http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9SRZfJAKKM

Speaker Pelosi - Energy Independence and Security Act

http://www.electric-cars-are-for-girls.c...

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEOepSoeIKE

Electric Auto Association's 35th Annual electric car rally in Palo Alto, California

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6lmf977hg

cool, Susan!

3990

Bombing Kills 43 in Shiite Holy City in Iraq

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and QAIS MIZHER
Published: March 18, 2008

....Privately, many American officials in Iraq are concerned that political progress has been limited, though. A bill intended to allow some former Baath Party members back into the government may end up causing as many problems as it fixes, for example. And another crucial bill that called for provincial elections by October was vetoed.


-----

This frustrating and humiliating conflict just drags on. Some thirty five years ago this month, we were withdrawing the last American combat forces from South Vietnam. Like extricaing ourselves from that nightmare, it would be good if we could remove ourselves from Iraq and use the 12 BILLION dollars a month we're throwing down the can there to invest in the American people here at home.

What a foreign policy disaster....

That's a terrifying number, Roger. We need to load our good people in trucks, busses and airplanes, and Bring Them Home Now.


Real Estate prices in hell will plummet when Cheney and Co. get there. Will our government try a bailout?

roger rankin
Tue, 03/18/08

Reply to this

3990

----

3990 for NOTHING.

Heather and Dave are wonderful volunteer Democratic environmental activists and conservationists. They live very close to Yosemite. Catheys Valley is heaven on earth.

3990  
That's a terrifying number, Roger.

That's the problem with America. They don't know their numbers.

Just look at the presdent economic situation.

In case anyone is keeping score: Howard and Jim Dean are still first.

I am tenth. 

OK, eleventh.

presdent = this just proves

present

was misspelled.

Susan, There is not a good reason why 80% of us should be driving electric vehicles.

Out on the Farm, I have a propane powered Ford 6 cylinder irrigation motor and a 55 Horsepower electric submersible irrigation pump. Each system irrigates 140 acres and produces fairly equal corn and soybean yields. The electric pump operates at one fifth the cost of the propane powered unit.

Our long-range goal is to install a 50 horsepower wind turbineout by the electric pump to backfeed the grid during peak demand times when our electric well usage is controlled by our Public Power system.

We live in a wonderous and dangerous world. The cruds occupying the halls of Power have done their best to bring real progress to a halt. They will not succeed while there is one breath left in this body.

Bob, you have been, so far, promoted to twelfth. This rickety funhouse really is just like throwing a note in a bucket.

Great vids on the electric cars. Thanks, Susan.  I love the tiny aqua one.  I wonder how much the elec. bill is for one of these that's used every day about town.

So, I said before, I will take a return to Clintonomics as a start.

That's the trouble. Clintonomics was the start -- of Bushonomics. 

I'm very confused.  Phil said that we're not paying for this...yet.  Phil, can you explain this again?  Please?

http://www.opednews.com
           
Outrageous - Taxpayers Bail Out Bear Stearns; JP Morgan Buys for $2 / Share

In the past 72 hours, the ultimate financial scam has been perpetrated on the American public. On Friday, the Federal Reserve back-doored a loan to an investment banking firm. And today, a bank bought the investment banking firm for pennies on the dollar - all largely subsidized by you, the taxpayer.

A couple of months back, I wrote the following:

The unprecedented wealth transfer from poor and middle income families to the uber rich is nearly complete. The folks at the bottom of the GOP-led financial pyramid scheme are nearly bled dry, and the pyramid is about to collapse. To sustain itself a little longer, the folks at the top of the pyramid will have to start an Amway-style ritual of financial cannibalism amongst themselves. I think that (to an extent) this is exactly what we’re seeing in the stock markets and big financial houses as the true meltdown begins…
 

Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience: ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-scha...

Mike Palecek: Reverend Wright is Right-On (2 comments)

16.

seashell :-)
Tue, 03/18/08


Click on the Plug Ins website link at the top. They might list the cost.

That's the trouble. Clintonomics was the start -- of Bushonomics. 

No, it was Reaganomcis that started it.
Bush and Clinton just continued it.

Continue the present course or change?

This is so sad and so true.

