I get a lot of emails everyday, most of the time when they're ads I merely delete and forget. This morning however because of whatever reason I opened one of them. The ad was from Overstock.com.and it was advertising some pretty offensive products, that I might want to put on my holiday  table....NOT. More below the fold including pictures, for the non curious think Spike Lees' "Bamboozled".

At least that's what Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman believed, when he was being prosecuted back in '00 for the 1993 WTC bombing.

ABDEL RAHMAN: We thought that McCarthy was more dangerous.
YOUSRY: We thought that McCarthy was really a, a devil.
STEWART: A devil. Well, Fitzgerald I think is more so. He's, uh . . . he's like a crusader.
YOUSRY: She says, sir, that--
STEWART: He has it in the heart.

 Seeing as the Sheik is now cooling his heels in prison I would think that Scooter-boy must be very very worried if he has a subscription to the New Yorker and reads this.
As Lynne Stewart said of him at the time, "He has it in the heart"
 http://www.newyorker.com/...

 With all the news stories coming out of Aruba,it seems that the only mysteries that the public is consumed with concern, upscale vacationers in island paradises, or on luxury cruises. It also helps if they're blonde   Well, there's another mystery that should be shared with the public and it concerns one of our soldiers fighting in Iraq. I read about this story on Americablog.com earlier today just around the same time that I ran across this song while trawling the net. Download to listen.
 http://s28.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3QW6YQ9KQ4NVV3JBARK5F2K6HJ
Another Soldier Gone by the Violinaires

Prvt. Lavena Johnson

 I got an e-mail a few months back from someone I'd not seen or spoken to in years. It seems she saw me being interviewed on a TV show and wondered if I was the one she used to play with way back when and contacted me. I've known this woman since I was 6 years old..our parents were friends..I was always over her house and vice-versa. We were both raised blue collar in Democratic urban ethnic families.
  Well, we hooked up for lunch when she was in LA this last spring and hung out introduced our husbands..etc....She seemed to be the same cool person I remembered when we were kids. I felt a lot more comfortable when she informed me she was on her fourth marriage and I'd realized she'd left the Catholic school  girl far behind. She invited us up to their place in Oregon to visit...and then I got this e-mail yesterday.
  You Know You're a Redneck If...

I just came across Skype this afternoon. For those of you who may not have heard of it, it's an online phone service which allows one to make free computer to computer "phone" calls.

It costs nothing to register, nothing to use unless one is planning on calling computer to landline or mobile phone.So I downloaded it then I sent it to another friend in the Dkos commmunity and I just got off the "phone" with her. As we were talking I was thinking, hmm..free program, all one needs is a computer, one can make conference calls, what an excellent caucus tool.

Great tool for politicial phone meetings, planning etc....so, I'm passing on the link to anyojne who wishes to use it..it works with any sort of platform.

http://www.skype.com/

 I saw this piece in the LA Times online this afternoon, it is heartbreakingly the most spot on  description of exactly what is the result of unraveling the social safety net, and the human tragedy hidden behind the pleasant sounding euphemism "The Bubble"
  "Many Oakland tenants have been swept out of their apartments by an overheated housing market. Most go quietly. Mary Jesus -- stubborn, articulate, unstable -- orchestrated a final act of defiance.

Diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder, she was stable as long as she had stable housing. But like others in similar situations, once her sanctuary was threatened, she lost her grip."
  http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&e=5&u=/latimests/20050610/ts_latimes/aten antwhopaidtragically
  The entire article is well worth reading, a heartbreaking example of how neighborhoods are vital to the survival of many people and their destruction for profit can be fatal. Too bad that Dreiser is not alive to tell this tale.The human cost of this bullshit bubble.
 

 Paul Krugman had an interesting article in which he hazarded a guess that 2004 was 1928 and that we're rapidly approaching the rise of another New Deal as the typical American Worker sees the social safety net shredded before his very eyes.
 While the Republicans shriek securtity security security above all things and pour billions into research opjn  Anthrax and otrher least likely to occur diseases we wait on the precipe of another global pandemic.See below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1492464,00.html

More below the fold
 

This is a copy of an e-mail I just sent off to Target Stores Headquarters

To Whom it may concern,

My husband and I were shopping in your store on Jefferson Blvd. in Culver City today when we were approached by a man with a clipboard asking us to sign a petition regarding state and city employees pensions.
  I said I wasn't interested as my father was a firefighter.
  He then said loudly" I don't care what your Father does".
  When my husband and I were leaving he shouted after me, "oh you're just a liberal, in a loud voice", he also said ,"her fathers a firefighter, I don't care what her father is"
   

In the middle ages condemned people were drawn and quartered and had their entrails pulled out and burned before their eyes for the entertainment of crowds in the public square. Terri Schiavos death while less painful was even more humiliating, partiicularly for a woman so concerned with her appearance that bulimia may have put her in the situation she was in.

