Another Quote of the Day

...this one was so good, I couldn't resist.

“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Mr. Waxman

The Article

Hattip goes to Hullabaloo

Quote of the day

For those who wouldn't vote for Hillary or Barack for whatever reason and would rather vote for McCain I ask you this. Why would you want a President who doesn't have a clue about the people he'll be sending your children to kill?

~ Fixer - @ Alternate Brain

White House Defends Corn Ethanol

... Corn prices have grown dramatically in recent years, almost tripling since 2005. Along with high prices for other crops, they have been pushed along by the burgeoning biofuels industry as well as rising worldwide demand for food, trade barriers, bad weather in some regions of the world and other international factors.

According to Department of Agriculture economists, higher corn prices increase animal feed and ingredient costs for farmers, ranchers and food manufacturers, but pass through to consumers at a rate less than 10 percent of the corn price change. They say retail food prices would rise less than one percentage point above the normal rate of food price inflation — 2.5 percent — when corn prices increase by 50 percent.

White House economic advisers have said ethanol made from corn is responsible for just 2-3 percent of the overall increase in global food prices, which are up more than 40 percent this year over last year. Opponents say that's still too much. (ems mine)

Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, on Monday introduced a bill to freeze the current mandate to produce nine billion gallons of ethanol this year. Energy legislation passed last year would require that 15 billion gallons be produced by 2015.


I think that what will matter in the coming years isn't so much the reality that making corn ethanol is pushing world food prices up only a very little bit.

It is rather the perception on the part of a growing world population that the US will do whatever is in the short term interest of the corporations that have purchased our government. That the US will pollute, use up, and destroy scarce resources no matter the cost, and most especially if that cost is paid by someone - anyone - other than those who directly benefit.

It's called greed.

It will destroy us along with the rest of the world unless we reign it in.

The original story is here

To see a Greenwald vid "War on Greed" and sign a petition, go here

Spring Pics

The violets and lilies of the valley are outdoing themselves this year.

While it's finally warm enough to let all the house plants outside to play

Our sweet shady gardens fill in nicely. (That one big hole is for some impatiens that I will get at teh nursery very soon..)

McCain don't know up from down

After months of ridiculing opponents who want to set a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq, today John McCain is setting his own timetable. In remarks prepared for delivery, he says he envisions that “most” of the troops now serving will be home by January 2013, when his first term would end.

Hell, if the people now serving in Iraq are not home by 2013, that would mean they spent anywhere from 4 to 8 years there. Most of the troops that are now in Iraq are due - LONG overdue - to go home right now!

Sewage, Sludge - a Rose by any other name...

The False Claims Act lawsuit brought by microbiologist David Lewis, who says he was forced out of the agency, alleges that EPA officials and University of Georgia researchers fraudulently orchestrated a grant and then fabricated data to ensure that the EPA's 'biosolids' programme would come out smelling pretty. If the charges stick, the scientists and EPA officials could be held personally liable and may be forced to pay back the original grant as well as some US$4.6 million in subsequent grants, plus penalties.

“This is one of the few ways that you can hold people accountable for bad science and indeed for using false information to create that science,” says attorney Ed Hallman of Decker, Hallman, Barber & Briggs in Atlanta, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Lewis and two Georgia dairy farmers. (my ems)

Gosh, I hope they win!

Hattip: Skippy

We're Refiniishing my Computer Room...

...and I've been having a hard time posting the last few weeks. I originally thought that we could take everything out, paint the room, and return all the stuff to it's rightful place in one weekend.

Silly me!

Somehow all of a sudden we're stripping and replacing all the woodwork, steel-wool-ing the whole oak floor to remove the stains...

we're building shelves in the closet to hold my computer and all the peripherals as well as all my sewing stuff... The upside is that when we're finished, we won't have to touch that room again. Until then, I have a camera with a full card that I can't upload, and the hummingbirds have arrived. I'm determined this year to get some usable pics.

My Bloggiversary!

I realized this morning that it's my bloggiversary week(FIVE [ack! I cannot add ] THREE years!), and that I haven't been posting pictures as often as usual (gosh, late winter and early spring is ugly). So, without further ado - here's a few to whet your appetite.

A beautiful spot I discovered on the annual Walk Against Hunger this weekend.

The dreck floating on the water is tree pollen.

Ducks enjoying our swamp.

* Happy Spring Everybody! *

No Peace, No Work :

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1, 2008 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism – Democrats and Republicans – and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force – that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Hell yes, I'll be staying home on Thursday!!!

Solidarity allowed Poland to defeat the USSR. It's time for workers to stand up to these ridiculous politicians who only want to hear from you on election day. It's time to end the forever war, dismantle the military industrial beast, and liberate the funds that we would be spending on DEATH in order to spend them on LIFE.

Make Love not War.

We want quality, free education, health care that all can afford, safe neighborhoods, clean air and water, and inexpensive clean power. We could be doing all of this with the money we're spending dealing out death and destruction all over the world. I don't want my beloved United States to be an empire, that's the antithesis of everything we stand for.

