my reproductive rights are my own

as they are of my sisters and their sisters. they do NOT belong to king george or any of his asinine appointees. they're all coming in with some sort of SICK religious agenda (i don't necessarily say religion is sick, i am saying THEIR particular beliefs are sick).

keep your laws OFF of MY body

get a load of these ten picks he made
Bush in Your Bedroom
By Heather Wokusch, HeatherWokusch.com.

here are the first three. go to the link for the others (if you can stomach it)

..................1. Patricia Funderburk Ware
In 2001, Bush named abstinence-only proponent Patricia Funderburk Ware to be Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). Ware's qualifications for the job of promoting "effective prevention of HIV disease" included criticizing condom use and lobbying against HIV/AIDS being in the Americans With Disabilities Act. Two years later, Ware recommended that a controversial character named Jerry Thacker join the PACHA panel. Thacker has called AIDS a "gay plague" and homosexuality a "deathstyle." Amid public protest, Thacker soon withdrew his nomination and Ware left her PACHA post.
2. Tom Coburn
Bush nominated then-Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be PACHA co-chair in 2003. Coburn supports mandatory reporting to public authorities of the names of those testing positive for HIV/AIDS. He favors "the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life."
According to Coburn, the gay community "has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power… That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda." Who else would you want advising the Bush administration on AIDS?
3. David Hager
Hager was one of three religious conservatives that Bush put on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2002 and only public outcry prevented him from becoming its chairperson. Critics argued that in his gynecology practice, Hager had refused to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women and had recommended Scripture readings to alleviate headaches and premenstrual syndrome. A memo which Hager wrote helped persuade the FDA to overrule its own advisory panel in 2004, thus preventing the emergency contraceptive "Plan B" from being made more easily available. Critics assailed the FDA's decision as ignoring scientific evidence, but in Hager's assessment: "Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good." A downright criminal side of Hager emerged when his former wife went public with the fact that he had been emotionally, physically and sexually abusive during their 32-year marriage, forcibly sodomizing her on a regular basis. As Hager's ex-wife told The Nation magazine in May 2005, "it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."..................

beware

if a blog (blogspot) you come across has a holiday card posting on it DO NOT OPEN IT or DO NOT CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS.

Blogspot Blogs Help Spread Storm Worm Attacks
Brian Krebs on Computer Security
In an attack that showcases what cyber criminals have in store for Web 2.0 next year, the individual or group behind the Storm worm is distributing new versions of the malware with the help of hijacked and newly-created Google Blogspot blogs.
The Storm worm, one of 2007's most prolific e-mail-borne Trojan horse programs, has always come wrapped in holiday-themed messages or disguised as videos from some recent high-profile news event. The latest Storm versions -- predictably spammed out as Christmas and New Year's greeting cards - don't break with that tradition. It urging recipients to click on a link that then tries to install the Trojan through hook (unpatched Web browser vulnerabilities) or by crook (tricking the user into believing he or she needs to install some "video codec" to view the holiday message)................

i believe in evil too

the evil i believe in stems from humankind, NOT the devil. there is no devil other than those that are flesh and blood and born. WE (no, not all of us) are the evil forces (we are also the GOOD forces as well)

Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan
By NICK PISA
................The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.
Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.
They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of "Godlessness." ...........
............Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on," he said.
"Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a properly trained exorcist. ............

want to know what's really in that bottle of nair?

well wired magazine tells us (and it's not like we didn't know this shite was in there)

.......Fragrances
Nair is loaded with a secret concoction of scents — and it's a good thing. Anyone who used the stuff in the 1970s will tell you it smelled like skunk juice. Today Nair smells sweet as it burns away unsightly stubble.

Potassium thioglycolate
That skunky stench is a signature attribute of this compound, a member of the perennially pungent thiol family. A sulfur-hydrogen atom group gives thiols their sharp scent. They eat into keratin (a skin and hair protein), which is what makes actual skunk spray (and Nair) lock onto human flesh and fuzz. If the process stopped there, the result would be a home perm — weakened hairs can be easily shaped into curls. .............

friday's book

My Life as a Traitor
Zarah Ghahramani & Robert Hillman

...........Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic. Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the street by secret police) and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’.
While imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal interrogation: her head was shaved, and she was beaten. After being released, she was forbidden to return to university, and soon realised that she had no future in her native land. Robert Hillman, an Australian writer, met and befriended Zarah in Iran in 2003, and helped her to escape to Australia, where she now has permanent residency.............

