Quotes from the Traitors own mouths

Via Kos:





"You can support the troops but not the president."


"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."


"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"


"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."


"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."


"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."


"I had doubts ... from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."


"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"


"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."




All quotes from Republicans during the Clinton Administration.

The Speakers?

Senator Rick Santorum
Karen Hughes, spokesman for George W. Bush
Senator Trent Lott
Tom Delay
Sean Hannity
Joe Scarborough (R-Fl at the time)

With Republican spittle and drool oozing out at everyone who opposes the Iraq war and dares to go public, It is worth noting that these quotes are from Republican "traitors", as the Republicans themselves term it. From a different wear, though, with Clinton as President. The next to last quote is from Tom Delay. The last one is straight from George W. Bush"s mouth.


As Kos points out, Clinton won this war without a single American casualty!

dailykos

Vigil

Tonight at 8:00 eastern time, over 1400 candlelight vigils will support the families of our lost American Troops in Iraq. A friend will hold a private vigil as will I, so the number wiil be at least 1402.

Join us will you?

Peace!

Steve

From Cindy Sheehan's blog...Look who is supporting her now!
....We are moving to a place that doesn’t have much shade and I put out an appeal for tarps and a soldier from Ft. Hood brought some to us that he “borrowed” from Ft. Hood for us to use. I have had a lot of soldiers from Ft. Hood come out and tell me to keep it up and that I am doing a good thing. We are doing this to honor Casey and the other fallen heroes in their memories. But we are doing it FOR the people of Iraq and the other soldiers who are in harm’s way right now. Right after we heard about the crosses last night, a Camp Casey volunteer found out that a pen pal she had in Iraq was KIA on August 12th. This has to stop, now. We will stop it.

Intelligent What?

A discussion is happening over at Prairie Weather I thought I'd share with you on Intelligent Design. You can read PW's post over there, link on the side bar.

I view it as people trying to hang on to the myths of their childhood. There is a similar tragedy playing out in Gaza, with Jews holding up their holy book claiming god gave them that there land... Arabs can't find that particular tract in their own particular holy book and beg to differ. Neither of those holy books contains the New Testament, in which Jesus quite often contradicts both of those books, by the way, even though the FundXtians claim infallibility of the "Word" thereby justifying their stand as creationists.

While waving these various holy books containing the words of gods at each other, Jews, Arabs, Christians, Budhists, and the rest of us are standing on the one storehouse of information we all, everyone of us, agree was produced by "god", though that word means different things to each of us.

That storehouse of information, that book which I personally consider holy, is...

The Earth.

The theory of evolution arises out of trying to make sense of the infallible words, written by the forces of time and geology, for us to see on the very planet we must save in order to survive. It is the geological record that cannot lie. If the other "books" are contradicted by our very planet itself...Then we must find ourselves with the same choice facing Galileo.

Are we to be honest people, or will we lie to support the myths of fallible men from long ago that still hang oppressively over our very ability to make rational decisions?


This comment is posted at Prairie Weather:



I find all this interesting...I live about 25 miles from the Courthouse where the Scopes trial was held, and have come across myth after myth concerning that event. The bottom line is this:

Creationists believe the bible says god "created" all things roughly 6000 years ago. If evolution is factual, there is a contradiction of some magnitude.

Now we have this Intelligent design thing which frankly contradicts creationism but somehow seems acceptable to the FundXtians.

OK, that wasn't the bottom line...this is:

Fundamentalist religion in America has a vested interest in destroying critical thinking, and one of the many byproducts of that is science education.

The question to be answered is this:

"Will America throw its future to those who have raised the study of functional ignorance to the level of art?"

Steve

Vultures at play

A partisan man well known for his ruthlessness on behalf of his personal special interests falls from grace. Well actually, "pushed" would be a better description. You can feel the love oozing out of his memoir:


"I considered Frist’s power grab a personal betrayal." ...Trent Lott

Lott had said nice things about Senatorial dinosaur, Strom Thurmond, whose vileness is still being discovered as people come forward with stories of his horrible behavior. Bill Frist cheerfully watched, as the scavengers ripped Lott apart, for what is ultimitely the smallest of his transgressions. Lott lost his Senate leadership position as a result, thereby furthering Bill Frist's ascencion.