It's time to stop it.
NOW.
Before it's too late for our world to heal.

Click here for the full article.


3:19 UPDATE:

VERMONT AFL-CIO CALLS ON WORKERS
TO SUPPORT WEST COAST STRIKE AGAINST WAR

Montpelier, Vermont –The Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, representing thousands of workers in countless sectors across Vermont, have unanimously passed an historic resolution expressing their “unequivocal” support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq. The strike, being organized by the Longshore Caucus of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), will seek to shutdown all west coast ports for a period of 24 hours on May 1st 2008. The Vermont AFL-CIO is the first state labor federation to publicly back the Longshoremen; other state federations are expected to follow.

click here to read the whole thing.

Fiscal disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

~snip~

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The E.U.’s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. Moreover, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world’s fourth richest nation.

Worthy article, if a little depressing. Go there and read. I've always liked dandilion salad. Yummm

Joke of the Day:

McCain calls Obama insensitive to poor people

I just laughed out loud when I read that headline (click it for the article).

Police Athletic League

The National Police Athletic League just called for a handout. I felt like saying: "You backed Bushco in the last election, why don't you go ask him and his cronies for some bucks... Oh yeah, they're right in the middle of CUTTING your funding!

I guess that's working out well for you now... Not so much?

Ted Rall:

...Have we, at long last, any decency?

In one respect, the three remaining presidential candidates say, "Yes, we do." They've promised to close Gitmo.

What ought to happen to the nearly 300 detainees is obvious. Hand each of them an apology, a bag of cash--a million bucks wouldn't be nearly enough for what they've been through--and a plane ticket home. Those who can't return to their countries of origin because their U.S.-backed dictatorships would murder them receive a penthouse suite in the U.S. city of their choice.

I'd let them switch places with their guards and 300 top-ranking members of the Bush Administration for a couple of days first. No questions asked. Just get on the plane, and don't forget your bag o' cash.

Anyway.
...

Right ON.

Forsythia!

Whew! we're finally getting some spring flowers and some leaves starting on the bushes. It was a long, long winter for me this year.

Now we have some birds (probably robins) who are trying their darndest to build a nest over our air conditioner at work. Every day I get to work and there's a mess of sticks and dried out leaves all over the front entrance, and a scrabble of stuff up on the AC. Every day we clear it away, and hope they find a better place. They sure are persistant!

Quote of the day

McCain’s health care plan is centered around the idea that we’d be better off if more Americans bought health coverage on their own, rather than receiving it through a job or government program. But maybe since he has never purchased insurance in the individual market, he does not know the challenge it presents for Americans with preexisting conditions.

~ Elizabeth Edwards

More Spring Pics

Friday Pics

The weather finally broke yesterday, we had sun and temps into the mid seventies. Today it might touch the eighties! Whew, it sure seemed like a long, long winter.

We opened up the pond last weekend, the fish are fat and happy. We have nine in there right now, all about a foot long.

Why's that Pedophile on my TV?

I'll probably offend a whole bunch of innocent people with this one, so my abject apologies to start with... but:

Last night I caught a snippet of the news between arriving home and jumping in the shower. I had paused in front of the TV whilst the segments were changing, and then the announcer came on with a guest, who was wearing a priest's collar and talking about the pope's visit. So help me, the first thing that came welling up out of the lizard depths of my brain was "Why's that Pedophile on my TV?".

Then I thought - you don't know, he could be a perfectly nice person. Just because he has on a priest outfit, that doesn't automatically make him a pedophile.

The fact that Cardinal Law was taken back to Rome, welcomed with open arms, and given high office there leads me to believe that the powers that be in the Catholic Church don't think that pedophilia in the church is really a problem. Until he and all the rest of them who had the power to stop it and instead betrayed the trust of their flock by giving these criminals access to MORE children rather than retiring them to a monastery where they could meditate on their sins.... until they are all reviled and punished I will always look at priests as possible pedophiles, and will never trust them at all.

Now we find that the highest officials in our government have committed the worst crime that we can think of: knowingly and enthusiastically planning torture for other human beings - in the White House no less.

I'm here to say that until and unless we round them up and put them on trial for war crimes, we will all be painted with that brush. We will not be trusted, our shit will stink to the heavens, and rightfully so.

After Nixon we swept it under the rug, for the sake of "healing the partisan wounds".

After Reagan's Iran Contra, we were treated to Ollie North's innocent baby blues as he spouted righteousness and looked all spiffy in his uniform with all the salad on the chest. The war crimes and the torture under Paul Bremmer (familiar name?) were swept under the rug, and Reagan was crowned prince of the sunrise and gumdrops trickling down a rainbow.

Li'l Bush on a silver spoon slid out from under that rug.

Until we prosecute the gang of torturers, and put them in chains where they belong, people all over the world will be asking themselves every time they see our politicians on the news... "Why's that war monger torturer on my TV?"

and rightfully so.




[disclaimer: I am not now and never have been a christian, but my ex-husband was an ex-catholic who was an altar boy when young; and learned from an early age that it was a good idea to avoid being alone with a priest.]