a very interesting (and telling)

article in harpers by scott horton
do i believe king george knew you ax? oh hell YES i do believe king george knew
in the holiday news section
Did Bush Watch the Torture Tapes?
...............Are Bush’s denials that he has seen the torture tapes really credible? I don’t think so. And having seen them, the interest in their destruction would be equally fierce, which helps account for the involvement of the White House’s four most senior lawyers in the process. No doubt about it. The White House desperately wants to scapegoat some CIA people over this. (Laura Rozen’s article “Operation Stop Talking” is the best treatment so far of this phenomenon, which finds its best current expression in the effort to “get” John Kiriakou). But the trail leads to the White House, and that is clearly where the decision was taken. It will be interesting to see the techniques used by the Justice Department to obscure all of this. At this point, no one who’s tracked Justice Department antics over the past six years is anticipating anything but a crude cover-up. ..............

let's have a big ol'

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwww for jesus y'all!

this story has it ALL. manly men. EX-homosexuals. christian comedians. jesus. and of course men who hate women

GodMen: A more manly form of Christianity
Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane
Studies show that 60% of regular churchgoers are women, and one group of men believes the reason is that "Christianity is too soft."
ABC's Nightline visited a meeting at a Tennessee shopping mall of nearly 300 men who call themselves "GodMen" and say they want to "cowboy up as followers of Jesus." At the meeting, the men were encouraged to get in touch with their feelings about Internet pornography, adultery, and homosexuality.
Christian conservative standup comic Brad Kline, who co-founded the GodMen group, told ABC that Sunday church services are excessively strait-laced and disconnected from men's concerns. "We have nothing to lose," he said. "We don't have any congregation we have to answer to. We're just guys trying to be straight and being real."
Paul Coughlin, author of No More Christian Nice Guy, explained to ABC that Christianity suffers because "we only emphasize the tender stuff. We cut out the tough stuff about Jesus, and that's awfully unfortunate ... You cannot love without courage."........

Benazir Bhutto

(this picture was taken moments before her assassination)

i don't know much about her. i know i always liked her (and certainly hoped the corruption charges were false). i know i admired her and thought she was very strong indeed. her family was torn apart. she was jailed in solitary confinement. her husband was jailed. her father was killed. then her brothers were killed. she went into exile.

she then did something either so very foolish or so very brave. she came BACK to her country. to pakistan. is that courage or is that insanity? i vote for courage. she knew her life was in danger. she put her very life on the line for her country, her people AND for democracy. she paid the ultimate price

Obituary: Benazir Bhutto

Obituary
Benazir Bhutto, 54, Weathered Political Storm

some amazing photos by john moore of getty images. the final moments of ms bhutto's life

i stink at geography

it's a fact. a well KNOWN fact. however, i did surprisingly well (for me that is) on this annual geo quiz from the sf gate / chronicle

John Flinn, Chronicle Staff Writer

1. Are there any countries where you can you see lions and tigers and bears in the wild?
2. What is the only U.S. state to allow its residents to cast absentee ballots from outer space?
3. If you could somehow hover at a point in space just above the equator, roughly how fast would the ground below be moving relative to you?
4. It was originally named the Flavian Amphitheater, but nobody calls it that today. What is its more common name?
5. Every nation whose name begins with "A" also ends with "a" - with two exceptions. What are they?
(the other 45 questions at the link above)

an interview you should listen to

craig unger being interviewed for truthout

this was SO bizarre

i had to post it (bizarre AND funny AND just downright odd)

Martha Stewart shows off nativity scene she made of clay while at West Virginia prison in 2005
The Associated Press

..................On the Christmas Day episode of her television show, Stewart showed off ornate clay forms of the baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary, three camels and others she sculpted at a pottery class at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, W.Va.
"Even though every inmate was only allowed to do one a month, and I was only there for five months, I begged because I said I was an expert potter — ceramicist actually — and could I please make the entire nativity scene," she said.
Her creations were all fired and glazed at the prison. She completed the effect with tiny artificial palm trees imported from Germany by a New Jersey distributor................

who are they kidding?

the white house doen't give a flying YOO HOO about turks killing civilians. NOW OR IN 1915 when they committed genocide against the armenians (and the white house is mad some people are insisting turkey own up to that genocide so long ago. we can't let ANYONE forget that happened)

US concerned about escalation of Turkish attacks: White House
The White House Wednesday said it had expressed concern to Ankara over the possible escalation of Turkey's attacks against Kurdish PKK rebels inside northern Iraq.
"We've also made it clear to the Turkish government that anything that could lead to escalated concerns or civilian casualties; we have concerns about those steps," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters aboard Air Force One.
The comment came amid new attacks early Wednesday by Turkish bombers on positions inside Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the third round of such strikes in ten days confirmed by Ankara............