Why is Lott surprised when the game he plays for his entire career yields its fruit? How else does he expect his corrupt cohorts to behave? They have no honor!...And Frist is their leader, now. Too bad, Trent. In a society of wolves, the fallen alpha dog is usually killed and eaten.

Consider yourself lucky, loser!

Peace,

Steve



*****
I was going to write about the Matlin Cousins in Texas. One, Larry, sees Cindy Sheehan and her group holding a religious service and thinks the Second Amendment gives him the right to fire his shotgun over their heads, scaring the crap out of everybody. "I'm tired of them", he said.

Then some fine young Texas Conservative sees the rows of crosses, 500 of them, dedicated to our American troops who died in iraq, and ties a chain to his pickup truck and runs over the crosses. No word on if there was a yellow ribbon on his tailgate.

Just when you are convinced Texans are exactly what they appear to be, the cousin of Larry the Shooter comes along and does something nice. Fred Matlin is a veteran. he lives closer to the Bush ranch and offers Camp Casey a new home...on his land.

If I keep meeting nice Texans, I may have top quit bashing them as a group. There may be more out there than just the ones I know of. Perhaps we should start a "Free Texas" movement.

Billmon does it better:


"When I heard about the lunatic in the pickup who mowed down the memorial crosses at Camp Casey, I have to admit, my first thought was: It's Texas, what the hell do you expect? We should just be happy he didn't tie one of the protesters to his bumper and drag him/her down the highway until body parts started to fall off...."

billmon

There...Feel better now?

ALBANY, Ga., Aug. 15 (AP) - The only woman ever executed in Georgia's electric chair, Lena Baker, is being granted a posthumous pardon, 60 years after she was put to death for killing a man she said had held her in slavery and threatened her life

Pardon Me

Rudeness

My Gosh! The Rude Pundit lived in Knoxville, taught at the University of Tennessee, may have worn something orange...


Say it ain't so, RP!

The orange part...

rudepunditshow


NY Times reviews the show...and has picture!


theater

WHY?

President Bush is having a fine time on vacation. He has to go on with his life, you know, staying fit in case he has a crisp decision to make. He can't take a half hour to talk with Cindy Sheehan because he has his two hour bike rides, which are much more important.

Cindy's son Casey died in Iraq. All she wants to know is "Why?"

Frankly, the rest of America wants to hear the answer to that same question from the President's lips, and the reason he hasn't met with Cindy...and the reason Cindy has received such an outpouring of support...is that the President cannot answer that question truthfully.

The Iraq war will define Bush for all history. It is a failure.


There are other grieving parents who join Cindy in a club of the heartbroken:



He is number 1,828, 1,829 or 1,830. We don't know for sure, because so many died last week.

...For those of you who still trust the Bush administration -- and your percentage diminishes every day -- let me tell you that my nephew Chase Johnson Comley did not die to preserve your freedoms. He was not presented flowers by grateful Iraqis, welcoming him as their liberator.

He died fighting a senseless war for oil and contracts, ensuring the increased wealth of President Bush and his administration's friends...

Missy Conley Beattie

Read the rest of it, if you can:

Grief in kentucky

Peace,

Steve

President Bush is much better at vacations than you are! Prior to 9-11 he had spent 42% of his time in office...On vacation!

Mother Jones has a fun compendium of vacation factoids...


the_road_to_nowhere

Mother Jones

From MJ rag comes the Diddly Awards, honoring the first inept steps in the 2008 Presidential race.

And the winner is (drum roll)...


Bill Frist! (I knew it!) For trying to cement his credibiltiy with the evagelical nut jobs who espouse Intelligent Design, condemn the Pope for holding "a false and unbiblical office", and think stem cells have souls.

Frist was caught on tape telling his photographer to "Get some devastation in the back" on a trip to Sri Lanka after the Tsunami disaster.

