I realize that I often sound naive and idealistic, but I’m not as disturbed by McCain’s association with a former lobbyist for Myanmar as I am that in the United States there exist lobbyists for Myanmar. How do these people sleep at night working with a regime that does (don’t click if you are sensitive) this?
But some allies worry that Goodyear’s selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists. Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.
Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to “begin a dialogue of political reconciliation” with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing “falsehoods” by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. “It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago,” Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta’s record in the current cyclone crisis is “reprehensible.”
It turns out this man is not a terrorist. He’s just mad about suspicious people taking his photograph.
They were software consultants in town for a weeklong business conference — not terrorists planning an attack to cripple the country’s largest ferry system.
Last summer, the FBI launched an international search for two men after crew members and riders on a Washington State Ferry reported their unusual behavior — namely that they were taking pictures below deck, in areas that don’t hold much interest for most tourists.
One of the men recognized himself in the photo sometime in the fall but didn’t know what to do, said David Gomez, the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of national-security programs in Seattle. He contacted his friend and they consulted family members involved in law enforcement in their home country. Then they went to the U.S. Embassy, Gomez said.
For someone who rides the ferry every day, taking photos of the car deck is pretty unusual — but not so for “a guy who rides it one time in his life,” Gomez said. “Their story makes sense; their story has validity … . It was perfectly normal once we learned what was going on.”
Yesterday in America it was Mother’s Day and so I called my mother to have a conversation about life. You may recall my post about race in America in which my mother expresses disbelief that America is ready to elect a black man as president. We picked up where we left off a few months ago. A little background may be necessary. My parents are both conservative. My father is a white American from the South while my mother is from Thailand though she has been an American citizen for several decades. My mother voted for Bush in 2000, but not in 2004.
I asked my mother whether or not she would vote for Obama in the fall. I paraphrase her response of course. “You know Daranee, I worked with a lot of black people and they always would help each other get jobs and give favors to each other while not caring about anyone else. The favoritism was so clear. I just worry that Barack Obama would do the same thing – only give his friends jobs and only care about things that concern blacks. I would probably vote for Hillary because McCain is so terrible about the economy, but I worry about voting for a black.” My mother was a civil servant and indeed she did work with a lot of black people, and yet I didn’t know what to say. Here is a woman who is a minority. Here is a woman who I have witnessed racism directed at and yet she struggles to judge a person by something other than their skin. Maybe, I worried, America isn’t ready to vote for a black man.
I was racking my brain to come up with some sort of analogy that might make her consider a different side. I asked her how she would feel if I had difficulty getting a job because people made assumptions about me based on my race. She agreed that in that case it would be unfair. I asked her if there was anything about the campaign that Barack Obama was running that led her to believe that he would only focus on black issues. She said she didn’t think so. But again she repeated her worries based on her own experience at work.
I’ve sort of glided over a rather monumental portion of her statement which was that she would vote for Hillary. This was huge. My mother hated the Clintons especially Hillary Clinton. She didn’t like how Hillary wasn’t modest and how Hillary said “When you vote for Bill, you get me too.” And yet here was my mom saying she would vote for Hillary. At least for my mother, sexism is easier conquered than racism. And I think this says a lot about how much the Republicans have failed and how they should be very worried in the fall.
It’s curious that minorities sometimes have the most difficulty judging people by something else than the color of their skin. I’ve worked with a Filipino woman who declared to me she wouldn’t hire any Filipinos. My mother feels comfort grouping people together by race or other similar categories. I was horrified when we went into a Bass Fishing contest in Wisconsin when my mother loudly exclaimed “Boy there are a lot of hillbillies in here.” Luckily the auditorium was very loud and no one heard.
It’s very curious because my mom has certainly been unfairly judged by her race. I should tell you that she has a very strong Thai accent. My mom is a big animal lover, and one time decided to adopt a dog that needed a home. She called the number on a classified ad for a dog. My mom asked if the dog was still available and the woman who answered the phone said that the dog was taken and hung up. My mom thought that it was strange the way the woman talked to her, so she had my dad call to find out for sure. When he did he found out that the dog was still available. My mother thinks the woman was worried that my mom wanted to eat the dog.
I asked my mother if she would consider taking a chance on Obama. “Vote for him and see how it goes,” I said, “then decide in four years whether or not your worries were founded.”
She said: “Maybe. That’s what I did with Bush, you know?”
In many ways this conversation was important in that people should feel comfortable expressing their fears. How can we get over race if we are too afraid to talk about it. In getting our prejudices out in the open we can actually do something about them, and analyze them in the same way that we would analyze anything else. I’m worried we have not come so far as we should have as a nation, but it’s not hopeless. It is possible. And I think, maybe with a little coaxing America is ready for a black president.
