When I last posted, it was near Memorial Day and now Labor day is upon us.  So much has happened.  I have thought about posting many, many times.  Instead, I have been reading a lot of other posts on various blogs all over the web.  I have also been watching the news and tweeting about some of the changes that have been going on in the world. Below are a few of my observations from a very long and somewhat heartbreaking summer.

First of all, I wanted to say how sad I was to say goodbye to Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, distinguished Senator, family patriarch and a man with a passion for not only the downtrodden, but those who have felt the searing wound of grief and sorrow.  He was a man easy to characterize as some liberal ideologue, but he was so much more than that.  He was a soldier who carried on for his family, he fought the good fight and he was loving and very tender hearted.  Who could not admire that kind of man.  Was he perfect. No.  None of us are.  It was that he so openly dealt with his shortcomings that endeared him to me and numerous others.  He will be missed.

Iran. The Twitter Revolution.  It was rather interesting to see how Twitter put pressure on CNN to cover the events in Iran over the first weekend of the protests.  The power of the people on Twitter.  You are an absolutely amazing group of very passionate people with strong convictions.  I so enjoy reading your tweets because they are more immediate than blogs.  The exchange is rapid, witty and really fun.  More importantly, the events in Iran showed the power of that medium for both good and bad.  Something to think about there.

Race.  I remember when I was watching the inauguration and there were some talking heads on Faux news insisting that now that we had a black President that race was a thing of the past.  I distinctly remember almost falling out of my chair the first time that I heard that.  No, the events of the summer have more than amply demonstrated that race is still an issue in this country.  I think until and unless the “nude” crayon is no longer pale flesh, we have a ways to go.  Yes, I know you might think that is a rather silly way to think about race, after all it is just a crayon.  You’re wrong.  It is so much more than that.  It’s a symbol that allows some to have the belief of both superiority and majority.   It facilitates that Plessy v. Ferguson type of thinking.  It puts an imprimatur of correctness in throwing a resume away without granting an African American a job interview in the must subtle and unprovable form of discrimination, but discrimination that I have seen first hand. So I vote no on “pale” flesh colored crayons and opt for coffee flesh color instead.

Judge Sotomayor.  The debate over this lady was patently absurd and the most bigoted, misogynistic display that I have seen in recent history (well, other than all of the garbage that Hillary had to endure when she ran for President).  When are people going to wake up and realize that women are not only highly competent, but actually better at their jobs than a substantial amount of men would be in the same position?  Even worse, when are women going to start supporting women?

Guns.  If you have read this blog, you know I an not a fan of  guns.  You also know that a lot of gun bloggers and other people harassed me while I was steadily blogging.  Why?  Like the Teabaggers and the Town Hall gangs, rather than have a real dialogue, they prefer to drown out the opposition.  You know, I DON’T LIKE GUNS.  Yes.  There you have it.  I don’t need to apologize to anyone for how I believe and I am not going to ever deal with people attempting to silence my opinion while I give a voice to theirs. You may not like that I make that decision, but it is mine to make.

Now,  can you actually believe that we allegedly live in a “civilized” country where people are walking around with automatic weapons strapped to their leg in open view?  People from far more civilized societies think we, as a country, are nuts.  No, we are just held hostage to the NRA.

Blogs.  I remain steadfast in my belief that the danger of blogs is that you develop a following of people who just adore everything you write.  How is that different from Rush’s dittoheads? Just sayin’.  More importantly, does it make you think and see things in a new way? No.  So, why blog?  To feel validated?  To meet other like minded people?  To feel like you are part of a community? Just to rant?  My conclusion after all of these months is that we blog because we feel that we have something to say and that is really a good enough reason to do it.  I just wish that there was more of a middle ground between adoring fans and crude, rude trolls.

