Here's a photo and story for all dog lovers and for my Golden Retriever, Tristan.A dog at a southeast Kansas zoo has adopted three tiger cubs abandoned by their mother. Safari Zoological Park owner Tom Harvey said the tiger cubs were born Sunday, but the mother had problems with them.
A day later, the mother stopped caring for them. Harvey said the cubs were wandering around, trying to find their birth mother, who wouldn't pay attention to them. That's when the cubs were put in the care of a golden retriever, Harvey said.
At 23 JoJo was murdered and his last words were, "Peace, brother, One Love." Read his parents take on who is responsible.The real criminals are the antisocial monsters who are responsible for a system that is making war on the poor and in the process creating confused and enraged people like the man who killed our son. That man is as much a product of this system as the handgun he used. He obviously had no village that might have given him the love and respect that would have made his horrendous crime impossible. Some people will argue that he had a choice between right and wrong. But if this society denies good choices to children how do they learn to make good choices as adults? If we don't give a child a decent life, how can that child grow up to respect life?
Desperation has set in to the McCain campaign early. Their ads against Obama are false and misleading and they are not able to present a positive message as to why people should vote for McCain so they swing wildly at Obama. The latest effort to show his popularity as a negative is appalling.Which presidential candidate hosted Saturday Night Live (hint -- the musical guests were The White Stripes)?Hint: Answer is the same to each question.
Which one had cameos on "24" and "Wedding Crashers"?
Whose wife secretly got her pilot's license and owns a jet?
Who is pals with Warren Beatty?
Whose daughter is friends with Heidi from MTV's The Hills?
Whose wife once told Vogue, explaining the purchase of a 7th or 8th house, this one a beach house, "When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, 'Oh this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go. Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn't get in the place. So I bought another one.”
Whose family credit cards have been known to ring up more than $500,000 in charges in one month?
In the context of the resent shooting at the church in Knoxville, a former co-worker of Sean Hannity of Fox News has written an open letter to him reflecting the impact of rhetoric in leading to the shooting.“If the Left succeeds in gaining and retaining more power, the well-being of future generations will be at greater peril. I fear (our children) will inherit a nation that is less free and less secure than the nation we inherited from the last generation. It is therefore our job to stop them. Not just debate them, but defeat them.” — Sean Hannity
Dear Sean:
I found these words on page 11 of your book Let Freedom Ring. This book, and similar ones from your conservative colleagues Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage, was found in the home of a man who read those words, internalized those words, and then loaded his shotgun. He took 76 rounds of ammunition with him to a place of worship—a place where he knew he could do his job to stop and defeat some liberals. At the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jim Adkisson, a fan of yours, killed two people, wounded five others, and left an entire congregation and country shaken by his actions. Actions prompted, as he testified in his own written notes, by the ideas contained in your words.
I don’t know if you remember me, Sean, but I worked with you in Atlanta in the early 1990s, right as you got your big break with FOX News. I was an anchor and reporter (under the air name Candace Petersen) at WGST, your last low level stop before hitting the big time. I remember your last night on the air before you left for the big leagues. I approached you in your office, a cramped back room that I’m sure resembles a hovel compared to your FOX digs. I asked if you, during your last show, would tone down your rhetoric against gays and lesbians—stop demonizing our community for just one night. You refused. You explained to me, as if I were a child, that to do so would be to let your audience down. They expected you to go on the air and rant about how liberals, minorities, women and especially gays and lesbians were ruining our country. You simply had to oblige.
Even though you explained it simply, I still didn’t understand. Your Girl Friday—your most trusted assistant on your show was a young lesbian. She admired you, for some strange reason, and you two were close friends, lunching together, spending time together outside of work. You didn’t seem to have a problem with this particular lesbian. She wasn’t the one you kept blaming on the air for the downfall of democracy. No, you had two different lives then—one on the air, where you performed your outraged conservative act and one in real life, where you enjoyed your lesbian friend and seemed like a decent, sane fellow.