Good old Bill, Flew in, felt bad for the people in front of the cameras...Flew out.

Peace,

Steve

Who's over whom?

The official blogger of the Knoxville News Sentinel is Michael Silence of No Silence Here. He's worth reading, for various reasons and he writes this in a piece called:


Give me a break!

"David Duke weighing in on Cindy Sheehan: Why Cindy Sheehan is Right!

I am now officially over this story.

Another reason I'm moving on: I’m appalled by the blog swarm surrounding Sheehan. The left is using her plight to espouse more anti-Bush rhetoric, and the right is demonizing a woman grieving over the loss of her child."

Posted by Michael Silence at August 15, 2005 11:12 AM


I felt the need to comment:


Cindy Sheehan has gotten done what the Mainstream Media has not, and that is to frame the Iraq war in terms so personal that every American must ask the same question:

"Tell us again...Why are we in Iraq? Now that my son is dead, it would help to understand how this is a good and moral thing."

See, the problem is: A good and moral thing, it ain't!

When we speak of the Mainstream Media (and that would be you, Mr. Silence)
in this instance, we still get to view their cowardice. Afraid to ask the question themselves, they can simply hold up a mike to someone else possessing the combination of deep loss and personal courage.

So Mr. Silence...Got any children of your own?

Ready to grow some courage?

Steve

Traveling Man

It's the cow gonna be hamburger experience.

You wait in a pen with lots of noise all around and folks you don't know and will never see again bumping against you and there's no place comfortable to sit, and you can't hear that tv hanging from the ceiling except for every third word. Then they smile and take your ticket and march you through a door that looks all the world like the door to happiness but as soon as you smile back at the nice lady and step through, you see the long sloping hallway of no return you have to walk down and it's really hot, as you wait behind the morbidly obese woman that you are (please, please, please) hoping won't be sitting next to you...you also have pretty solid thoughts about the man with the wild child he's trying to hang on to who's standing behind you.

"This might not be much fun", you think.

But it works out. Your seat mate turns out to be a pretty girl, petite, and fits nicely into her seat with no parts hanging over into your space. Her Dad and brother are sitting behind her and you get to have a nice conversation about a planned road trip she and her college buddies are planning fron New Hampshire to Nashville. She has a to-do list that includes line dancing and buying a cowboy hat. You don't point out that Nashville is the fake cowboy capital of the world and that if you really want a cowboy hat, and you have a three hour layover at the next stop, which happens to be Dallas, you might...But she pounds two Bloody Marys as soon as the cart rolls by and the conversation deteriorates. Mental note: They didn't check her I.D. and she looks about fourteen to you. This has implications about your own age that you refuse to acknowlege.

On the next leg to Atlanta, as we walk down the cattle chute, the craziest child on the planet is being held onto by two parents. They look very strong. This turns out to be a good thing. The child cannot speak in normal volumes and likes to scream if he is denied the slightest gratuity.

By sheer force of will and parental determination, the man and woman manage to get the child into a seat next to the window, where they figure he will have to get past both of them in order to escape. I meditate on people's lack of foresight and planning as the child immediately ignores the two frantic parents and climbs over the seat in front and starts jumping around laughing happily in the lap of a very surprised woman who simply does not know what to do. Here she has resigned herself to an abbatoir and now she learns that someone left the orangatan cage door open, in order to make her last moments even more incredibly unbearable. She is mauled by the parents as they wrestle and retrieve the feral primate they have loosed upon the world. She will spend the longest hour and a half of her life on the flight to Atlanta, waiting for the next ear piecing screech from the seat behind her. I can see her head rock forward each time the child kicks the back of her seat. I wonder if she is thinking about the emergency door two seats ahead. She might jump if the flight isn't over soon.

Down the slaughterhouse chute once more...last one, to Nashville. They push us away from the gate and the pilot imediately comes on and points out the light show from the thunderstorm at one end of the runway.