Manners.  The other thing that drove me away into my hiatus was the apalling manners that I have seen on blogs.  Some people like to get into verbal skirmishes on blogs.  I really don’t.  I do enough of that at work.  So, to the people who want to leave abusive comments, you are warned that I will not engage you and I won’t even post you.  That has nothing to do with your First Amendment rights so go to law school so that you can try to figure that out for yourself.  I will not try to educate you anymore on that topic.  I find that sort of comment boring and, at least with me, I have so little free time, boring is about as bad as it gets.  If you don’t like what I post, post on your own blog about what you believe, just don’t leave any vitriol here because no one else will ever see it and I have a filter so either will I.

Well, I had many more observations from my long hiatus, but I won’t go into them all now.  I have loved what I have read over the summer.  Really, I have.

I hope you all had a most excellent summer.  I’ll be seeing you around.

Posted in news Tagged: Edward M. Kennedy, guns, Iran, race, Sonia Sotomayor ]]> http://cmacivor.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/its-the-end-of-summer-and-so-much-has-happened/feed/ 10 Cathy 998118_desolate http://cmacivor.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/breaking-news-is-on-twitter-not-the-msm/ http://cmacivor.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/breaking-news-is-on-twitter-not-the-msm/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:24:50 +0000 Catherine http://catherinemacivor.com/?p=6245 ]]>

Iran exploded in violence this weekend, but the breaking news on that was on Twitter, ot CNN or MSNBC (I don’t even acknowledge FOX as a nedia source).  I got into blogging because I wanted to work towards effecting change, but the goodpeople on twitter are shaping things up through social media microblogging.  When the MSM networks decided to take the weekend off, Twitterers from Iran to California started pressuring CNN for coverage through using the hashtag #cnnfail.  As you can see from the New York Times article referenced here, socialmedia is leaving the media behind and exposing the media for the useless corporate-driven nonentities that they have become.

It is now time to jump on social media or get left behind.  I say join and let’s change the world one tweet at a time.

Another death, this time from an apparent member of the Free Republic who walked up to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with a rifle. You can see the CNN story here. I came home from a long day and saw this piece from Daily Kos indicating that the shooter, James Von Brunn, was a member of Free Republic.  Readers of this blog may remember the Free Republic from this blog post and the abusive comments that blog post caused from this group.  They want to be considered “comservatives” or “Libertarians” yet others would say they are just another hate group. Please see this from Kos.

Readers also may remember when the Department of Homeland Security came out with a report that indicated that right wing hate groups were on the rise and that theree was a growing threat of domestic terrorism caused outrage from the GOP.  I had seen the hate.  Journalists had seen the hate.  It was not hard to find. See my post on that here.

Wake up America. The GOP and Faux News has ratcheted up the right wingnuttery with their fearmongering and lies.  WE are in danger.  The President is in danger.

Something needs to be done.

I want to thank all of the people who sent email, posted comments, and tweeted about the blog.  I was really very surprised by the response.  I have received such nice emails from many, many people, including some of the blogs harshest critics. On the other hand, I also received communications from regular readers that surprised me.

The following is an email that I received from someone whose name I will withhold because it was sent via email, but it meant a lot to me so I will share a portion without revealing the author:

Hi Catherine – I just left a comment on your blog and wanted to send you an email to tell you how much I’ve learned from your blog.  Most political blogs lose me in their rambling writing style and I am never comfortable commenting as I don’t feel like I “fit in”.  Wasn’t the case with you.  I wanted you to know that.

***

Anyway what I’m getting at here is that I felt some parallels by what you were saying in your last post, I know how you feel.

You did good with “Change”.  A lot of good.  Maybe one day you’ll pick it up again.  I just wanted to know you made a difference to me.

So what I learned from this whole blogging experience and then not blogging is that it doesn’t really matter if you are the best blogger that you can be or if your blog falls far short of your own high expectations, because, as I always say, when it comes down to it, the people in your life matter and maybe they are all that matter.

So, because you all matter a lot to me, I’ll be back.  I am not sure when though, but it will probably be some time later this summer.  Blog on I will.  :-)  Did Yoda say that? If not he should have.

Thank you all for everything. I’ll be back soon. In the interim, if you want to catch up, I’m on Twitter: @atimeforchange.