juan cole

has the top ten myths of 2007

to start off with, here's number 10 (go to the link for the other 9)

10. Myth: The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.
In a recent ABC News/ Washington Post poll, Iraq and the economy were virtually tied among voters nationally, with nearly a quarter of voters in each case saying it was their number one issue. The economy had become more important to them than in previous months (in November only 14% said it was their most pressing concern), but Iraq still rivals it as an issue...

cv rick

wrote a post yesterday about our democratic leadership. please stop by and read it. it's EXACTLY how i feel as well

this is not only absurd BUT obscene

we're 'winning' both the war on terror AND the war in iraq (or so 'they' say). why then are billions more requested than was requested in 2007 and 2006?

what are we allowing 'them' to do? is it too late, i wonder?

we've literally killed an entire country and now we're working on killing our own
Wars Cost $15 Billion a Month, GOP Senator Says

By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
The latest estimate of the growing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide battle against terrorism -- nearly $15 billion a month -- came last week from one of the Senate's leading proponents of a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.
"This cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month, with the Army spending $4.2 billion of that every month," Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, said in a little-noticed floor speech Dec. 18. His remarks came in support of adding $70 billion to the omnibus fiscal 2008 spending legislation to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as counterterrorism activities, for the six months from Oct. 1, 2007, through March 31 of next year. ............

merry christmas

i collect ornaments. i love ornaments. here are some of them. lots are blown glass and wonderfully tacky - take for example the christmas mermaid (you can't see her tail from the angle but she's the pink and green one)! i had a blue space man that was my favorite but he's not on the tree this year (my sister decorated and i didn't feel like going to find him). the one with the carrot and moon also has the little bell in the picture. that bell ornament is as old as i am. it's beat up but it's special. my grinch (glass) and my ostrich and my purple moon pictures didn't come out. perhaps next year.

anyway, please have a merry christmas, joyous holiday season and safe and prosperous upcoming new year

an ordinary boy and his ordinary dad?

no. an extraordinary boy and an even more extraordinary dad.

GI saves Iraqi boy in unlikely adoption
After Meeting Disabled Iraqi Boy in Baghdad Orphanage, American GI Adopts, Brings Him to US
CARRIE ANTLFINGER
Capt. Scott Southworth knew he'd face violence, political strife and blistering heat when he was deployed to one of Baghdad's most dangerous areas. But he didn't expect Ala'a Eddeen. Ala'a was 9 years old, strong of will but weak of body — he suffered from cerebral palsy and weighed just 55 pounds. He lived among about 20 kids with physical or mental disabilities at the Mother Teresa orphanage, under the care of nuns who preserved this small oasis in a dangerous place.
On Sept. 6, 2003, halfway through his 13-month deployment, Southworth and his military police unit paid a visit to the orphanage. They played and chatted with the children; Southworth was talking with one little girl when Ala'a dragged his body to the soldier's side.
Black haired and brown eyed, Ala'a spoke to the 31-year-old American in the limited English he had learned from the sisters. He recalled the bombs that struck government buildings across the Tigris River.
"Bomb-Bing! Bomb-Bing!" Ala'a said, raising and lowering his fist.
"I'm here now. You're fine," the captain said.......

how does this work?

let's see. 700 million get taken away from our children and our needy. then king george turns around and gives pakistan 5 billion (to build weapons to threaten india)???????? so our kids and elderly and our needy get thrown down the sewer and pakistan gets big guns courtesy of the united states of america.

why aren't people shouting from their rooftops? why are we allowing this to continue? when will we wake up?

Medicaid Funding for Schools Cut
The Bush administration yesterday eliminated about $700 million a year in Medicaid reimbursements to schools, sidestepping an attempt by Congress to block such a move.
The new rule, issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is expected to save the federal government $3.6 billion over five years, transferring those costs to school districts.
Lawmakers this week passed legislation to place a six-month moratorium on Medicaid implementing the rule change, but President Bush had not signed the bill.
A wide range of medical services, such as speech and physical therapy, are furnished to students in schools. Medicaid, the government's health insurance program for the poor, will continue to pay for those services for low-income children............


Billions in Aid to Pakistan Was Wasted, Officials Assert
By DAVID ROHDE, CARLOTTA GALL, ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped. In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs........