i am a firm believer

animals do have feelings and emotions. we should treat them as such. hell, we can't even treat each other with compassion, i guess it's too much for me to expect us to treat animals kindly.

Photo Gallery: Dying Elephant Elicits ''Compassion'' (click on the title above, it's a link to the rest of the story and pictures)

Warning: This gallery contains graphic images.
Day One: Grace Aids Eleanor
Grace, of a family of elephants that researchers call the Virtues, touches the ailing Eleanor, the matriarch of the First Ladies family, who has fallen in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve on October 10, 2003. Grace will soon push Eleanor back to her feet, though the ailing elephant's resurgence will be short-lived.
Elephants show compassionate behavior to others in distress, even to elephants not closely related to them, according to the researchers who produced these photos and an accompanying report, published in the July 2006 issue of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Before this picture was taken, Eleanor, a new mother, had been found with a swollen trunk, abrasions to an ear and a leg, and a broken tusk—probably from a previous fall. ..............


and this from the ny times

A Chinese Outcry: Doesn’t a Dog Have Rights?

SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 — It was late last month, the boy said, his voice still tinged with emotion, when he and his father were forced to march their two German shepherds to a public square and hang them from a tree.
The boy, Xia Shaoli, was not alone in his pain. Officials in Mouding County in southwestern Yunnan Province had ordered the mass extermination of dogs, pets as well as strays, after three people died in a rabies outbreak. And as a crowd gathered around a large tree in the village of Xiajiashan, owners complied one after another with commands to string their dogs up.
According to official figures, 54,429 dogs were killed during the Yunnan campaign. Reports in the Chinese news media say that some people out walking their dogs had the animals seized by gangs of vigilantes, who clubbed the dogs to death on the spot.
The events in Yunnan have been quickly followed by rabies scares in other parts of China. On Wednesday, the Chinese news media reported the killings of 280 dogs in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and 13 in the city of Fuzhou in southern Fujian Province. ..........

this is an interesting little article.........

Bush staff wanted bomb-detect cash moved


By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer Fri Aug 11, 7:38 PM ET
While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.
Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.
Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course," Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently.
"The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security," the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.
Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who joined Republicans to block the administration's recent diversion of explosives detection money, said research and development is crucial to thwarting future attacks and there is bipartisan agreement that Homeland Security has fallen short.
"They clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven't been using," Sabo said...........

i meant to post this the other day, but didn't have time

since the original story i have read donations have been coming in for mr mccusker.

what happened to him and thousands of others was/is inexcusable. there is no reason it HAD to happen as it did. there is NO reason our nation didn't help them as it should have. katrina destroyed more than homes. instead of lending a hand, many (in our government) just spit on those that were treading water.

this is so very sad. this is but ONE story out of so many. those of us not in the gulf coast area have no idea (me included) how much devastation occured.

After Long Stress, Newsman in New Orleans Unravels

By SUSAN SAULNY
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 — On the morning after Hurricane Katrina, when members of The Times-Picayune’s staff found themselves marooned in its flooded building here, John McCusker refused to join most of his colleagues in relocating to a remote newsroom in Baton Rouge.
After the building was evacuated, Mr. McCusker, a photographer for the paper, swam through muck while managing to keep his equipment dry and, from a kayak, captured some of the most harrowing images of the storm’s immediate aftermath.
Then, for months, he lived the misery he had been photographing, having lost his possessions, his family’s home and his entire neighborhood to the hurricane. On Tuesday, nearly a year after the storm, he seemed to snap.
In an episode that began as a traffic stop for erratic driving, the authorities say, Mr. McCusker was halted once, pinned a police officer between cars by backing up, then fled and drove into several cars and construction signs in the Uptown neighborhood before being stopped again and finally subdued with a Taser gun. In both stops, the police say, he begged officers to shoot him, telling them he did not have enough insurance money to rebuild his home in the Gentilly neighborhood and wanted to die.
“He was demanding it; he kept saying, ‘Just kill me, just kill me,’ ” said James Arey, commander of the negotiation team of the Police Department’s special operations division, who responded to the scene. ..........

over the years i have been reading about this VERY disturbing story

women ARE second class citizens even in north america. something to show off, something to own, something to get rid of when you're done with them

the good ol' boy network at work here. even though their skin isn't white white white this time, it's the same thing. money and power

El Paso Reporter Risked Her Life on a Mass Murder Story

By Barbara Bedway Published: August 11, 2006 10:45 AM ET
NEW YORK By 1999, when the El Paso (Texas) Times' Diana Washington Valdez began reporting on a string of murders of young women across the border in Juarez, Mexico, the killings had been going on for six years. But the level of U.S. media frenzy generated when a young blonde woman goes missing somewhere was notably absent in Juarez, even as the number of victims -- most of them poor, attractive girls attending school or working at one of the city's many large assembly plants -- steadily grew into the hundreds. Many of the women were raped and mutilated prior to their deaths, their bodies dumped in ditches or vacant lots in the desert. State law enforcement authorities responsible for investigating the crimes (at least 90 women were raped and killed in similar ways) consistently failed to preserve crime scenes, collect evidence, or interview witnesses. Valdez, a bilingual reporter with plenty of experience investigating corruption on the U.S. side of the border, says, "Even I had no idea how bad it was, and how high up the corruption was occurring."...........

i'm going to paraphrase something

i heard randi rhodes say recently;

we are getting bombs over to israel wicked quick BUT we couldn't get trailers over to help victims of katrina.