Even if you have no interest in baseball or the Seattle Mariners, you should watch this video.
One of the most annoying things about brawls in baseball is all the macho posturing. You’ll see none of that from Richie here. His interest is not in intimidating his adversary. It’s in bringing him down. It’s shear animal impulse and it’s great to watch.
Sexon is upset that the pitcher purposely tries to hit him in retaliation for another player — but goes for his head. Well I’m totally with Richie. There are limits. You can’t aim for someone’s head. You could kill them.
The cool kids are not content anymore with the flat screen monitor as it has been usurped by the dual flat screen monitor. What’s next and how outrageous can it get?
My grandmother was a Southern (Louisiana) headstrong woman — very self-sufficient and very stubborn. One time when she visited my family in California we decided to take her dinner to a Mexican restaurant. She refused. She told us she had heard on Paul Harvey that Mexicans ate bugs and she would not go to a restaurant that served bugs. No amount of imploring and no amount of assurance would get her to that restaurant. We told her we had been to the restaurant several times and they did not serve bugs. She thought they may try to sneak those bugs in to the salsa.
Kirby is one of those fascinating people who both know that Obama spent 20 years at a certain Chicago church and firmly believe that Obama is a secret Muslim.
“All the evidence points to that he is,” Kirby told me. “I don’t trust him.”
The evidence Kirby has received comes in the form of emails from “watch dog groups” that he listens to, as well as chatter among his friends. He’s heard it all—Obama not saying the pledge of allegiance, Obama’s pastor engaging in hate speech, Obama being a Muslim—and he believes it all.
Granted, he also thinks Hillary Clinton is “crooked as a snake” and he wishes Mike Huckabee had won the Republican contest, but Kirby is nevertheless quite worried about a potential Obama presidency: “Having a Muslim for a president—if he’s true to his faith he’s going to be pushing the Muslim faith.”
I asked Kirby why he thinks Obama went to church for 20 years if he’s in fact Muslim.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “A lot of people have political reasons behind everything they do.”
And why would Obama lie about his alleged Muslim faith?
“If people of your faith had attacked New York City, and that is still fresh in Americans’ minds, wouldn’t you lie about it?”
What would it take to convince him that Obama is a Christian?
“If I heard him say Jesus Christ is Lord it would cause me to listen to him.”
I told Kirby that Obama has, in fact, said he believes in Jesus. Repeatedly.
“Oh, really,” he replied. “I didn’t know that. I hadn’t heard that.”
Kirby gets most of his news from email and the Internet, he told me, and then he instructed me that even if Obama does believe in Jesus, “believing in Jesus and believing that He is Lord are two different things.”
Kirby is from Albertville, Alabama, and he said he used to be filled with prejudice but that Jesus has filled his heart with love. “I don’t even know you, man, but I love you,” he told me.
If he only knew.
After I finish asking him questions about the presidential race he starts asking me about my religion. He finds out I’m Jewish. He wants to know if I believe in God. The snack cart interrupts.
I figure it’s dangerous to go down this road, so I decline to mention that airplanes are actually one of the few places where God and I have words.
He asks if I believe in the Book of Revelations. I tell him no, and, gosh, I’m really tired, should probably take a nap.
After the plane lands he tells me he’s going to pray for me as he’s getting into bed tonight. He also tells me that he hopes this image—him talking to God about me in bed—is with me while I’m in bed tonight.
WHAT: Press Conference on the impact of legislation to
require government-issued photo ID to vote
WHEN: 1:00 PM, Thursday, May 8, 2008
WHERE: League of Women Voters, 8706 Manchester, Jefferson City, MO 63144
JEFFERSON CITY, MO – On Thursday, May 8, three Missouri voters who
lack government-issued photo IDs as well as Secretary of State Robin
Carnahan and community leaders will discuss the potential impacts of
legislation currently being pushed through the Missouri General
Assembly. The proposed legislation would make Missouri one of the
toughest states in the country for eligible citizens who want to vote
by requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the
polls. If passed, these changes could be in place by the November
general election and could put the voting rights at risk for up to
240,000 registered Missouri voters.
“This may sound like a good idea at first,” stated Sister Sandy
Schwartz of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary regarding voter ID
requirements, “but once you stop to think about who would really be
affected, this is going to keep a lot of our loved ones from being
able to vote.” Yesterday in Indiana twelve nuns in their 80s and 90s
were turned away from the polls because they lacked the needed IDs to
vote. Sister Schwartz and others are concerned about the difficulties
the policy change would create for elderly Missouri nuns, as well as
other senior citizens, the poor, and minorities.
