RelentlesslyOptimistic

Happy Mother's Day (sorry, Mom)

Via For Your Entertainment

Worth A Thousand (English) Words

 

From Orcinus

Patience

Too true:

Absolutely Not!

Via For Your Entertainment

Happy Earth day: Gasoline use decreases!

For the first time in almost 20 years, use of gasoline dropped in 2007!

 

It wasn’t known where the man got the deer, which had been dead for some time

Missing Man Found Dressed Like Doctor With Dead Dear In Stolen Ambulance

A man reported missing from a Florida hospital was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer wedged in the back, authorities said.

"I don't know how the man got it up in there,'' said Sgt. Robert Pearson. "It was a six point buck.'' It wasn't known where Holliman got the deer, which had been dead for some time, Pearson said.

Via the New Shelton wet/dry

Because their lips are moving: Top Officials Planned Detailed Torture, Bush Approved

ABC News reports that top officials of the Bush Administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Ashcroft, discussed and approved detailed interrogation plans and methods of torture to be used. President "We-Don't-Torture" Bush said he knew about and approved of the discussions. The significance of this story is the shocking admission that top officials not only approved of the use of torture, but that they discussed and approved of specific techniques against specific prisoners.

Jan Crawford Greenburg's ABC News Blog posted a summary with links to key stories, and Digby sums it up by saying that:

"There was a time when the Village clucked and screeched about "defiling the white house" with an extra marital affair or hosting fund raising coffees. I would say this leaves a far greater stain on that institution than any sexual act could ever do.

The vice president, national security advisor and members of the president's cabinet sat around the white house "choreographing" the torture and the president approved it. I have to say that even in my most vivid imaginings about this torture scheme it didn't occur to me that the highest levels of the cabinet were personally involved"

Via Orcinus, image from ABC News

Computer Virus Spreads To Humans!

The Wombat

 

I saw this at a recent Shadowcliff Sustainability event, where everyone laughingly applauded when it was through. It's a funny environmental flash video by the Foundation for Global Community
called The Wombat. Note that it'll start playing when you click the link.

Happy Easter Peeps Show

From For Your Entertainment

The Media's Race Problem

It's been a while since I've posted anything here from Orcinus, in spite of the fact that I think David Niewert provides some of the best perspective on hatred and prejudice around. Yesterday's post started by quoting journalists like the Washington Post's media critic, Howie Kurtz, discussing the media's role in creating the controversy:

"[I]t wasn't until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright's sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now."

Niewert then points out that"

"It's telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright's remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama's speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with -- and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget."

Niewert draws from Kurtz again in describing the bias involved in being concerned about whether the "controversy" will "make too many white voters uncomfortable," but says they ignore "the deeper questions of whether white complacence about race might be something worth challenging, as well as their own roles in failing to make that challenge."

Neiwert quotes both Obama's response and Bill Clinton (from 1995) as they discuss the widespread and persistent effects of our racist history on education and economic opportunity, and closes by saying that:

"These are uncomfortable truths, of course, but they are also truths. And the media have as much a role in the failure of white Americans to honestly and forthrightly confront them.

The reason we haven't done so is that we whites have done our damnedest to ignore them. We have effectively wiped the memory of sundown towns from our memories, making us almost purposefully ignorant of them and their surrounding history of ugly violence and vicious bigotry.

Indeed, as we have seen throughout the Obama controversy, the media have been consistent in encouraging white Americans to forget them. Meanwhile, the black people who have to live with these realities cannot."

The photo above is from yesterday's New York Times in an article headlined "Photograph of Bill Clinton and Rev. Wright Surfaces," as if meeting with Wright in 1998 was somehow controversial.

Image of a piece of toast seen on face of the Virgin Mary

"Pilgrims were flocking to the Hampshire town of Basingstoke today after a local woman claimed to have seen a vision of a piece of toast on a picture of the Virgin Mary at her local church. Betty Tilley, 42, was...amazed by what she saw.

‘There’s just no question in my mind that it was a miracle. Right there, on the face of the Holy Mary, Mother of God, I could see a nice piece of toasted sliced white bread. The amazing thing is that it was just like the one I had had for breakfast, so clearly this must be some kind of message from God.’"

From grow-a-brain, image from Amazon. Also, don't miss the Madonna of the Toast blog!

Freedom

From Bits & Pieces

Because Their Lips Are Moving Special: At least 935 official lies to justify the war

The Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan non-profit that produces responsible investigative journalism, released The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path To War that concluded that:

"President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

And

"...the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq"

As a part of preparing the study the Center produced, and has made available on their web site, a 380,000 word database of the statements made by top Bush administration officials that enabled comparisons between what they said and what they actually knew according to official documents and statements.

Via Mark Morford, photo from Political-News.org

Texas Pride: State ranks as 7th largest carbon emitter in the world!

According to TIME magazine:

"The headquarters state of America's oil industry spewed 670 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2003, enough that Texas would rank seventh in the world if it were its own country, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The amount is more than that of California and Pennsylvania — the second- and third-ranking states — combined."

Via Cake News. Image of Dallas from the Texas Transportation Institute