*************************** 

"The entire planet knows that if Al Gore had run for president in 2008 it would have been a slam dunk. So why didn't he do it considering the very life of western civilization is at stake as well as the ongoing Bush/Republican rape of Mother Nature, affecting polar bears, ozone holes, global warming, melting icebergs, fossil fuel poisoning, the trashing of what's left of environmental protection laws, and on and on to the certain death of our children's environmental future?

Yes, the man has his personal priorities and all that, but there may be literally no time in western history when it was so LIFE AND DEATH that an individual stand up and be counted as Al Gore and 2008 . . . and he's taken a pass.  Boy, has he ever taken a pass.

Has his life been threatened?  Certainly, a possibility.  More egocentrically, he is elite, after all, Democratic Party notwithstanding.  Politics has NOTHING to do with the elites, and maybe he just doesn't want to let go of that high class international elite existence.

Bottom line, who knows, but I hope he realizes down to his quarks that he could have been the man of the century, perhaps even the millennia and he flipped it all off.

Al, we needed you like something to grab onto when you're drowning and going down for the 3rd time.  We needed you like we needed someone to dash into the street to rescue our child from a racing car.  We needed you like someone to give the country an antidote to anthrax.  We needed you like a veritable mythological hero of yore.  NEVER has an American been so needed.  Maybe only George Washington was similarly needed, except that George was needed at the beginning of America; whereas you were/are needed at the "end" of America.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_w__chris_080317_why_did_gore_abandon.htm 

thanks, Susan!

Krugman: The B Word Robert Rubin, former Treas Secy, and John Lipsky, top official at the Intnl Monetary Fund, suggested public funds might be needed to rescue the US financial system. Lipsky insisted he wasn’t talking about a bailout. But he was. Henry Paulson, the current Treas Secy, says any proposal to use taxpayers’ money to help resolve the crisis is a “non-starter." That’s as credible as all of his previous pronouncements.

Pelosi Takes Superdelegate Stand That Heavily Favors Obama, Without Mentioning His Name

There is not a good reason why 80% of us should be driving electric vehicles.

Well, my last 3 cents for tonight.

It's about movement. I and you want to go anywhere we want. Where do we get the power to do this? So far it has been oil.
Can we find enough of oil so that we can avoid change?

I’ve been thinking about implosions. Actually I’ve been thinking about warehousing, leverage, multipliers, magnified expansion/ contraction, fractional reserve banking, and the FED. When I learned last week that the FED had created yet another “accommodation” to swap newly minted US Treasury securities for $200 BILLION in par value Cleverly Rigged Accounting Ploy (CRAP) financial derivatives that were actually worth less, or even worthless, I was livid. I saw this as yet another lame attempt to bail out the banking industry for their wayward past actions. I asked myself: “Why, why, why?” Then it hit me I was looking at all this from the WRONG direction! Please read on.

Leave it to Paul Krugman to tell the hard truth about what needs to be done in this financial crisis.

[T]he important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

Not that the Fed shall listen, mind you; Ben Bernanke, like Alan Greenspan before him, cares about the laissez-faire swindlers who caused the latest financial meltdown. Factoring in the taxpayers only counts for bailing out the criminals, not bailing out the system the crooks abused in order to flush the economy down the toilet.

One of the clickies in this article is so busy with volumn, I couldn't get in.  Why does it take the truth so long to come out?

In 1971 at age 19, I had a life-changing experience when I met dozens of Vietnam veterans who'd descended on my hometown of Detroit to testify at the "Winter Soldier" hearings organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In anguished presentations, the Vets painstakingly described the horrors against Vietnamese they'd seen or taken part in. And the attitudes of racism and bloodlust that motored the war. Many vets blamed the lies in mainstream media for convincing them to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Virtually every soul in that Detroit hotel banquet hall wept openly at the heartfelt, bone-chilling revelations pouring out of the Vietnam vets struggling with bloody memories and post-traumatic stress. But no one outside that hall could see or hear the proceedings. No TV or radio networks covered the event.

It's about movement. I and you want to go anywhere we want. Where do we get the power to do this? So far it has been oil.
Can we find enough of oil so that we can avoid change?

But of course, oil is causing climate change.