I’ll give him credit where it’s due. Nice work. I’m crossing my fingers that he won’t be announcing a snowmobile theme park in the wilderness area tomorrow. Click here for more pictures.
Nearly six years after it was first introduced, a bill to create a Wild Sky Wilderness northeast of Seattle has become law.
President Bush signed a bill Thursday making Wild Sky the first new wilderness area in Washington state in nearly a quarter-century.
The House gave final approval to the bill last month. It designates 167 square miles in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest north of Sultan, Wash., as federal wilderness, the government’s highest level of protection.
Wild Sky, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen, both D-Wash., is the first new federally designated wilderness in Washington since 1984.
“Reaching the end of the trail never felt so good,” said Larsen. “Today marks the summit of a long journey made possible by many committed people and years of community input. Together, we not only created a new wilderness bill, but a new model for creating wilderness in the future.”
I have to admit I’ve never heard that one before. I’m from California and I live in Washington, so really I’ve been a neighbor of Oregon most of my life. The fact that I now learn they are just a bunch of elitists is a real shocker.
Seattle political consultant Cathy Allen, a Clinton supporter, said the contest will go on, but acknowledged that opportunities for her candidate to win it are few and far between.
“There is an elitism about Oregon that makes me nervous about Hillary’s prospects,” Allen said Tuesday night.
The Supreme Court of the United States of America protecting our constitution by keeping Catholic nuns from voting in Indiana.
Voting in Indiana was carried out under a state law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, that requires voters to produce a valid photo ID. About a dozen nuns in their 80s and 90s at St. Mary’s Convent in South Bend were denied ballots — by a fellow sister — because they lacked the necessary identification.
Once again, exactly what voter fraud was Indiana so worried about that they took their position to the Supreme Court?
God bless America. Unless you’re a Catholic nun in Indiana.
Further proof that something dramatic is needed to shift this country around. I’m not an economist, but it may not be a good time to invest in the U.S. right now.
A clip from one of my favorite movies of all time. How can you not be endeared to this odd women who expresses her affection for a man that she’s too afraid to talk to by secretly cleaning his house? The music should be familiar.
This weekend within an hour I saw two pop culture references to Bill Clinton’s philandering. Please excuse my paraphrasing.
A commercial for Direct TV in which a man says something about how you can watch two programs at once (or record two programs, I don’t remember). Then a Bill Clinton impersonator walks into the frame and says “two at once,” smiles, chuckles and expresses pleasure at “having two at once.”
Cedric the Entertainer was on Comedy Central talking about Bill Clinton and saying he could have sworn Bill said something about there being a whole lot of hot b—— in the room.
A good post on the Washington Post fact checker that demonstrates what happened in Illinois after a six month gas tax break.
When gas prices hit a shocking $2 a gallon in Illinois in the summer of 2000, politicians demanded action. As a Democratic state senator, Obama joined other lawmakers in pushing through a six-month suspension in the state’s 5 percent sales tax on gasoline. While there was some talk about making the moratorium permanent, the tax was reinstated in January 2001, after Illinois Gov. George Ryan told lawmakers that the state could not afford to continue the tax break.
The gas tax moratorium proved politically popular in Illinois, but economically questionable. The Illinois Economic and Fiscal Commission estimated that the state lost $175 million in revenues during the six-month period. A subsequent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that gas prices fell by 3 percent, meaning that only three fifths of the savings from reduced taxes was passed on to consumers.
“It turned out to have a pretty small effect,” said Joseph Doyle, an assistant economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Consumers were slightly better off, but the benefits were spread very thinly, and the government was a lot worse off.”
A poll by the Chicago Tribune showed that only 28 percent of motorists believed that they were actually paying less for gas as a result of the temporary suspension of the tax. Obama has changed his mind dramatically on the tax cut since voting for it back in 2000 in Illinois. On the campaign trail Monday in North Carolina, he described the proposal as a “short-term quick fix that we can say we did something even though we’re not really doing anything.”
JERUSALEM - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday she will ask Israel to remove more physical barriers erected in the West Bank as a bulwark against Palestinian militants.
The Bush administration also would like to see speedier progress toward a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, a goal of President George W. Bush in his final year in office, Rice said en route to Israel and the West Bank for weekend meetings.
“I understand that everyone — President Abbas, I, the president, would like to see things move more quickly,” Rice said. “That’s why we keep coming and pressing all the parties to meet their obligations.”
And apparently punishable by nine months in prison.
MCARTHUR, Ohio — A judge in southern Ohio must decide whether to send a man to prison for sharing a Little Debbie snack cake. The case involves 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who last year was held in a residential community corrections program in Nelsonville for breaking into a bar.
While there, prosecutors said he bought the oatmeal creme pie from a vending machine and shared it with a fellow inmate who was on restriction and wasn’t allowed access to snacks.
Prosecutors in Vinton County have asked Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Simmons to revoke Caudill’s probation and put him in prison for nine months.
This takes me back to the second grade when I was almost given the paddle for not eating my lima beans before I ate my ravioli. Life is so unfair…
On Tuesday, voters in Indiana and North Carolina will go to the polls to vote in what could be one of the most significant days of the Democratic presidential race. But in Indiana, the Wall Street Journal suggests, it might not be Democrats who matter most to the final results.
Indiana’s primary is open, which means that Republicans can cross over if they wish and vote in the Democratic primary instead. And they may have reason to — besides the general swing from Republican to Democrat lately, there’s just not as much reason to vote in the Republican primary now, since that party’s presidential race is over and there aren’t many big local down-ticket races. With that in mind, the WSJ reports that the state Democratic Party’s chairman estimates that Republicans could constitute as much as 15 percent of turnout for the Democratic primary; officials with Barack Obama’s campaign put that number at about 5 percent.
There are reasons to think either Democratic candidate could be the beneficiary of Republican votes. For Hillary Clinton, there’s the possibility that Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” intended to prolong the Democratic race by giving Clinton Republican votes, could help her. The Obama camp, meanwhile, has been reaching out to Republicans in the state, and will even be rolling out three prominent state Republicans who are supporters of his campaign.
There’s no question that Rush Limbaugh is an idiot, but I wonder why any Rush Limbaugh Republican would be idiotic enough to take such a risk. How would they feel knowing they had helped elect Hillary Clinton?
I think it’s highly likely that a Democrat will be the next President of the United States given John McCain’s Iraq failings — remember it was he who touted the surge as the way to end the war. While I want Obama to be the nominee, there is some pleasure I derive in imagining a Hillary Clinton presidency that resulted from the support of Rush Limbaugh.
A top Iranian judiciary official warned Monday against the “destructive” cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.
In the latest salvo in a more than decade-old government campaign against Barbie, Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi said in an official letter to Vice President Parviz Davoudi that the doll and other Western toys are a “danger” that need to be stopped.
I’ve got news for Najafabadi; traditional Americans have been complaining about Barbie for years. Barbie has been blamed for eating disorders, unrealistic perceptions of beauty and yes sometimes immodesty. Although I doubt Najafabadi’s opinion is any more common than the American criticism of Barbie. If it was, no one would buy Barbie in Iran and it wouldn’t be a problem.
Given the popularity of my post on FLDS Mormon wear and Islamic wear, I thought I’d post some pictures of the Barbie’s Islamic competitors.
I live in Seattle. I blog. I have a coffee category for my blog. In fact my coffee posts have gotten more hits than anything else. I am definitely a coffee connoisseur.
Even as a fervent Obama supporter, I nonetheless have to say I can’t blame Hillary for not knowing how to use those terrible coffee machines at the gas station. Who buys coffee from a machine at a gas station anyway? Are these the same people that buy the three hour old hotdog and hamburger? While we’re at it don’t gas stations sell brewed coffee in a pot?
I’m getting more annoyed at this whole “elitist” thing anyway. You’re elitist if you like espresso? Give me a break. If I’m an elitist I’d like to have the millions in the bank to back it up. I don’t. Besides you can now buy espresso at McDonald’s. Nothin’ elitist about McDonald’s.
Let’s be honest, most politicians don’t lead the life we lead regardless of whether they are Democrat, Republican, man or woman. My job like most people’s jobs doesn’t pay my expenses on top of my salary. I have to pay for my own lunch, my own transportation, gas, I don’t get to vote on what my next salary increase is going to be and I don’t get to opt out of Social Security. I’ve never ridden in a private jet and I certainly never have flown first class. I wouldn’t call politicians elitist, but they are certainly clueless.
So enough with the shows. If you play basketball regularly, by all means play basketball. If you don’t bowl regularly, don’t bowl. If you don’t regularly shoot animals, do shots, or pump gas, then spare us. As for Hillary, try McDonald’s for your espresso. I hear they’re pretty good.
Fox News anchors think Abraham Lincoln ran for President against a black man. Those were such progressive days after all. In this clip, the TV hosts discuss the stupidity of their intern while never noticing that the photo that is meant to be Lincoln’s opponent Stephen Douglas is actually abolitionist Frederick Douglas.
A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.
Three islanders from Lesbos - home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women - have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.
One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.
“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.