I was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago  when I was a young woman, I was given a poor prognosis....in the various support groups I was in, one theme was constantly present , the issue of death and how difficult that process might be. It was everyones feeling that they had the ultimate choice in how they would die, the ability to issue a DNR order and trust that one's loved ones would honor ones wishes in that gave all of us a great feeling of peace, in contemplating this issue. Now, because of this Schiavo matter all of that is in jeopardy.
   (there's more below the fold.....)
       

 Is he planning on being as triple threat, Governor, Actor, Screenwriter.Evidently he has taken up fiction writing since arriving in Sacramento. Or perhaps he's playing out the part he'd wished he'd gotten in Jim Brooks' Broadcast News. Either way, he and his crew have started writing and producing their own little "news stories" and passing them off as the real deal.

  http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050313/ap_on_re_us/schwarzenegger_videos

   What's a matter they couldn't get Karen Ryan? How much more of this must we sit through before the MSM gets off their asses and stops letting the GOP do their job for them? Is Arnold just practicing his Presidential fiction tecniques??? Stay tuned.
  In Los Angeles this is Sula reporting.

 a military doctor's weblog which chronicled last months' mess tent attack in Iraq has been shut down by the US Military..More of Freedom on the march????
    One wonders how long censorship can hold out when one is talking about troops reporting from the field to the folks at home. Maybe this guys problem was that he was actually in the middle of things, a serving member of the military rather thanb  just an "embedded" reporter.
  I'm sure none of the "embedded journalists" out there are going to pick up on this..more's the pity.
   http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=20&u=/ap/20050105/ap_on_re_us/doct or_s_war_diary

 .....at least at Harrah's Club Casinos, where they recently fired a bartender who'd worked there for 21 years...for her refusal.

http://www.lvcitylife.com/articles/2004/06/16/local_news/news01.prt

"As part of implementation of the new dress code, female employees were given make-overs. "After" photos were taken and considered the standard for that employee's appearance from then on."

**

   And if anyone was thinking that she'd win in Federal Appeals Court, they ruled in favor of the casino too.
    A week or so ago everyone was talking about size being the American Purdah....no one ever mentioned make-up.Now that Harrah's is doing that with women employees..how about manditory tupes for all the bald headed males out there dealing blackjack or is that just too George Costanza?

  I couldn't tell what others have chosen the list was far too long to even unscroll properly on my computer but as for myself, I am by passing Bill Maher this evening, setting aside my all consuming thirst for politics and am sitting down to watch....
    The Lord of The Rings Trilogy...the long version on my big TV....The epic battle of Good and Evil is exactly what the doctor has ordered to soothe my troubled mind and prick up my courage to go on with the fight.
    After I've viewed these films, I'll be running Akira Kurosawas' Seven Samauri......
    It's time we villagers stood up to the bandits.
     To all of you, enjoy your weekends, rest, restore and come out fighting on Monday.

 The new report that states that 1.7 million veterans are lacking medical insurance, access to veterans hospitals etc.....
   With Bush always shooting his mouth off about how he stands strong with the troops, this should be in peoples faces and kept there.
    http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041019/ap_on_he_me/veterans_health_1

 In case anyone hasn't heard it yet or read the profile in the New Yorker...a good reminder to not let this happen again.
  Enjoy!
    http://www.cartoonbank.com/newyorker/slideshows/040913algore.html
  Through the courtesy of Monkey Bowl and the Nyer.

   You've all heard of Seperated at Birth, well there's a list....
one might called Seperated by Death. It's a list of those men who died in place of many of the fine chickenhawks who serve us so poorly today.....
    Here it is!

http://www.angelfire.com/ok5/pearly/htmls/gop-pansies.html

  the one that they were holding back so as not to "unduly influence " the election. I think we must get on this immediately. What's good for the goose as the old saying goes. If Sinclair Broadcasting is going to run their anti-Kerry smear I think that our side should insist that CBS break the Bush story they're sitting on.
   A new standard as to influence has been set by Sinclair. The least we can get out of this is the GOP screaming, and perhaps prevailing on Sinclair to pull their trash piece from the airwaves.

not unbiased but rather a private research group mainly occupied in working for Drug Companies...
http://www.hoovers.com/quintiles-transnational/--ID__17267--/free-co-factsheet.xhtml
  no wonder Bush is quoting them.l