As for "where do we get the power?" Just hold your finger to the wind and your eye to the sun. All the power we need slips through our fingers every day.

You know, I just had a thought that might have some merit with BO supporters.

While McC is over in the ME/England talking about 100 years of war, BO could steal most peoples' hearts and minds by following in his footsteps, talking about 100 years of peace.

That's the anti-McC spiel... 100 years of peace.

Maybe I could be s/o's campaign mgr.  :-) 

Goodnite bloggie.  Time to start another book.  But I'll quickie peek just in case...........

    
Last Updated: Tuesday, 18 March 2008, 04:58 GMT
E-mail this to a friend     Printable version
Dalai Lama blamed for Tibet riots
    
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao 18/3/08
Mr Wen says the protesters are trying to sabotage the Olympics

Mr Wen speech
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding recent violence in Tibet's main city, Lhasa.

Speaking at the close of parliament, Mr Wen also said the exiled Tibetan leader's claim of "cultural genocide" in Tibet was nothing but lies.

China's response to the violence had been restrained, the premier said.

China says 13 people were killed by rioters in Lhasa. Tibetan exiles say at least 80 protesters were killed in a crackdown by Chinese security forces.

    
There is ample fact and plenty of evidence proving this incident was organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique
Wen Jiabao


The Dalai Lama, who in 1989 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his consistent opposition to the use of violence in the quest for Tibetan self-rule, has repeatedly called for dialogue with China.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7302021.stm

A group of UK-based human rights and development organisations have called for fundamental policy changes towards the Gaza Strip by Israel, the international community and the West Bank-based Palestinian leadership.

Their report details what are calling the worst humanitarian crisis in the strip since Israel occupied it in the 1967 war, and describe it as a man-made disaster resulting from the isolation and blockade of Gaza after its take-over by Hamas militants last June.

The following are the main points in the report, sponsored by Amnesty International, Care International UK, Cafod, Christian Aid, Medecins du Monde UK, Oxfam, Save the Children UK and Trocaire.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7191359.stm 

Good one, Susan!

*******
From the looks of things, Danny must have had a well-deserved day off yesterday.

*******
Since my maiden name is distinctly an Irish one, I get lots of mail on St. Pat's from family & friends. Since Jo's post yesterday am was one of the few St. Paddy's offerings, I thought that I would post a couple others that I hadn't heard before.

OK, so it's a day late, but they're still fun.

Here's the first:

=================
Paddy was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place. Looking up to heaven he said, 'Lord take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass every Sunday for the rest of me life and give up me Irish Whiskey!'

Miraculously, a parking place appeared.

Paddy looked up again and said, 'Never mind, I found one.'

Bloggie behaving badly yet again. My post should have fallen AFTER sea's.

Anyway, here's the second:

==================
Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, 'Do you want to go to heaven?'

The man said, 'I do, Father.'

The priest said, 'Then stand over there against the wall.'

Then the priest asked the second man, 'Do you want to go to heaven?'

'Certainly, Father,' was the man's reply.

'Then stand over there against the wall,' said the priest.

Then Father Murphy walked up to O'Toole and said, 'Do you want to go to heaven?'

O'Toole said, 'No, I don't Father.'

The priest said, 'I don't believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?'

O'Toole said, 'Oh, when I die, yes. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now.'

This is just another reason to get very serious about population control.  Pay women NOT to have kids and limit one per family.   This "go forth and populate the earth" is destroying us, not to mention what we do to our animal and plant brethren.  We cull/kill species that are likely more intelligent than we are.

Still in the caves we are........(god, I sound like Yoda)

Culling is back on South Africa's agenda after more than a decade The eminent conservationist Richard Leakey has given qualified backing for South Africa's plan to cull elephants.

In an article for the BBC News website, the former head of the Kenyan Wildlife Service says culling is "a necessary part of population management".

But Dr Leakey says there is also a responsibility to curb human activities that impinge on elephant habitat.

South Africa plans to allow culling after a gap of 14 years because of growing numbers of elephants.

The population is estimated to have expanded from 8,000 to 18,000 in little more than a decade.

Though I find elephant culling repugnant, I can see the sense in it
Richard Leakey http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7301195.stm  The plan has aroused the ire of some environment and animal welfare groups.