Kind regards,

Cathy

I have been doing some thinking about this blog and have decided a few things.  First, I am so appreciative of everyone who has taken time out of their day to come by and read what is written here.  I have met some really great people through blogging and never ceased to be amazed at how kind you all can be.  

Second, I have always thought that if you cannot do something well, then why do it.  I am really proud of many of the posts at this blog.  My day job though does not permit me much time to write the sort of  posts that I would like to make on a regular basis and when I do have the time, I am usually so bleary, the last thing I want to do is to think.

Third, I really think that someone who has a blog should invest in the blogging community and in blogging and I do not have that kind of time to do it the right way.  I like so many blogs that I have in my sidebar and there are always others that can be investigated.  I should read my favorites every day and give comments where applicable because I enjoy reading them, but by the time I get to read things I am usually just about out of steam.  On the flip side, I am often too tired to reply to comments on my own blog and they are always very good comments.

Along that line, by the time you work a 14-18 hour day writing arguments and making arguments, I usually don’t look forward to coming home and argiung with people on my blog, especially abusive people.  I think that the virtual world has allowed some people to remove that mask of civility and to let them pour out all of their venom in virtual form.  I suppose I have had my fill of that here.  I don’t find that very interesting at all.  That is why I banned gun bloggers. So much could have been said on some of those issues that were discussed here.  I believe that no issue is black and white.  I believe that compromise is essential to any endeavor, but the politics of macho doesn’t operate that way.  So be it.

On the other hand, I see that on blogs the danger of developing a following is that you have a group of supportive people, but they are also people who agree with everything that you say, which is not good either.

So, with very little between the two extremes, where does that leave a real discourse?  I am not sure. 

As you can tell, I think I have come to the end of my road here as a blogger.  I won’t say that I will never be back, but at this point, I think I have said what I can and given about all that I have to give.

It has been a terrific experience and I want to thank everyone who has been supportive of this blog and, again, thanks to all of you who have come to my blog for the past 6 months.  What an interesting and terrific experience it has been (for the most part).  Good luck to all of you and keep up the good work.

Kind regards,

Cathy

KATU of Portland, Oregon reports that 31 year old Amanda Jo Stott-Smith was arrested for the “aggravated” murder of her 4 yer old son and attempted “aggravated” murder of her 7 year old daughter. It appears that police suspect that the children were actually pushed off the bridge.  (See the video at the link).

The two children were found in the water just after 2 a.m.  Nearly an hour before then, police responded to a call where someone had reported hearing what sounded like screaming.  When officers arrived, they heard the screaming as well.  A resident in the area who joined the search in his boat found the children in the darkness. 

“What we came up on were two children in the water,” said Dave Haag.  “One was face down, the other on her back – flailing, gasping for air.  We pulled them out.”

Rescuers tried to resuscitate the boy at shore but he was unable to be revived.

“All I thought was the mother part – why isn’t someone crying over this baby?” said Pam Gorder, who lives in the moorage where it all took place.

An autopsy was performed on the child and the medical examiner determined he died of drowning.

Police said the children went into the Willamette River from the Sellwood Bridge but did not say how.

“We know the bridge is the source where those children came from,” said Det. Sgt. Rich Austria with the Portland Police Bureau.  “As far as details to the manner of which those children came off the bridge, we’re not going to provide that information at this time.”

Police were able to identify the children through a missing person’s report filed by their father in Tualatin Friday night.  Police said Stott-Smith had joint custody of the children with their father.  Court records show she filed for divorce in March.  Detectives said she has other children who are in protective custody and that she has a prior police record.

I am quite certain that there is a lot to this story that has not been revealed and that these children fell through the social services cracks.  ”According to police, 31-year-old Amanda Jo Stott-Smith was taken into custody at a downtown Portland parking garage.  Police said when they approached her, she tried to jump off the top floor of the parking garage but they were able to talk her down.”  This is a woman with severe emotional issues.  

I have to wonder if mental health care were universally available, would people be able to get the help that they need so that these sort of tragedies would be dramatically reduced?

