We lose.....big time

What the hell is going on in Washington? Have you seen this morning's NY Times editorial........Security Loses; Pork Wins?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/opinion/opinionspecial/14thu1.html

Have our Senators lost their senses? How can you put greed above the safety and security of our country and it's citizens? We deserve better than this....come on! Senator Collins.....is it really that important for you to "bring home the bacon"? Senator Lieberman's excuse is that he is an idiot. Why do the good people of Connecticut keep electing him to the US Senate? Ooooops! I just remembered, that's why Santorum keeps getting elected here in Pennsylvania....he's got his constituents buffaloed.

The distribution formula should be based on risk and need in order to keep our country safe. How many times in the last couple of weeks have we read reports that were released to the media saying our ports, our rails, our chemical plants, our nuclear plants, oil and gas refineries are STILL not adequately protected. The TSA (the people entrusted with airport security) has only spent a small, small fraction of the $600 million that they were budgeted for this year, and it's July already. Of course they are too busy having parties and expensive luncheons to get around to the important matters of airport security. Don't you feel safer now at the airports? What is going on here? I think an investigation is in order here. We are extremely vulnerable to terrorist attacks within our borders. My god people.....WAKE UP!!

Here's a list of the Senators who voted for the pork.....if one of these assholes belongs to you, send them an email or call them NOW and ask what the hell is going on here?

The shameful list FOR the Collins amendment which put pork ahead of security:

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?
congress=109&session=1&vote=00175


There's some surprises on this list, well at least I was surprised.


Here's the list who voted FOR the Feinstein amendment, which called for an 87% allocation based on risk and vulnerabilities.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?
congress=109&session=1&vote=00176


The security of our country as it stands right now is a sad joke people. How safe do you feel?

Rove: Down but not out

It seems the Bush administration has quite a quandry on it's hands, wouldn't you say? The administration is unusually quiet right now, quite a change from the arrogance that they usually exude. I love it!! Can't you just hear those little spinmeister wheels spinning right now? They are trying DESPARATELY to figure a way out of this one. They'll come out with something I'm sure....they always do. Will it be believable? Nah, I doubt it. This could be the scandal that derails the gravy train for so many Republicans and Big Business like Halliburton, AND let's not forget the always faithful and pious Religious Right. This administration's arrogance and evil ways have finally caught up with them........it's about time. They fucked themselves BIG TIME here!

Bush will have to eat his words about firing the person responsible, because the Rethugs cannot lose Kammandaunt Karl. He is their brain, without him they are up shit creek. EVERYTHING that comes out of that WH has to be approved by Karl. He orchestrates everything. Notice how we don't hear much from DeLay and Frist anymore? Why do you think that is?

BushCo has really gotten themselves into a HUGE jam right now. What to do? I love it, I love it, I love it!! We haven't had any opportunities to gloat the last 5 years, so I'm gloating now! This is so great!! LOL!!

I'm sure by the weekend or the beginning of next week they'll start trotting out a new message. They can't remain quiet like this for too long. Look out when they do start coming out with a new message.....it'll be like coming out with guns blazing. They'll keep doing like they usually do...keep repeating the lies enough times and people start believing the bullshit.

I just hope that the Democratic Party and the leadership in the House and Senate really take full advantage of this present that has fallen into our laps. If they don't, it'll be time to get rid of Pelosi and Reid for sure. Howard....it's time to get everybody fired up! Come on Howard! I'll help you, and so will lots of other party faithful. People, get those Letters to the Editor out there in the magazines and the newspapers, contact your Congresspeople and Senators. Let's keep the heat turned up. Let's go!!

The New York Times had a really good editorial this morning....please see below:

July 13, 2005
A Few Thoughts on Karl Rove

Far be it for us to denounce leaks. Newspapers have relied on countless government officials to divulge vital information that their bosses want to be kept secret. There is even value in the sanctioned leak, such as when the White House, say, lets out information that it wants known but does not want to announce.

But it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary. And Karl Rove seems to have been playing that unsavory game with the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a career diplomat who ran afoul of President Bush's efforts to justify the invasion of Iraq. An e-mail note provided by Time magazine to the federal prosecutor investigating the case shows that Mr. Rove's aim in talking about Ms. Wilson to Matthew Cooper, a Time reporter, was to discredit Mr. Wilson, perhaps to punish him.

Mr. Wilson had published an Op-Ed article in The Times about being assigned to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger - a claim that was popular among the White House and Pentagon officials eager to make the case for war with Iraq. Mr. Wilson said the allegation was unsupported by evidence, and it was later withdrawn, to Mr. Bush's embarrassment.