Some are so opposed to the plan that they have called for tourist boycotts.

Let's see if this one falls where it should.

**********
Yes, there are lots of factors and reasons for this, but many, if not most, have been caused or exacerbated by putzCo policies and rampant corruption.

So thanks again, putzCo.

============
A financial crisis unmatched since the Great Depression, say analysts
Larry Elliott, economics editor
The Guardian, Tuesday March 18

A century after John Pierpont Morgan rescued the New York stockmarket from a 50% sell off in share prices, his blue-blooded Wall Street bank was yesterday once again at the heart of attempts to contain the deepening global financial crisis.

In an echo of the "bankers' panic" of 1907, JP Morgan responded to what is being billed as a meltdown of historic proportions by agreeing to buy its stricken rival, Bear Stearns.

The length and severity of the crisis that broke over global markets last summer has had analysts delving into their history books. George Soros, who was largely responsible for Black Wednesday, the last bout of serious financial turmoil to afflict the UK, believes there has been nothing to match the events of the past nine months since the Great Depression.

[...]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/...

And on that sad note about our wonderfully intelligent elephants, who faithfully work for humans who keeps chains on them,

Goodnite. 

I wonder if animals would cull humans if they could.  I wouldn't blame them.  

keeps s/b keep, but you all know that.  :-)

Forever doomed to fall upthread instead of in sequence, I guess.

******
The situation in Tibet appears to be going from bad to worse.

We had actually planned to go there early next month, but after verifying that our schedules would not quite allow for the trip then, decided to leave it for another season.

Right now, it seems as if that was the right decision.

But I do hope that somehow the situation gets resolved. And soon. It's always the most vulnerable who suffer the most.

================
Arrests after governor's threat to deal harshly with resistance
Jonathan Watts in Linxia and Tania Branigan in Beijing
The Guardian, Tuesday March 18 2008

Thousands of paramilitary police were massing in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas of unrest last night ahead of an ultimatum to protesters to hand themselves in.

Witnesses reported that arrests had begun long before a midnight deadline passed in the capital, and authorities in other provinces were cracking down both on protests and those who report them.

Hong Kong journalists were ordered to leave Lhasa, and foreign reporters have been turned away or ordered to leave Tibetan areas in the Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces in the past two days.

[...]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar...

So much for not talking to terrorists ... it was the dialogue and links to state authority that eventually got the situation in Northern Ireland resolved.

=============
Extent of secret links between government and IRA revealed
Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday March 18 2008

The full extent of a secret 20-year "back channel" between the British government and the IRA is revealed today by Tony Blair's former chief of staff, who declares that the peace process might never have been possible without the link.

In the first authoritative account of the link by a British official, Jonathan Powell tells the Guardian that a Derry businessmen, Brendan Duddy, and a series of MI5 and MI6 officers risked their lives to allow the British government and the IRA leadership to communicate in private between 1973 and 1993. In the latest extracts from his memoirs, serialised in the Guardian this week, Powell writes: "It is very hard for democratic governments to admit to talking to terrorist groups while those groups are still killing innocent people.

"Luckily for this process, the British government's back channel to the Provisional IRA had been in existence whenever required from 1973 onwards." The secret link was only used on three major occasions: to negotiate an IRA ceasefire in the mid-1970s; during the first IRA hunger strike in 1980; and in the early stages of the peace process in the 1990s. But Powell writes that the simple fact that a link existed from the IRA leadership to Downing Street - mainly via Duddy and his MI6 handler Michael Oatley - was of huge significance.

[...]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/...

This is from yesterday's paper, but still worth a read.

This line-up does not just include the US *players* ... how many of these do you know and recognize?

And this is the last ... on to the salt mines!

===============
Where are they now? The faces of the Iraq war five years on
By Rupert Cornwell, Ian Burrell, Kim Sengupta, Tim Walker, Anne Penketh, Michael Savage, Nigel Morris & Robert Verkaik
Monday, 17 March 2008

Some survived and thrived, others lost everything. Some made their names, others squandered their reputations. Five years since the most divisive war of modern times began, many of the prime movers have faded from the headlines. Where are they now?

KOFI ANNAN

[...]
MOHAMMED SAEED AL-SAHHAF

[...]
HANS BLIX

[...]
AYATOLLAH ALI AL-SISTANI

[...]
LORD HUTTON

[...]
ROBIN COOK

[...]
PAUL WOLFOWITZ

[...]
GENERAL SIR MIKE JACKSON

[...]
DONALD RUMSFELD

[...]
ANDREW GILLIGAN

[...]
COLIN POWELL

[...]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE

[...]
SCOTT RITTER

[...]
ALI ABBAS

[...]
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL

[...]
DICK CHENEY

[...]
TARIQ AZIZ

[...]
LYNNDIE ENGLAND and CHARLES GRANER

[...]
GEORGE W BUSH

[...]
MUQTADA AL-SADR

[...]
AHMED CHALABI

[...]
COL TIM COLLINS

[...]
DOMINIQUE DE VILLEPIN

[...]
JESSICA LYNCH

[...]
RAGEH OMAAR

[...]
JACQUES CHIRAC

[...]
SADDAM HUSSEIN

[...]
JONATHAN POWELL

[...]
GENERAL TOMMY FRANKS

[...]
IAIN DUNCAN SMITH

[...]
CLARE SHORT

[...]
ELIZABETH WILMSHURST

[...]
LORD GOLDSMITH

[...]
TONY BLAIR

[...]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...

The electric car parked in solar powerplant...I watched a show on the history channel recently that showed much of what this gentleman is saying...

BRATTLEBORO -- The secret to saving the world could be hidden in the miles and miles of parking lot in the United States, Dr. Arjun Makhijani said Saturday.

Makhijani addressed roughly 65 people at the annual membership meeting for the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution.

http://www.reformer.com/ci_8599836?sourc...

Good morning, everybody

Color me skeptical.

The people pushing the electric car are also into nuclear.

need to change browser 

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1028545

This is an essay by John mcKay, one of the fired United States attorneys. 

5:23 am - thanks for the chuckles, Judy!  it's never 'too late' for a laugh!

sea - re: Who's more likely to take us into more war, a man or a  woman?  It's a good question, not answerable simply by saying "Obama."  Women, in gen'l, do not like sending children off to die. How many times have many here said that we need more women in power to help end wars and suffering?

For me it's coming down to, Who will not commit troops easily and who can beat McC? And who has the experience and knowlege to keep this country from going completely under?  Glub glub.

the questions you ask are good ones - but you know we've been answering those here all along.  you answered them too, long before this, but I guess you feel the need to ask us these questions over and over, as if our support for Obama is a tenusous thing or perhaps one day our (same) answers will have a meaning for you that had escaped you until 'now'...  I'm not sure what answer we could give that would be acceptable to you.  we're Obamastars, or some other slight insult you apply daily to anyone who supports him - excuse me, but if you feel we've all drunk some some sort of koolaid, as this name calling would imply, why bother to answer your questions, over and over again? yet I will try.

I understand that this decision is not easy for you.  please understand that it wasn't easy for me, either, but for a long time now I have felt certain that Obama would be the best leader and most likely to beat McCain for many reasons.  and I would say that this particular woman, HRC, would have no problem sending Americans off to war - she did that already, w/o even reading the NIE to learn the details of WHY she was signing off on Bush's war.  and, sadly, she simply doesn't display the female traits I feel would be most helpful in a leader, in working towards peace.  in working so hard to appear tough, she's sharpened any soft edges that might have made a difference in how she governs, imo.  that's my opinion - take it for whatever it's worth to you.  I could give you a long, detailed explanation but I doubt that anything I could say would pass muster with you.  whatever you're waiting for hasn't happened yet - I hope it does, sea.  I hope you can vote for your choice with the same conviction that I did.

Warning, it's a pdf.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1028545 

good morning, Monica!   I do believe the attorney firing will eventually take it's toll - it's just taking such a loooong time for it all to come out!  I'm trying to have patience...  :)

and I'm hopeful - spring is almost here and the temps will be in the 40's today and some day very soon my bottom step might just melt out of that 9" slab of ice that I call a driveway.  I've had a nice 'ramp' at the end of the drive but it's now a becoming a ledge and I may have to resort to using a