Middle western, middle aged with middle class values, picking my battles to fight the good fight. I took a medical retirement after 24 years working in health care and education. I learned about the power of blogging through the Clark Community Network
Take a look at these pictures and ask yourself if there's something we can be doing for these Iraqi journalists and media workers who risk their lives everyday to tell us what's going on over there? Most of them know they need to leave Iraq, but don't have any idea how to get out of there with their families.
This blog post on the McClatchy blog is written by one of their Iraqi correspondents who went to Fallujah, where he is from. He had been reporting from Baghdad. You can read from his post the urgency of the situation there. He's asking us to help by e-mailing this post to our senators and representatives to demand they take action to help them.
Please go to this link for America's Most Wanted and look at the pictures of Kelsey Smith. She was last seen on Sat. night June 2nd near Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, KS. I live near the mall. Her friends and family have put up flyers and gone door to door to alert people in the area. Tonight the police came to my house doing a door to door canvass trying to find anyone who might have seen anything. The police believe she was abducted. The mall is near I-35, I-69 and of course I-70 is not far away. She could be anywhere by now. Her car was found in the mall parking lot.
McClatchy has a blog for their staffers in Baghdad to tell their stories. They write about their lives and don't pull any punches. Some of what they write about their experiences are in graphic detail.
I've been reading and commenting at The Stakeholder, the DCCC blog since it's inception. It has been brilliant in putting the issues of the day front and center, keeping us current on all the hot races in 2004 and 2006. This has mostly been done by a very very good blog master, Jesse Lee.
Here is the NYTs article on Chalabi and us getting into the war in Iraq joined at the hip with this guy. It's 12 pages online to read, but certainly well worth it. The writer spend time with Chalabi over a number of years. He even made a trip with him to Iran. (more on flip)
Target has announced it will match Wal-Mart on the $4 a month generic Rx drugs that Wal-Mart will start in the Tampa area. We can only hope this will go nationwide soon. Even at $4 a month on these generic drugs they are making a profit. It only goes to show what a rip-off these drug prices have been for all of us. This USA Today article links to the list of drugs that will be available at the $4 price.
The economy team at the Clark Community Network has been writing the history of debt in America, aka the history of money. Today is the debut of the third part in the series. Please be sure to go back and read parts one and two. It's history about this part of the world I'll bet you didn't know.
I've read the release of the statement from Mel Gibson asking for help from Jewish leaders in helping him to understand "where those words came from" when he was drunk the other night.
Wes Clark will be live blogging at the Clark Community Network today at 2:00 CST and 3:00 ET. You need to go to www.securingamerica.com and then click on the community button at the top of the page. This is the "scenic route" to see both the Securing America site for WesPAC and then take the short hop to the new and improved Clark Community Network aka CCN.
It doesn't take a crystal ball for this picture to become any clearer. In the White House (signing statements by Bush) and both chambers of Congress (Frist and Hastert as leaders) the rule of law seems to be dead. (See the SCOTUS ruling on Hamden v Rumsfeld and John Dean's latest FindLaw piece about what Graham and Kyl were up to with the WH to get that one dismissed and got caught in the act) Now a court is going to hear arguments about why the government (Justice Dept. same one who used the Graham Kyl fraud in the Hamdan case) should be dismissed. This is regarding the Deficit Reduction Act that Bush signed into law knowing the congress didn't vote for the same version as the senate. (Cheney was a tie breaker in the senate).
(This takes you to my blog and link to the article.) It seems that more Patriots
died in British NY prisons than during battle. The conditions were beyond horrible. Many of these men were locked away on prison ships where they died. This is something we just don't learn about from our school history books. After the war, of course King George III was not held accountable for "war crimes" as he was the king of the British Empire. After this war, nations did start to establish rules on treatment of POWs and who counts as a POW. England called our Patriots, "insurgents" or "enemy combatants" not deserving of POW status. These are my words more or less.
Yesterday I wrote a comment about how well I think the 50 state strategy is working in Kansas. I got a lot of positive feedback for my comment. Now, I am a believer that we can do two things at once. We can have a 50 state strategy and also give the money to the DCCC that they will need to help all these great congressional candidates win in November. If 600,000 people send the DCCC $100 (you know the spiel) they will have the $60 million they need to do the great work they do.
The Clark Community Network bloggers are forming teams and starting some excellent blog series at www.securingamerica.com then click on Community to get to the CCN. The Real Science team has a fabulous thing going now on Global Warming. We are forming other teams as well. The economy team is just forming and starting out as a blog entry on my blog. I've done three so far and hope our regular team entry can start in June. If anyone has an economics background or interest in the subject from the viewpoint of our US eoconomy and the impact the rest of the world has on us and visa versa, please check us out and make some useful comments.
It was so exciting to see a blogger, one of us featured in a very long article in the WAPO. If anyone has a right to be angry with the Bush administration for repeating the mistakes of the Nixon administration, it's MSOC. How many of us lost our fathers to "an unfortunate incident" such as the war in Vietnam? She held her own on FOX too!
It's time for us to become a unified Democratic party with one very central message. Last summer at a grassroots meetup in Little Rock, Arkansas of the National Clark Community, George Lakoff told us that our frame for our party is "the common good." He also talked about the early states being called a commonwealth in that everyone was working together and using their resources to work for the common good of their state. Then, that expanded to include the common good of the entire nation through a system of taxation that was to benefit everyone. The words made absolute sense to me. Everything that matters to us as a party and a nation fits into the "common good."