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When Barack Obama was elected, there was a lot of chatter as to whether the struggle for racial equality had ended.  I found this astonishing.  It was almost as if a segment of America wanted to sweep America’s ugly racist past under the rug and deny its racist present.  The inconvenient truth is that racism is still with us and not just in the deep South.  This past February, I posted about the racial backlash after the election, “‘White Heat’: The Racial Backlash After Obama,” including an attack on Kaylon Johnson simply because he was African American and his truck had Obama stickers on it.  The media ignored incidents such as these because they focused on the newly elected African American, his wife and young children.  

By the time his inauguration rolled around, there was a lot of talk about Martin Luther King and the struggle for desegregation.  The talking heads on CNN, MSNBC and Fox were asking if the struggle for racial equality was over now that  Barack Obama was President and, incredibly, some said that it was over.  ”We are all equal now.”   

Are we?

The New York Times recently had an article about Montgomery County Georgia where segregation is till a way of life to which whites cling.  The Montgomery County High School has two proms – one for whites and one for African American students – and in that part of the world, that is their way of life.  According to the New York Times, ever since schools were desegregated in 1971, Montgomery County has had racially segregated proms.  

Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed. According to Timothy Wiggs, the outgoing student council president and one of 21 black students graduating this year, “We just never get anywhere with it.” Principal Luke Smith says the school has no plans to sponsor a prom, noting that when it did so in 1995, attendance was poor.

Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”

“It’s awkward,” acknowledges Jon Paul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.”

A tradition of racism to which whites in the deep South cling.  These are the people to whom Ronald Reagan was speaking when he was talking about welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and “strapping young bucks” who were allegedly not doing their fair share and that was in the 1980′s.  In 2000, Karl Rove “invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.”  As recently as 2006, the RNC ran an ad against Harold Ford, Jr., where a white woman claimed to have met Ford at a “Playboy Party” and saying with a wink, “Harold, Call me.”  Ford was single and had attended a Playboy party with 3,000 others at the Super Bowl in 2005.  The commercial was an obvious attempt to play the race card and tap into racist white fears of interracial dating.  

So the next time I hear someone saying that since Barack Obama was elected, there is no longer racism, I will think of those people I have discussed above and the white people who I have met on Twitter who have advised that they cannot display any Obama memorabilia on their clothing or cars for fear of bodily harm or property damages.

We’ve come a long way, but unless you’re deaf and dumb, we still have a very long way to go.

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American Military Casualties in Iraq

American Deaths

Since war began (3/19/03): 4300 Total   3448   In Combat

Since “Mission Accomplished” (5/1/03)  4,161 Total  3340 In combat

Total Wounded: 31285 Official     Others estimate Over 100,000

Latest Fatality May 23, 2009

CNN has an article about “area 60″ of Arlington National Cemetery where 500 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. It is a very good story to remember when we think about our economic condition and how things used to be better.

Flowers arrived at Capt. Marissa Alexander’s office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on June 3, 2005.

Her husband, Staff Sgt. Leroy Alexander, was half a world away fighting with the Special Forces in Afghanistan, but he had found a way to send a floral arrangement to his wife, who was five months pregnant with twins.

“He called me and asked me what building I worked in. He said he had to update some records,” Alexander said. The flowers lifted her spirits.

But a few hours later, her emotions would be thrown into a tailspin. Alexander saw two Armyofficers in dress uniforms knock on her front door.

One of the officers started to talk: “We regret to inform you…”

If he said any more, Alexander doesn’t remember. “The next memory I have is in my kitchen, banging on the floor. I just couldn’t believe it,” she said.

A roadside bomb had made her a widow.

Staff Sgt. Alexander now lies  in area 60 along with hundreds of other fallen soldiers.

Iraqi Deaths due to US Invasion

When you see the members of the Bush administration talk about how much better off the Iraqi people are than they were under Saddam Hussein consider the below statitstics from antiwar.com. If you want to know why the man who threw his shoes at Bush was such a hero in Iraq, try to wrap your mind around the following statistic and think again.  The next time Cheney brings himself back out of hiding to say how safe the Bush administration made us, think about the below number of Iraqi dead to date in this war, how collectively angry we were when foreigners came to our country and killed 3,000 people on our soil, how we wanted revenge for the murders and how we were willing to do whatever it takes to get that revenge.

