For a Day Without Immigrants:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
Not working like they thought it would: NYT
Guess even the sheep are realizing that the crappy couple hundred dollars they got in a tax refund a few years back wasn’t much of a bargain…
MSNBC
WTF is he talking about?
The only good thing about these high gas prices is that I think we’re going to see Bush’s approval rating dip below 30% finally. So there’s a reason to smile at the gas pump, even if you feel like crying…
has a substance problem? ThinkProgress
Tee-hee.
.
WASHINGTON May 1, 2006 (AP) — The senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed Monday that Iraq be divided into three separate regions Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni with a central government in Baghdad.
In an op-ed essay in Monday’s edition of The New York Times, Sen. Joseph Biden. D-Del., wrote that the idea “is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group … room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”
Read my diary …
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I don’t know if that would work, but at least SOMEONE is thinking about the reality of things in Iraq.
‘Militants’ kill Kashmir Hindus
that all the coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner is focusing on Bush and his “twin” today?
Press corpse, all right.
Colbert no longer exists.
I guess his show will be getting cancelled shortly…How dare he point out that the chimperor has no clothes?
noticed that too.
.
C&L — Colbert Does the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
‘Clock stopped’ at Darfur talks
President Bush has pointed to hydrogen technology as the ultimate solution to the nation’s fuel supply problems, but one big question waits to be answered: Where will all the hydrogen come from? It takes energy to get hydrogen in pure, usable form. That’s why it’s really not considered a fuel at all, but rather an energy carrier — a method of storing power generated any number of ways. And whether it’s a clean or dirty fuel depends on the process leading to the generation of the hydrogen.
50,000 people in 20 villages alongside the Ganges River are in the firing line of a range of diseases as 310 tanneries flush untreated chromium waste into the river and agricultural fields. The details are shocking: Every third person here suffers from skin disease. One in every 25-30 villager has leprosy. The chromium content in soil and water of these villages on the bank of the Ganga is so high that vegetable and fruits are poisonous. Even milk from the cattle is not fit for consumption — human or otherwise.
A top official at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has long raised concerns about nuclear safety practices has been reassigned, a move he sees as an effort to silence his criticisms.
More than 26,000 species of animals, birds, plants and fish will this week be added to the list of those in serious danger of extinction. Among them is the common hippopotamus, increasingly targeted by poachers for the ivory in its teeth. The species are to be added or moved up the so-called “red list” drawn up by The World Conservation Union (IUCN).
All across Asia, governments are searching for crops that can help them offset a dependence on imported oil that can only skyrocket as their economies soar. Palm oil and sugar cane are the dominant crops in the region, but everything from coconuts to castor oil to cow dung is being tested for fossil-fuel alternatives such as ethanol and biodiesel. And search for ways to address the competing demand for cropland for growing food.
Volcanic rocks have tumbled down from the peak of Indonesia’s rumbling Mount Merapi volcano but its “standby” status remains unchanged for now, a vulcanologist said Saturday. The avalanche of rocks created a thin layer of dust that fell on two hamlets located on the western slope of the 2,914-meter (9,560-foot) volcano Friday, said Dewi Sri from the vulcanology office in Yogyakarta.
Baiyangdian Lake, known as “the pearl of the north,” was central to the ecological system of the North China Plain, one of China’s main breadbaskets, and once boasted a vast array of wildlife and wetland vegetation. Now, northern China’s largest freshwater lake is dying from pollution.
You may like his politics, but his scientific work has taken a hit: Although linguists following the lead of Noam Chomsky have argued that certain patterns of language organization are the exclusive province of humans – researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego have discovered the same capacity to recognize such patterns and distinguish between them in starlings.
Russian scientists are continuing to register higher than normal levels of water pollution – 30 times above safe levels – in the Amur river after last year’s blast at a benzene factory upstream in northeast China, Russian television reported Sunday.
One of those depressing Eco/Science news days, I see…
Venezuela does it better than DC “professionals”.
Link
link to WaPost article… behind free subcription.
This whole “rolling wounded soldiers for change” thing disgusts me to the core.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who lost a leg in a roadside bombing, received a letter in 2004 saying he was in debt to the government and was in jeopardy of being referred to a collection agency. (By Haraz Ghanbari — Associated Press)
Nearly 900 soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have been saddled with government debts as they have recovered from war, according to a report that describes collection notices going out to veterans with brain damage, paralysis, lost limbs and shrapnel wounds.
