Open Thread

What’s on your mind? There is a relentless downpour here, with some aggressive lightning.

8 Comments

Street Kid on June 24, 2006 at 4:18 pm

available in Orange, online petition included

Petition also linked to in update.

Recommends appreciated.

catnip on June 24, 2006 at 4:25 pm

C’est La Fête de la St-Jean.

Vive les frogs!

PsiFighter37 on June 24, 2006 at 4:37 pm

I’m just relaxing…stayed up all night reformatting the comp and finally getting a working sound card and speakers.

So I’m kinda in a state of geeky bliss. And I’m eating a Subway sandwich.

Nancy LeTourneau on June 24, 2006 at 4:42 pm

I’m wondering what people think about John Edward’s Working Contract. He wants to reduce poverty by a third in 10 years and eliminate it in 30 years. Given the news from the Brookings Institute that middle class neighborhoods are disappearing, I think we all ought to be listening.

jimstaro on June 24, 2006 at 4:52 pm

An Incomplete Picture

The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who’d taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed. Instead, a parade of generals and Defense Department officials told Congress and the public that fewer than 100 people were hospitalized or became seriously ill after receiving the shot from 1998 through 2000.

Don’t Raid Veterans Healthcare to Fund the VA’s ID Theft Response

US. Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) today suceeded in passing emergency funding through the Senate Appropriations Committee to ensure that veterans healthcare and benefits are not raided as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) responds to last month’s data security breach.

More Than One-Third of Iraq Troops Suffering Migraines

An unexpectedly high number of troops serving in Iraq are suffering from migraine headaches, researchers report. The debilitating headaches are affecting more than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or about twice that in the general U.S. population, according to a study being presented at the annual American headache Society (AHS) meeting now underway in Los Angeles. Conditions the U.S. soldiers face may trigger the pwoerful headaches, study authors say.

God of the God of Gods on June 24, 2006 at 5:29 pm

It is brazenly naive and highly nationalistic to think that the US actually has any thing at all to due with its own future in Iraq.

Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (sic!) are kicking our infidel asses outta there.

These two Iranian-based Shia factions have been fighting to change Iraq into a fundamentalist Islamic republic for over twenty years without the help of the USA.

It is not as if they are just going to welcome the much much hated USA and set aside the past twenty years so they can start `sucking down chili dogs outside the TastiFreeze’.

Maliki’s Master Plan

A national reconciliation plan for Iraq calls for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops and, controversially, amnesty for insurgents who attacked American and Iraqi soldiers.

By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
Updated: 9:42 a.m. PT June 24, 2006
June 24, 2006 – A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of all security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Compensation for victims of coalition military operations.

Those sound like the demands of some of the insurgents themselves, and in fact they are. But they’re also key clauses of a national reconciliation plan drafted by new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who will unveil it Sunday. The provisions will spark sharp debate in Iraq–but the fiercest opposition is likely to come from Washington, which has opposed any talk of timetables, or of amnesty for insurgents who have attacked American soldiers.