1,331,578

Now think about how there never was any link between al Qaeda and Saddam and that Cheney and Bush tortured to try to establish that link to justify a war that had no basis in fact and which was premised upon multiple lies from the Bush administration.

Do you feel safer because of Cheney and Bush torture policies and their war in Iraq?  

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Yet another gun spree has resulted in two deaths and another five injured.  Among the dead and/or injured was a police officer and a 10 year  child who suffered a graze wound to the head.  This was allegedly prompted by some sort of “altercation” during a graduation party.  ”The suspect went to his car, got a gun and shot two people dead on the front lawn…Police were eventually able to persuade him to leave the house and give himself up,” according to CNN.  

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Buckingham Palace

A Buckingham Palace chauffeur, Brian Sirjusingh, is alleged to have accepted 1,000 pounds (or about $1,500 USD) to allow two reporters posing as welathy Middle-Eastern businessmen access to the Queen’s garage and cars.

Mazher Mahmood, of the London-based News of the World, claimed he was allowed to enter the London residence of Queen Elizabeth II without security checks after paying a man identified as a Buckingham chauffeur £1,000 ($1,591).

Footage of the incident filmed undercover showed the chauffeur giving Mahmood, whose face was blurred, a tour of the royal garage and, at one point, allowing him to sit in one of the vehicles.

***

“Our investigator is sitting where the queen sits in the royal limo,” Jobson said, referring to the video. “And the fact is, we’ve been told that security has been tightened up, that these things wouldn’t happen again, new rules and regulations were brought in — they simply haven’t worked.”

***

Meanwhile, Mahmood’s editor, Robert Jobson, told ITN: “Nobody stopped him, nobody actually challenged him. It actually exposes a serious lapse in security at Buckingham Palace.”

According to CNN, The chauffeur has since been suspended pending an investigation.  

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I previously posted this week that Newt Gingrich was charged with and fined for serious ethics problems while he was speaker of the house in the 90′s.  Consider this from the Washington Post dated January 22, 1997:

The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House’s 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing.

The ethics case and its resolution leave Gingrich with little leeway for future personal controversies, House Republicans said. Exactly one month before yesterday’s vote, Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.

There is an interesting history there though. Nancy Pelosi actually led the charge on the investigation that led to Gingrich’s unprecedented censure.  According to the New York Times, Gingrich recently sid of Pelosi “When you become speaker of the House, you no longer have the luxury of being dishonest, demagogic and destructive.”  During that investigation, Pelosi said the same of Gingrich:

Ms. Pelosi essentially accused Mr. Gingrich of all three more than 12 years ago as she urged her colleagues to endorse an ethics committee rebuke of Mr. Gingrich for using tax-exempt money to promote political goals and for providing false information to the special ethics panel Ms. Pelosi was on. She said Mr. Gingrich spoke often of ethics but did not make them a priority and had put the Congress in a bad light.

“Mr. Gingrich’s statements lead me to one conclusion: that Mr. Gingrich, in his dealings with the committee, is not to be believed,” said the future speaker, who urged Republicans to weigh whether Mr. Gingrich should remain the pre-eminent figure in the House. “He is technically eligible. I hope you will make a judgment as to whether he is ethically fit.”

Ultimately, the House voted to reprimand Mr. Gingrich and fine him $300,000 for ethics violations in the most severe rebuke ever visited on the presiding officer of the House.

But on Friday, Ms. Pelosi — not about to be drawn into a discussion of Mr. Gingrich and whether he is seeking revenge for her role in his own ethics case — said she was finished talking about the C.I.A. imbroglio.