We sit on the tarmac for two hours. They bring us a granola bar but won't give the guy next to me a beer. I can tell he is going home because he has an orange baseball cap and a U.T. tee shirt. We talk for a while and then he gets up and goes back to talk to the flight attendant. After a while he returns. "She won't give me one" he says. He looks tired. He may be the only person on the plane without a cell phone, and I loan him mine to call home. He has been away for a week.

"I was visiting family in Hartford", he said.

As we chat, it seems to me he is babbling a bit...making conversation to prevent himself from being alone in his head. People get to know each other sitting in a big metal can like sardines for two hours. He has been to a funeral. His brother...one year younger. Suicide.

"Bad", he said.

"I'm sure."

"All our family is in Hartford. It happened here. I was the first one at the scene...before the ambulance and the police...

"Bad!" he said again, looking at me.

"You gonna be ok? That kind of thing is really tough on the family. Takes a while to get over."

"I took him with me back to Hartford...Bad."

The flight attendant walked by and asked him if he could step to the back for just a minute. He was gone long enough to sit with the attendants and drink his beer.

How did she know?

He told me the flight attendant said she was a big Tennessee fan and saw his shirt. I didn't mention the code for funeral attendee that would be printed on his ticket.


When he came back, we talked about hunting and hydraulic excavators. He works at a factory that makes them in Chattanooga.

"Be careful driving" I tell him. "You get the least bit sleepy, pull over and catch a nap, Ok?"

We said bye at the shuttle bus to the parking lot.

A bunch of tired but mostly relieved people got on the bus. It filled up and some folks had to be turned back. The last seat left was next to me, and an attractive, but obviously unhappy, woman got on the bus and looked around before sitting down.

"This has not been a good day," she said. She was very nicely dressed up like she was headed out for an evening on the town, and was wearing too much perfume. Her husband's flight had just been cancelled. He was coming home on leave from the war.

"I haven't heard from him since he left Kuwait," she said. There was a cell phone clutched in her hands. She looked down at it over and over but it didn't ring.

"I have to drive three hours back home, now... I don't know what to do...two crying boys at home."

Several of us said the most comforting things we could think of to her, knowing that nothing would help except a call from her husband.

Her perfume was filling the air, blotting out all else. An American soldier was not getting an All American welcome home that had probably been months in anticipation. We all wondered why he hadn't called.

She was pretty. "This hasn't been a good day", she said again. We all felt bad for her. Everyone wanted to help but no one knew how.

I drove home, two hours, through a series of spectacular thunderstorms. Nasty weather to struggle through on the way back to my family. I thought of the grieving brother and hoped he would get home Ok, and I thought of the soldier's wife and her ruined plans...Hoping something would go right for her and her husband. Having been, long ago, the crying child lying in bed wanting his father to come home...I hoped things would somehow work out for the confused and bewildered woman driving back to Kentucky in this brutal August night.

I thought about two men in Texas. One spending the night in the airport in Dallas, after traveling halfway around the world to see his wife and two young children for a few days before they sent him back. The other man vacationing on his ranch while a mother sits vigil outside the gates holding a sign that asks,

"Why did my son die?"

Later...I pulled up to my house, opened the car door and gave a desicated french fry to each of the dogs. Setting my bags down in the kitchen and heading upstairs with my family sleeping, I thought,

"Now, finally...this is a good day."

Peace,

Steve

Salt Lake City

I'm currently attending the Outdoor Retailer show in SLC, global headquarters for Mormon Central. This might be the weirdest place on earth as far as societal rules go. You see billboards with pro-polygamy messages, though the mainstream church says they are against it. You can also buy a local beer called "Polygamy Porter" with the ad line, "One is not enough!"

This is absolutly true! Utah has the strangest alchohol laws around and any beer brewed in the state has to be of a very mild content. I wind up quite bloated well before any satisfactory buzz arrives. I was told not to come here, "Leave the state, if you don't like it" by a very nice mormon.

For a religion that doesn't allow alchohol or coffee, there sure do seem to be bars and starbucks on every corner...owned by mormons.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of daily outrage and snark. I've actually been working.

Work, work, work!