'splain that to ME lucy!

Stewart Eviscerates Sore-Loserman for Independent Run

the nutmeg grater: and now a word from now on ned lamont#links

the nutmeg grater: and now a word from now on ned lamont#links

the nutmeg grater: what a soul-less ass#links

the nutmeg grater: what a soul-less ass#links

the nutmeg grater: frightening VERY much so#links

the nutmeg grater: frightening VERY much so#links

thank you

to the peeps of my state, thank you!!! i have a bat in my house. i think i got her/him out, but i don't know for sure. i've not seen her/him in four days so i'm guessing it's gone. last night i ripped my big toe open (badly). thankfully when i went to the doctor's in early july he decided (out of the blue) to give me a tetanus shot. but of course, i don't care about ANY of this. i only care about ned lamont won!!! my heart is singing (even if my body isn't). thank you to the most wonderful people in the great state of connecticut. Lamont Wins Connecticut Primary, Defeats Lieberman POSTED: 11:02 pm EDT August 8, 2006 UPDATED: 11:21 pm EDT August 8, 2006 HARTFORD, Conn. -- Lamont has defeated incumbent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lieberman appeared before a crowd of supporters at 11 p.m. and congraduated Lamont on his victory "This was a much closer race that all the pundits predicted," he said to a cheering crowd...............

oh and thanks to my pops too. even though he's a democrat, he's wicked conservative. he voted for ned too. the war MUST stop. the lies MUST stop. the constitution of the united states of america must be mended and adhered to!

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN????

haven't we learned our lessons well? is this the 1950s all over again? are we forever doomed? will we continue to make the same mistakes we made in the past?

Told to Snitch or Leave U.S.

A 24-year-old Moroccan says federal agents gave him a choice: Inform on fellow Muslims or be deported. He chose to fight back.
By Lee Romney, Times Staff Writer 10:19 PM PDT, August 6, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO — The document that federal agents handed to Yassine Ouassif to justify his deportation contained startling language: "The United States government has reason to believe that you are likely to engage in terrorist activity."Ouassif was in exclusive company. Since Sept. 11, only five people have faced that ominous charge. Ouassif was about to become the sixth.
The slip of paper offered no details on what was behind the accusation.As federal officials took him into custody in December, they told the 24-year-old Moroccan — a permanent resident who had moved to California nine months before the terrorist attacks — that he would be taken to a detention facility in Arizona. He could fight deportation from there, but it would take at least two years, they said. And they assured him he would fail.Ouassif was scared. He cried. But he was not surprised...........

and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds."

chilling words and they come from our service members in iraq. there IS a civil war and it started a while ago. this is NO crisis, or conflict or scrape up. IT'S A WAR and WE stirred it up (granted it MAY have happened any way, with or without us, but we'll never know now).

U.S.Troops in Iraq Tell McClatchy Reporter: Yes, It is a 'Civil War'

By E&P Staff Published: August 04, 2006 9:45 PM ET
NEW YORK U.S. generals have had their say this week. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has spoken, so has Secretary of State Rice. Pundits, as usual, have weighed in, and weighed in again. Finally a reporter asked the real experts: U.S. troops in Iraq.Tom Lasseter, longtime reporter for the Knight Ridder bureau in Baghad -- now run by McClatchy -- is heading back to the U.S. after many tours in Iraq, but before leaving, he took another embed this past week. His report for McClatchy papers today opened, "While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun. "Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds."........

heads stuck in the sand: this is so very hard for me to fathom

in reality is 50% of our population this uninformed, this unaware, THIS STUPID?

i'm embarrassed. (and effing pissed)

AP Explores Media's Role in Popular Belief in Iraq WMD

Published: August 06, 2006 7:55 PM ET
NEW YORK Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story..........

the nutmeg grater: now newt is chiming in and calling me an insurgent#links

the nutmeg grater: now newt is chiming in and calling me an insurgent#links

the nutmeg grater: now newt is chiming in and calling me an insurgent

the nutmeg grater: now newt is chiming in and calling me an insurgent#links

the nutmeg grater: da liebs said it WOULD be a disaster to iraq and us if we pull out now????????????#links

the nutmeg grater: da liebs said it WOULD be a disaster to iraq and us if we pull out now????????????#links