The report from the Government Accountability Office, to be released at a hearing today, details how long-recognized problems with military computer systems led to the soldiers being dunned for an array of debts related to everything from errors in paychecks to equipment left behind on the battlefield.
[snip]
The underlying problem is an antiquated computer system for paying and tracking members of the military. Pay records are not integrated with personnel records, creating numerous errors. When soldiers leave the battlefield, for example, they lose a pay differential, but the system can take time to lower their pay.
The government then tries to recoup overpayments, docking pay for active-duty troops and sending debt notices to those who have left the military. Eventually, the government sends private agencies to collect debts and notifies credit bureaus.
The computer system is so broken that 400 soldiers killed in action were listed as owing money to the government, although no debt notices were sent, the report said.
A total of $1.5 million in debts has been linked to the 400 fallen soldiers and 900 wounded troops. Of the total, $124,000 has been repaid. The government has waived $959,000, and the remainder of $420,000 is still owed.
Was the US military always this broken? With the billions of dollars Rummy has to spend every year, they can’t get their computer system fixed? What if that computer system controlled a weapons system… would it be ignored so long? I can’t tell you how disgusted this makes me. One military family was so strapped for money when the Army collections agency came knocking that they had to send their child out of state while they struggled to pay their bills. There is just no excuse for this.
I forgot to mention that this problem is quite widespread. There are thousands of military families struggling with huge debts. The military should immediately forgive all debt caused by their faulty computer system and fix the stupid thing. How many brain cells does that decision require?
Apparently way more than they have.
It is absolutely disgusting that they expect people to give up their lives and limbs for a lie, and they can’t even be bothered to take care of them afterward.
This seems to have the potential to follow the pattern of other government/military functions. Underfund, under staff, keep changing directives and processes without training the staff as to what they are to follow, expose the “incompetence,” then privatize, giving the work in a no-bid contract. Then the whole department goes behind a corporate wall with even less monitoring and accessibility to accounting practices.
Maybe this privatization will straighten out the errors. However, it is also possible the errors will continue. Those affected would have to deal with a corporate bureaucracy, without recourse through government/military oversight.
And some folks will get richer.
Sickening…just sickening.
This problem surfaced with soldiers in Afghanistan-wrong billing, dunning soldiers for money and same thing was said then. That the military computer system is ancient and not integrated. Obviously nothing was done about it-surprise, surprise right. The Pentagon gets a half a trillion dollar budget but can’t be bothered to fucken modernize the computer systems.
Someone else mentioned the military should just void money owed and have computer system modernized..ha..that is simply to much of a sensible and reality based idea. Besides the poor soldiers who are being dunned it seems are just that-low man on the totem pole and are probably poor to start with so heaven forbid they get a break-that only goes to the already rich. I’ll bet anything we won’t here of Lt. generals and other high ranking soldiers having their pay screwed up.
It continues to baffle me how war after war every administration pays lip service to the military yet screws them over and over and over. Why do veterans have to fight and fight again back home for quality health care and so on?
link
WASHINGTON – The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.
It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge’s approval or a grand jury subpoena.
[snip]
Ann Beeson, the associate legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the report to Congress “confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval.”
JURIST has another article w/links to the report. Over 9000 NSLs issued in 05.
.
BELGRADE (AFP) May 1 — The European Union’s ultimatum to Serbia to arrest key crimes suspect Ratko Mladic expired with the former Bosnian Serb wartime military commander still at large.
The EU had said it will suspend talks on potential membership for Serbia-Montenegro — due to resume on May 11 — if Mladic was not handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) by April 30.
A man passes by a poster in support of top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic in the centre of Belgrade. (AFP/File/Dimitar Dilkoff)The EU’s enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, confirmed the threat on Friday, though he said the handover must take place within “the next few days”, rather than insisting on Sunday’s deadline.
Rehn said he would discuss the situation with the ICTY’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.
● Mladic Arrest and Extradition to The Hague Imminent ◊ by Oui
Mon Dec 26th, 2005 at 03:09:49 AM PST
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to Prosperity’s Ax
I just talked to DH who works in downtown Denver. He said “they are having an immigration protest outside out window. They just keep going by and going by.” He saw lots of American flags, and also Mexican, various Central American, and Canadian. There were some American Indians in the march, too. 🙂 Few police, no disturbances that he has seen.