That's what these shows are all about, of course. The girls in lycra, the Mariachi band, the free beer, all the toys a man could ever hope to have in the way of outdoor gear...all work. Hard work! Not as hard as clearing brush, but really hard work.


Gotta go...breakfast meeting...cooked to order eggs and strawberry pancakes.

Work, work, work!

Peace,

Steve

toldjaso!

Faithful readers, you learn things that other Americans don't know when you read this blog. Not that it is secret stuff, far from it...more like the "Purloined Letter", hidden in plain sight.

I have repeatedly stated that the Bush administration let Bin Laden go at Tora Bora. The little brother of Salem Bin Laden, President Bush's first business partner in Arbuto Oil, was given a get out of jail free card and let go. Bush, of course, denies this but now we learn from the CIA, Bush was lying.

I wonder, at what point will the CIA breaking point come? What will happen? There is the conspiracy theory that it was the CIA that took out John Kennedy, after all.



" ....But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora - intelligence operatives had tracked him - and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK."

truthout

Next thing you know, we'll find out something really outrageous, like there was a security breifing labelled, "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States."

Peace,

Steve

Sunday Funnies:

Liberals have more fun. Our jokes are certainly better and here's proof:


And be sure to notice the morbid displays of stupidity on Intelligent Design by the FundXtians this week. They are cleverly noted at several of these places.

The real reason Novak walked off the CNN set:

felbers

Medium Lobster loves freedom:

All of us love freedom, and all of us want to protect freedom, and surely to protect freedom it was necessary to tie Abed Hamed Mowhoush in a sleeping bag and an electrical cord, and surely to secure our basic liberties it was essential to beat him with a club and a length of rubber hose, and certainly it was vital to the preservation of our way of life to bludgeon him to death over a period of days in an interrogation room, just as it is critical to keep these and other methods of torture legal at all costs.

Irony served with seafood:

fafblog

41 American warriors dies this week. No Biggie! Since George Bush didn't mention it in his radio speech, Billmon seems to think that George must have read the wrong speech and serves up the real one:

THE PRESIDENT:

"Good morning. Like me, many across this great land are taking lengthy vacations this month, to escape the roasting hot weather made possible by my bold policy of global climate enhancement. However, it has been brought to my attention that a relatively small number of families are not enjoying the summer nearly as much as I am, because their fathers, mothers, brothers, sons and/or daughters have been wounded and/or killed in the

War of Heroic Action against Terrorism for the Future of a United Christian Kulture

-- or, as my NSC counterterrorism experts sometimes call it: W*** the ***K...."

It gets funnier...read on:

billmon.org


Peace,

Steve

Heroes

Fascism:

A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.


Fascists don't seem to read history books or they would all realize that damned few of them die peacefully in their old age as heroes. Eventually, there comes the "Bastille Day" in one form or another.

Can you feel it building up right now?

Rove is going down. Cheney will follow. Libby will go down. Rumsfeld will be humiliated. AShcroft has already been tossed and Lady Justice's breasts rein free, even if actual justice does not. DeLay will go down. McCain will rise up and be exposed as lacking the true fortitude to do what is right for America.

Eventually, some American hero will ask President Bush about why he protectedthe Al Queda terrorist, Al Zarqawi, from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, prior to the American invasion.

At present, Bush is building up Al Zarqawi as tantamount to Bin Laden, thereby proving that we should have invaded. What Bush didn't foresee, as if these people are capable of foreseeing anything real, is that Bush's own inner circle would prove to be so incompetent, that a small time operative like Al Zarqawi, would rise up to kick America's improperly equipped and led Army's rear end.

They are picking off our troops and there's nothing the phenominally incompetent Bushistas can do about it.

The Iraqi people have a new hero that the Americans have named, Juba. They don't know his real name, but they are afraid of him. He shoots Americans, and is very very good at it. Juba is a hero because all Juba shoots...is Americans. Juba shoots one time and an American dies. Juba does not kill innocent civilans. From as far away as 200 yards, Juba has made clean kill after clean kill of an American looking out the view slot of his armored personel carrier...steeping out of a Humvee...walking down the street in full body armor, unaware that there is a small spot next to the spine which is not protected, that Juba can hit. Americans are scared of Juba. If this keeps up, George Bush and his minions will have succeeded in creating the first International heroic figure who's one claim to heroism is that he kills Americans!

Do you remember the Freeway sniper? Remember how scared everyone was? This is what American troops face in Iraq except for one thing...the Freeway sniper was evil. Everyone was afraid because no one knew who he would kill next.

Juba has done exactly the opposite for Iraqis. They are not afraid of him. He is their hero because, unlike the other combatants in Iraq, Juba only kills Americans. Juba, a sniper...a killer, is the one figure in all of Iraq that makes Iraqis feel safer.

Think about that!

And then ask yourself this:

Who will OUR heros be?

Peace,

Steve

Juba

Peace,

Steve

Fun with Poll numbers:

According to the latest CBS poll, 77% of Americans think the Bush administration is either Hiding something (55%) or just plain Lying (22%)

12% think they are telling the truth...

With 17% of the population falling into the "rightie wingnut" category, that means that nearly a third of Bush's strongest base think he's lying.

Of course yesterday's poll had 20% of folks that thought Bush was lying also thought he was honest.

Duh....

Kos

What's a yardarm for?

Novak is a piece of scum that I used to respect, once long ago. I beileved he had the interests of America in his heart, whether I agreed with him or not. AS we watch him disintegrate, let us hope he takes the evil entity that has infected the once patriotic Republican party down with him.

I knew Charlie would be on top of this even before I clicked on his link:





The Scribble

Novak walked, but not from anything Carville said. I think Novak cracked and ran off the show to escape the question he was about to be asked regarding his part in the destruction of an ongoing CIA operation that resulted in the death by execution of at least one American operative.

CNN has very conveniently given Novak a little "time off".

That's too bad. I want to see someone grill him in a venue in which he has to answer.

For too many years Novak has been able to sit behind his column and spout venom without having to answer for it. Stand up Bob! Have a little courage.

Go down with your ship!


Peace,

Steve

Night Wind

August is the serious time of year.

Physics is the Law of God and cannot be denied. Religions make mutable proclamations they call laws but these get broken all the time...mostly by religious people, and mostly the laws about lying and stealing. But that is editorializing, and while I think it's significant, this particular problem is not what I am thinking about this morning.

Laws.

The real laws never get broken...never!

I often speak of the language of god. The Law, Physics, is described by this language, and We humans have given this language a name

...Mathematics.

This is the most beautiful language ever devised,if that is how it came into existance, and it is not of human kind's creation.

Human's merely discover mathematics. And then, only after rigorous thought, and hard work, and critical argument, do humans manage to come to a semblance of agreement on this language. The beauty and purety of the language of god is that it never lies. Not only that, but it cannot be used to tell a lie, except temporarily. If I speak without mistake in the language to tell a story, it will be the exact story that someone else would tell even if we have never met and live in different parts of the world.

3 squared equals nine...everywhere in this whole freaking universe.

This, and many more things of even greater significance, is something that humans did not invent...but discovered!

The greatest human advances can be linked to mathematical discovery: newly uncovered words in the language of god. whereupon, humans then can use the new words to predict things in the physical world which cannot be false. Logarithyms, Integral Calculus, Differential equations, are but the first baby steps in speaking this language but even with these simple tools, available to every high school student, we can describe and predict the reality of our universe. We can begin to understand the cause and effect of physics, but there is a greater mystery we must solve in order to survive:

When there is a conflict between the word of god written in the physical universe for us to read and the word written in books and held up by the religious as holy...By what rule shall we resolve the conflict?

I lay awake in my bed last night, listening to the strong night wind. It is a simple and miraculous thing. Here at the very end of Whites Creek gorge, in the heat of August in Tennessee, we always have the night wind. It is a law...no...it is "THE" Law.

Six hundred feet above this house, in the back yard, is the Cumberland Plateau and it is relatively flat. During the day the sun heats it with unerring regularity and then the night comes. The slightly cooler air in the gorge, which has been in shadow at least part of the day, begins to flow in the same direction as the water... downhill. The cooler air quickly collects in the lowest places, flowing downhill, and the night wind builds and builds until the morning sun brings its heat energy to halt the process.

Physics...God speak.

I can enjoy god speak as the night wind, a gift, sending me scrambling to the foot of the bed for the down comforter that lives there, even in August..

A serious time of year.

Peace,

Steve

American Intelligence

I don't know any other way to put it...Americans taken as a whole...are stupid! "Reality Challenged" is the only alternative label I could come up with.

The latest Gallup poll shows Americans feeling very strongly that we will never reach the goal of a stable democracy in Iraq, but a slight majority think we did not blunder by going to war.

Only 37% of Americans think we will achieve our goal in Iraq and 51% believe that President Bush "deliberately misled" the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet 54% believe President Bush to be honest and trustworthy.

Of the people who believe Bush lied...20% find him to be "honest".


Morons!

These folks deserve George W. Bush and his fascist cronies as their President...but what about the rest of us? Democracy can't be built on lies.

via Allhatnocattle.com:

"President Bush is going on his annual vacation. The White House says he goes to his Texas Ranch to unwind. I'm thinking when does he wind?" -- David Letterman

Charlie nails it again:

I liked this ad

Via Sharon Cobb

Scout Law

Howdy, Yall!

Just got back from Quantico, Virginia...Right next to CIA headquarters, the Marine University, and the spot where they had several thousand boyscouts gathered up in a field so the President could fly in for a photo op. They called it the National Jamboree and the President was a few days late getting there.

The Boy Scouts of America are a fine idea with bad execution. Let's see...How 'bout we dress a bounch of kids up in quasi military outfits, you know, like the Hitler Youth, and get them to chant things like "...a scout is obedient..."

Here is what the Scouting website says about being obedient:

"OBEDIENT
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them."


Think about that, for a second...

Scouts are also ordered to be:

"REVERENT
A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others."

While respecting the beliefs of others, Scouts cannot be agnostic...They get publicly ostracized and kicked out if they are. They are also kicked out if they are not "...Morally straight!" There are court cases saying so.

So you see, Scouts are supposed to respect the beliefs of others as long as they aren't other scouts who don't believe the right things. Scouts have to swear an oath to be morally straight, while giving the scout salute.

Scouts are also supposed to be:

"BRAVE
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him."

The Sout organization has kicked out lots of brave scouts who had the courage to stand up for what they think is right...Here's something that just happened that I don't think was right...

Making 3000 boy children stand in a field in 94 degree weather, waiting on George W. Bush to show up.

The humidity was near 100%...Heat index over 100.

The Boy Scout motto is, "Be Prepared", and the boys tried to be prepared for the suffering they were about to endure on behalf of the President's photo op team by bringing water bottles...

Sorry, you can't do that...someone might throw a water bottle at the President.

15 year old boys dangerously armed with waterbottles are apparently a matter of National security...

The water bottles were taken from the boys and nearly one third of them had to be treated for heat related health problems. 300 of them had to be evacuated for medical treatment. I talked to a government official who was there.

George W. Bush decided this was a bad day for a photo op and didn't show up.

A Scout is also:

"TRUSTWORTHY
A Scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is part of his code of conduct. People can depend on him."


I like that one! These things are part of what is known as the "Scout Law" You can be kicked out of the Scouts if you disobey them. I think we should make that last one the "Presidential Law".... Let me rewrite it for you:


A President is Trustworthy!

A president tells the truth.

He keeps his promises.

Honesty is part of his code of conduct.

People can depend on him."

The Boy Scouts have their own salute..just like the armed forces, who get to use the entire hand brought to the temple as a measure of a respectful greeting. Boy SCouts only use three fingers in their salute...Cub Scouts only two fingers, and so on...


President Bush only used one finger to salute them back.


Peace,

Steve

PS: Bush did show up three days late...Apologized...must have had to attend a National Guard meeting.