I don’t know if you’ve bought into your own shtick or not these days. If you truly believe half of what I could manage to read in your book (thank God the quote I found was in the early pages), I feel sorry for you. I don’t know how a person who obviously has no problem with homosexuality in their friends (or used to have no problem, anyway), can rant about how disgusting homosexuality is on pages 156 to 157. (Many thanks to your editors for the index.) I would call you a hypocrite, but if you’ve become a true believer, I guess the label no longer applies.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1977, death sentences against black defendants, but not Latinos, have been disproportionately enormous by almost every measure: population, homicide rates, victim data and the sentencing patterns of other states.The California Commission on the Fair Administration of justice wants why the death penalty is sought in some cases but not in others and what impact race has in that decision. The Fresno Bee explains.
California's 5-to-1 ratio of blacks on death row to blacks in the state population, measured in percentages, is much higher than the ratios in Texas, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. The national average is 3 to 1.
If you have an interest in meditation, here's an article from the Times of London, about how a six week stay in a Buddhist Monastery in Bangkok changed her life.My problems were different; they couldn't be fixed by simply sitting still every day. I needed intervention! A personal trainer! Oprah Winfrey! A hypnotherapist! But in the monastery, with no other option but to sit and at least try to meditate, I slowly found that I could sit for longer and longer, sometimes more than an hour. And I began to feel clean and refreshed afterwards, as if I had bathed in a cool sea.
My memory became sharp, and I could remember my chants, which impressed my old monk no end. I gradually stopped being angry with myself and starting feeling proud of myself. I saw strengths that I had never noticed before, and I stopped punishing myself with food and lost the extra weight naturally. I've never really been religious, and I was not attracted to Buddhism as a faith, but I felt that meditation allowed me to understand myself better and to find the right thing to do. Essentially, it taught me to listen to myself.
After church this morning, I was surprised by a gift of a great looking prayer shawl, knitted by the All Saints Beverly Hills Knitting Guild. They provide knitted items to parishioners who have been ill. As I am recovering from pneumonia (having spent 7 days in the hospital in early July), this was my knitted gift. It's just another way the community of Christians at my church have been an amazing source of strength for me. 
Brian Mclaren, one of the leading figures of the emerging church, spoke this past week to Anglican Bishops at Lambeth. Here's an interview with him in Christianity Today that I found interesting. CT: You suggested a new era for Christianity. What else do you think we can expect?
BM: I am just one small person with a very limited perspective in the face of such a huge question. But let me offer four small thoughts.
First, I think our future is more about the Christian way of life than it is about a rigid and polemicized systems of belief. Second, I think our future is mission-oriented - meaning that we focus on forming disciples who advance God's mission in their daily lives.
Third, I believe our future is ecumenical - with Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians taking a humble posture as fellow learners and collaborators for the common good rather than as competitors or us-versus-them enemies.
And fourth, I think our future will also require us to join humbly and charitably with people of other faiths - Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, secularists, and others - in pursuit of peace, environmental stewardship, and justice for all people, things that matter greatly to the heart of God.
In the middle of my troublesIn the midst of all my fearsIn the dark night of my worriesIn the bitter salt of all my tears:God is watching over meGod is watching over meGod is watching over mewith great big love.In my times of sorrowIn the midst of my despairIn the darkest, darkest midnight hourI know God is always there:God is watching over meGod is watching over meGod is watching over mewith great big love.
With over 2.3 million men and women in prison in the US, here's an interesting perspective from Julia Sudbury in the Guardian. We do not create safer communities by locking people in cages; that prisons do not solve the problems that lead to crime, like drug use, poverty, violence or mental illness.
We also draw attention to the massive cost of perpetual prison expansion, which siphons public resources away from services that could be used to build safer and more egalitarian communities. We take seriously the ways in which people harm others, and seek to transform the social and economic conditions that promote violence, as well as creating community-based strategies to address harm and create accountability.
We believe that the violence of crime cannot be solved through the additional violence of policing, surveillance and separation from loved ones. Instead, we advocate focusing attention and resources on building empowered communities, with decent housing, secure jobs, food security, healthy environments and high-quality education, as the ultimate alternative to incarceration.
“We don’t buy our own hype,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re always looking around the corner."