Before that happened, Mr. Rove gave Mr. Cooper a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Mr. Rove said the origins of Mr. Wilson's mission were "flawed and suspect" because, according to Mr. Rove, Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, who works for the Central Intelligence Agency. To understand why Mr. Rove thought that was a black mark, remember that the White House considers dissenters enemies and that the C.I.A. had cast doubt on the administration's apocalyptic vision of Iraq's weapons programs.

Mr. Cooper's e-mail note does not say that Mr. Rove mentioned the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, which later appeared in a column by Robert Novak. White House supporters are emphasizing that fact in an effort to argue that Mr. Rove did not illegally unmask a covert officer. We don't need to judge that here. But there remains the issue of whether the White House used Mr. Wilson's wife for political reasons, and it's obvious that Mr. Rove did.

The White House has painted itself into a corner. More than a year ago, Mr. Bush vowed to fire the leaker. Then Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, repeatedly assured everyone that the leaker was not Mr. Rove, on whom the president is so dependent intellectually that he calls Mr. Rove "the architect."

Until this week, the administration had deflected attention onto journalists by producing documents that officials had been compelled to sign to supposedly waive any promise of confidentiality. Our colleague Judith Miller, unjustly jailed for protecting the identity of confidential sources, was right to view these so-called waivers as meaningless.

Mr. Rove could clear all this up quickly. All he has to do is call a press conference and tell everyone what conversations he had and with whom. While we like government officials who are willing to whisper vital information, we like even more government officials who tell the truth in public.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The Evolution of Marriage

I just read an Op-Ed piece from the July 5, 2005 issue of the NY Times that I found very interesting.

The author shares with us the evolution of marriage down through the ages. It's not as rigid as the Religious Right would have us think. Personally, I am glad that marriage has changed through the ages. Not that long ago women were not allowed to own property or enter into contracts if they were married. Those were rights only the husband was entitled to. Women were there to keep the house, feed the man, bear children and have sex on demand when the "lord and master" demanded it. Eeeecks! Horrors! I am glad those dark days are past. Sheesh!

The author tells us that after every "evolution" of marriage, the world did not stop, no plagues, etc. like some "good Christians" had feared. Does this sound familiar? Shades of Rev. Dobson?

Read on....it is a delightful article.

July 5, 2005
The Heterosexual Revolution
By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.

My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

The first step down the road to gay and lesbian marriage took place 200 years ago, when Enlightenment thinkers raised the radical idea that parents and the state should not dictate who married whom, and when the American Revolution encouraged people to engage in "the pursuit of happiness," including marrying for love. Almost immediately, some thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Condorcet, began to argue that same-sex love should not be a crime.

Same-sex marriage, however, remained unimaginable because marriage had two traditional functions that were inapplicable to gays and lesbians. First, marriage allowed families to increase their household labor force by having children. Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility. But the advent of birth control in the 19th century permitted married couples to decide not to have children, while assisted reproduction in the 20th century allowed infertile couples to have them. This eroded the traditional argument that marriage must be between a man and a woman who were able to procreate.

In addition, traditional marriage imposed a strict division of labor by gender and mandated unequal power relations between men and women. "Husband and wife are one," said the law in both England and America, from early medieval days until the late 19th century, "and that one is the husband."

This law of "coverture" was supposed to reflect the command of God and the essential nature of humans. It stipulated that a wife could not enter into legal contracts or own property on her own. In 1863, a New York court warned that giving wives independent property rights would "sow the seeds of perpetual discord," potentially dooming marriage.

Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the traditional legal view that wives (unlike husbands) couldn't sue for loss of the personal services, including housekeeping and the sexual attentions, of their spouses. The judges reasoned that only wives were expected to provide such personal services anyway.

As late as the 1970's, many American states retained "head and master" laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980's did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, "I do," she was legally committed to say, "I will" for the rest of her married life.

I am old enough to remember the howls of protest with which some defenders of traditional marriage greeted the gradual dismantling of these traditions. At the time, I thought that the far-right opponents of marital equality were wrong to predict that this would lead to the unraveling of marriage. As it turned out, they had a point.

Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children- was an immense boon to many couples. But these changes in the definition and practice of marriage opened the door for gay and lesbian couples to argue that they were now equally qualified to participate in it.

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process it has become more flexible, but also more optional. Many people may not like the direction these changes have taken in recent years. But it is simply magical thinking to believe that by banning gay and lesbian marriage, we will turn back the clock.

Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company