-vision goggles and weapons.

“I want to make sure that the soldiers who leave Ohio to go to the war zone have been given every advantage they need in order to be safe,” he said.

Continue reading at YahooNews

If nothing else, republicans are consistent in how they deal with crime (their crime… not the crime of others). First, at all costs, hide the crime. The less people know, the better. If the crime becomes common knowledge, deny having participated in it. Obfuscate! A confused populace is a manageable populace. If it doesn’t appear at this point to be getting any better, tell folks it had to be done or we would have ended up with another 9/11 on our hands. And, last but not least, blame Clinton.

CNN:

The Presidential Records Act, passed during the Nixon administration, requires the preservation of all official records of and about the president.

A White House spokesman defended the use of outside e-mail accounts as an appropriate method of separating official business from political campaign work.

But the use of those accounts by officials discussing the firings — and one from now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff — have led a liberal watchdog group to accuse administration of trying to skirt the law governing preservation of presidential records.
[...]

Neither administration officials nor Republican Party officials would agree to be interviewed on camera after repeated requests from CNN. In a written statement, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said staffers used different computers “to have a separate e-mail account for political activities.”

Stanzel said that procedure was modeled on “the historical practice of previous administrations.” But John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, disputed that.

“It doesn’t appear that they were doing what we did, which was to segregate political activity from official activity,” he said.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

It’s hard to keep up with all the great blogs out there, but I wanted to highlight two great posts by Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings. She’s a philosophy professor, and often writes thoughtful dissections of important stories (and debunks of major disinformation campaigns), but two of her posts in the past couple months really struck me. When pundits go on a knee-jerk anti-blog tear, I have to think - where the hell are the pundits that are producing pieces this thoughtful and thought-provoking? There aren’t many.

“Liberating Iraq” (2/27/07) considers the belated and incomplete realizations of Iraq war hawks such as The New Republic’s Peter Beinart:

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

… liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive government. It can seem that way when you live under tyranny. Nothing is more comprehensible than people living in apartheid South Africa, or under Saddam, thinking: if only that government were removed from power, things would be better. They would have to be. After all, how could they possibly be worse?

Non-violent resistance and conflict resolution really do demand an entirely different moral, emotional and social vocabulary, utterly foreign to the insecure, unreflective neocons and their many chickenhawk allies. Imperialists and other bullies can never truly win over hearts and minds or foster peaceful coexistence - they only understand the language of domination. Even violence with “the best intentions” - if such a thing is possible! - will change the path.
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