$217 million per hour.Not to mention that we rank 37th in the world relative to the best health care systems, behind countries like Columbia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile.
That's how much Americans spend on health care according to testimony in front of Congress' Joint Economic Committee by experts from the American Human Development Project.
24 hours a day. 365 days a year. For a total of almost $2 trillion spent every year, 16% of our GDP - more than any other nation on earth. And for what?
An interesting insight into how Obama might manage his potential administration, from ABC News.Obama said. "And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.
From Bob Herbert's excellent Op-Ed in the NY Times:How much do voters really know about John McCain?
Senator McCain crossed a line that he shouldn’t have this week when he said that Mr. Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” It was a lousy comment, tantamount to calling Mr. Obama a traitor, and Senator McCain should apologize for it.
But what we’ve learned over the years is that Mr. McCain is one of those guys who never has to pay much of a price for his missteps and foul-ups and bad behavior. Can you imagine the firestorm of outrage and criticism that would have descended on Senator Obama if he had made the kind of factual mistakes that John McCain has repeatedly made in this campaign?
(Or if Senator Obama had had the temerity to even remotely suggest that John McCain would consider being disloyal to his country for political reasons?)
We have a monumental double standard here. Mr. McCain has had trouble in his public comments distinguishing Sunnis from Shiites and had to be corrected in one stunningly embarrassing moment by his good friend Joe Lieberman. He has referred to a Iraq-Pakistan border when the two countries do not share a border.
He declared on CBS that Iraq was the first major conflict after 9/11, apparently forgetting — at least for the moment — about the war in Afghanistan. In that same interview, he credited the so-called surge of U.S. forces in Iraq with bringing about the Anbar Awakening, a movement in which thousands of Sunnis turned on insurgents. He was wrong. The awakening preceded the surge.
More important than these endless gaffes are matters that give us glimpses of the fundamental makeup of the man. A celebrated warrior as a young man, he has always believed that the war in Iraq can (and must) be won. As the author Elizabeth Drew has written: “He didn’t seem to seriously consider the huge costs of the war: financial, personal, diplomatic and to the reputation of the United States around the world.”
He also felt we could have, and should have, won the war in Vietnam. “We lost in Vietnam,” said Mr. McCain in 2003, “because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”
The spirit of the warrior was on display in the famous incident in which Mr. McCain, with the insouciance of a veteran bomber pilot, sang “Bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys.
No big deal. Just John being John.
Bishop put to death
Before he died Wednesday evening, death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop apologized to his victim's family, thanked America and urged people to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama."For those who oppose the death penalty and want to see it end, our best bet is to vote for Barack Obama because his supporters have been working behind the scenes to end this practice," Bishop said.
As Curbed LA describes it. "The angels and the mechanical monster talk quietly, plotting their attack on the evil Nokia aliens."
In an interesting development, Mike Farrell, of Death Penalty Focus (a group that I have been involved with in the past), and "the hanging judge of Orange County, Don McCartin, have joined forces to try to end the Death Penalty. See the story in the LA Daily News. Don McCartin, having sentenced nine men to death and then watched as the system examined, re-examined and finally overturned all of his convictions while executing none of them, now believes the death penalty is a hideously expensive fraud. It tortures the loved ones of murder victims by dragging them through the years of complex appeals required by the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to protect the innocent.
He's aware of the constitutional dilemma created by the tension between the need to protect the rights of the accused in a death case and the desire for some form of justice to be done. But he's outraged that the mother of Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old girl raped and murdered in 1979, is now required to sit through yet a third trial of the alleged killer almost 30 years later. A sentence of life without parole would have allowed her to go on with her own life so long ago.Well said. And, as Mike Farrell said "our entire society is harmed by the dehumanization process inherent in state killing."
Yesterday I linked to the first part of a top 25 list of political speeches. Today 12 - 1. And the winner is:1 Winston Churchill, August 20, 1940At the height of the Battle of Britain, Churchill gave his landmark speech in the House of Commons, paying tribute to the Royal Air Force pilots whose struggle was eventually to win the battle. Churchill’s measured but soaring rhetoric was a source of great inspiration and comfort for a nation under the greatest sustained bombing campaign to date and confronting the prospect of a German invasion.