“I don’t think about it,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Gingrich has an axe to grind against his former nemesis Pelosi, that much is obvious.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Nancy Pelosi finally decided to zip it up and stand by her prior statements (see video above).   Republicans have been demanding an investigation and some have even said that Pelosi needs to step down (the loudest one have been in trouble himself for serious ethics violations).  Democrats are standing by Pelosi and have fended off an investigation, which would have been ridiculous.  Republicans wanted to investigate Pelosi, but they are against holding any member of the Bush administration accountable?  How ridiculously partisan.

The Washington Post reports today that both Democrats and Republicans have been pouring over the classified intelligence briefing memos at issue and that while the Republicans claim that the documents clearly demonstrate that Pelosi knew about torture techniques being used by the Bush administration in 2002, Democrats disagree.

Republicans who have seen the documents say they present a clear case that Pelosi (D-Calif.) was told about the waterboarding of a key al-Qaeda operative, rejecting her accusation that the CIA intentionally misled her about the interrogation technique, which simulates drowning. “I came away feeling comfortable in saying the speaker owes the [intelligence] community an apology at the least,” said  Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), a former FBI agent.

But Democrats, as well as some former intelligence officials, warn that the documents are far from definitive and reflect only after-the-fact recollections from CIA briefers who never intended to produce full transcripts of te sessions. “You can have a lot of interpretation either way,” said Rep. C.A.  Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), who said he “sped-read” the documents this week.

***

Members of Congress are largely divided into two camps: One says that the CIA intentionally withheld information about the tactics it was already using against detainees, even as it was providing Congress with intelligence that led to an overwhelming bipartisan vote supporting the use of force in Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. The other says that Pelosi is covering up her original tacit support of techniques that she now labels as torture.

Pelosi and leading Republicans have asked for the briefing memos to be declassified, each side seeming to think their release will vindicate its cause. And on Thursday, House Democrats blocked a Republican effort to form a special committee to investigate Pelosi’s allegation that CIA officials misled her.

The media has ccompletely missed the point that it was not Pelosi who authorized torture. The issue of what Pelosi knew and when is simply an attempt to divert the media’s attention from the certainty of what the Bush administration knew.  Moreover, what should really be investigated is why Condi Rice had Phillip Zelikow give her a second opinion on torture and then after he had given her opinion that it was illegal that the memos were collected for destruction. In a recent video that I poster on this blog, she had the audacity to defend torture.  She was almost shaking when she confronted a student when her questined her about the subject.  The excuse is always, you don’t know what it was like after 9/11 and the decisions we had to make.  

Can there be any doubt by now that Cheney, Rice, Bush and Rumsfeld had a hysterical reaction to a national tragedy.  They only invaded Afghanistan because they had to, they allowed bin Laden to escape to Pakistan, they allowed the presence of al qaeda and other terrorist cells to escalate to a near point of no return in Pakistan because they were focused on the folly known as the war in Iraq.

I feel ill when I hear the Sith Lord Cheney talk about how they kept America safe.  9/11 happened under the Bush administration watch when he was on vacation.  The intelligence was in Rice’s hands and he had access to it.  It was just not a priority.  Tax cuts for the rich were far more important than national security.  Cheney was more focused on paying off his corporate buddies and insiders.

Bill Clinton had one incident during his administration too so if you use Cheney’slogic, Clinto was able to keep the US safe after that one incident without torture.

Most importantly, the single most important omission from the Cheney revisionist history tour is that he was intimately involved in waterboarding to try to come up with some link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein after the US had already invaded Iraq.  Waterboarding to buttress the lies that took us to war should be a reason to shut down Cheney’s revisionist history tour and to put him in jail.  My preference would be Gitmo since he feels so strongly about keeping it open because as far as I am concerned, Cheney, not Obama, has been the cause of putting America in the most danger ever over the last 8 years.

Go back to your hole Dick and pray that Obama doesn’t come to his sense and let Holder loose on you.  Even if you don’t get prosecuted here, you’ll never be completely free because you will not be able to travel for fear of being brought to judgment in another country for your war crimes.

That is not enough for me, but it is at least something.

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According to CNN, 28 year old Sunday school teacher and young mother, Melissa Huckaby, was charged with additional crimes, including attempting poison a child and “Daniel Plowman.”  She is also charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering 8 year old Sandra Cantu.  

The new charges caused another delay in the murder case, CNN afiliate KRON reported.

The complaint charged that Huckaby “did willfully and unlawfully mingle a harmful substance with food or drink” with the intent to harm the child, identified only as “Jane M. Doe.”

Another alleged poisoning victim was identified as Daniel Plowman, but no age or other information was immediately provided.

The latest charges also include one count of child abuse endangerment relating to the unidentified child, who was allegedly in Huckaby’s “care and custody.” Read the complaint (PDF)

The Daily Beast has provided some additional details about “Daniel Plowman,” who is one of the new victims namedin the complaint.  

What we now know is that prosecutors believe Huckaby on March 2 drugged a 36-year-old man named Daniel Plowman, who lives in Hayward, a town about 40 miles west of Tracy. It was late that night when she allegedly mixed “a harmful substance with food or drink with the intent that the same be taken by a human being,” according to the amended criminal complaint file this week. Hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. the next day, Plowman was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. He had pulled his car into the drive-through of a McDonald’s about five minutes away from Huckaby’s mobile home. He ordered some food and paid for it just before passing out on the wheel, according to an employee who called police about the incident. When he came to, still disoriented, he drove into a wall. Police showed up and towed his gold-colored Ford Tempo. They took him into custody, but later released him and never pressed charges. I couldn’t track Plowman down for comment, but I heard from neighbors that he dated Huckaby for a while.

So she was drugging boyfriends too?  As for the other little girl, the police have more or less acknowledged that they could have been better about investigating that incident and then maybe Sandra cantu might still be alive.

Huckaby allegedly took her 5-year-old daughter Madison’s playmate out “to the park.” They were gone for four hours, the girl’s mother, Lora Polk, 41, told me. So Polk called the police, who searched everywhere, but the search ended when Huckaby appeared back at Polk’s home and dropped the girl off.

Relieved, Polk hugged her daughter, then took her to get some dinner at a local fast-food joint. But on the way there, the girl started slumping over. She slurred her words.

“Something wasn’t right,” Polk said. “So I rushed her to the hospital.”

Polk nervously waited in the lobby at the nearby hospital for doctors to come back with the results. About five hours after Polk admitted her daughter, she says doctors told her they found benzodiazepine coursing through the little girl’s body. They called the police, who questioned Polk, who accused her of supplying the pills to her daughter but evidently ended the night without an arrest.

Huckaby had said that the cops questioned her in connection to that case. And Polk offered for detectives to search her own home. But police said they just couldn’t form a strong enough case to file charges against anyone. Polk said they called her up after Sandra Cantu’s disappearance to express their regrets that they couldn’t have resolved the mysterious drugging incident back then. Cops didn’t even test the 7-year-old girl for signs of sexual assault until after Huckaby’s arrest—months after the suspect allegedly took the child, who said Huckaby gave her water that “tasted funny,” “like medicine,” said her mother.

This week, it became clear that whatever evidence prosecutors found against Huckaby in regards to the drugging incident was enough to file an amended complaint.

The tragedy is that it was several months too late for Sandra Cantu.

According to CNN, the citizens of Mexico City felt an earthquake of between 5.7 – 5.9.  According to people who were in the city, buildings shook and people panicked and ran in the streets.

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According to CNN, police have arrested 23 year year old Tiffany Toribio “suffocated her son and then buried his body beneath the sand of a playground, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”  Her son was three years old.  Toribio has confessed to murdering her own son soon after her arrest:

“She placed her hand over her son’s mouth and nose and suffocated him. She had second thoughts about what she did. She performed CPR on her son, brought him back to life and then decided to go forward with that original act she had started to commit.” 

When asked why she did it, she said “she did not want him to grow up with no one caring about him, the same way that she had grown up where nobody had cared about her.” She has since tried to kill herself and is now in isolation.  

I am disturbed by the thoughts of the last few moments of that poor child’s life when he was strangled by his own mother not once, but two times.  What an utterly depraved mind.

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