"The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
The report into conditions at Doncaster Prison, South Yorkshire, found that two-person cells had been turned into three-person cells by placing a bed in the shared toilet.
Late last night, the McCain campaign kept it up when aides handed out luggage tags to the traveling press that read “McCain Press Corps: JV Squad, ‘Left Behind to Report in America.’ ” The words were translated into French on the opposite side.
There's this tidbit in Maureen Dowd's column in today's NY Times.A member of the king’s inner circle who attended the chicken-and-rice dinner with King Abdullah and Queen Rania said that Obama had gone a long way toward assuaging their fears that he would be so eager to run away from his paternal family’s Muslim roots and to woo skeptical American Jews that he would not be “the honest broker” they long for after W.’s crazed missionary work in the Middle East.Can you imagine any foreign leader having this kind of reaction to our current president?
“The guy gets it,” the Jordanian official said after dinner with Obama. “Sharp, aware and a very good listener. He doesn’t seem stuck in preconceived positions. He said he would get straight to the Palestinian issue as soon as he becomes president.”
Hat tip for the cartoon: Ellie
A friend just spotted Anglina Jole looking in damn good shape, having just recently given birth to twins. He snapped this photo when he realized she was wearing the Opinionated Old Fart on her chest.
Batman star Christian Bale was to be questioned by police over allegations he assaulted his mother and sister the night before the European premiere of his film, "The Dark Knight," British media reported Tuesday.
Map above as John McCain sees the region. His comment this morning regarding trouble on the Iraq-Pakistan border confirms its accuracy. Map by: Matt Yglesias.
From Times Online comes this interesting bit of research. Religious people are more positive towards homosexual people than is claimed by conservative faith leaders, a report out today says.
According to academics at Leeds University, faith leaders are failing to reflect what the people in the pews really think about gays.
The report Love Thy Neighbour, commissioned by the gay rights lobby group Stonewall, says that Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Christian believers are “significantly more moderate” in their views on homosexuality than is often alleged on their behalf.
Here's something we all need to remind us each morning of what we have lost during the past eight years. It's the "Disappearing Civil Liberties Mug."Drink your decaf in this dazzling mug - and watch your civil liberties disappear and reappear! Simply pour in your coffee or any hot beverage and watch the painstaking work of the founding fathers vanish before your eyes and then reappear after drinking up or cooling down. A great way to amaze and entertain a guest with satire.
But, not McCain. This AP story is fun.If Sen. John McCain is really serious about becoming a Web-savvy citizen, perhaps Kathryn Robinson can help.
Robinson is now 106 — that's 35 years older than McCain — and she began using the Internet at 98, at the Barclay Friends home in West Chester, Pa., where she lives. "I started to learn because I wanted to e-mail my family," she says — in an e-mail message, naturally.
With all the Republican accusations of Obama being an "elitist" and "not one of us," take a look at the real story from the Chicago Sun Times. How many rich kids do you know who worked at Baskin-Robbins, construction, selling trinkets in a gift shop, a deli counter and as a telemarketer?As a high school student, Obama's first job was at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store. He also has mentioned he worked construction. And we know about the famous summer job between his second and third years of law school at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he met Michelle, who was already at the firm. The summer before, Obama worked at Hopkins & Sutter, a law firm in Chicago.
Here's what we know for the first time, with information passed on from the Obama campaign in response to my inquiries: As a college student at Occidental in Southern California, Obama returned home to Hawaii the summer after freshman year to sell island trinkets in a gift shop. Obama also had a summertime job at a deli counter in Hawaii -- making sandwiches.
Once in New York to attend Columbia, one summer Obama worked for a private company holding a contract to process health records of either police or firefighters; I'm not sure exactly what he did.
During one school year at Columbia, Obama was a telemarketer in midtown Manhattan selling New York Times subscriptions over the phone, wearing a headset. He did not like the job because "he worried that some of the people he called couldn't really afford the subscription."
