Fox News is reporting that Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has proposed a bill intended to stop Pres. Bush’s march to war with Iran. If the bill were to pass, it would it would prohibit funding “for military operations and activities within or above the territory of Iran, or within the territorial waters of Iran, except pursuan to a specific authorization of Congress.”
Vice Pres. Dick Cheney was diagnosed with a blood clot in his leg this morning. He was released after the diagnosis and went back to work but has been prescribed blood-thinning meds.
Cheney has had four heart attacks and is outfitted with a pacemaker. It is likely the clot may be a result of all the time he’s spent on airplanes in the past few months.
Among the many controversies (and we’ll get to some in later posts) that Florida’s new kinder, gentler Republican-lite governor, Charlie Crist, has brought about is whether to change the state song. Even those of us who never really knew we had a state song can guess what it might be. That’s right, Stephen Foster’s classic, “Old Folks at Home,” popularly known as “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River.”
It all started when Crist — who can’t pass a day without being compared to California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger for his “populist,” centrist, two-month-old leadership — decided to forgo the playing of the state song during his inauguration ceremony. No one seemed to miss it at the time, what with all the other festivities, but later Crist was asked to explain the omission.
”There are lyrics in it that are, in the opinion of some, a derogatory reference to some time in our historical past that involves slavery,” Crist said. ”I can’t condone it.”
Since he said that, people like me who know the first couple of lines and then hum, have been wondering what the actual lyrics are, and how this got to be Florida’s state song. What the research turns up is fascinating.
For starters, Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee,” as he spelled it, sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize.
Wait, it gets better. Foster wrote the song in 1851 for E.P. Christy and his traveling show, “Christy’s Minstrels.” It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and by the 1880s, was credited with starting Florida’s tourist industry. But a look at the lyrics is enough to make you recoil, or guffaw, or both. […]
U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D — Hawaii), has given us talking points for when Republicans start claiming Democrats are the bad guys by refusing to keep up Bush’s sham emergency funding of his wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abercromie is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, and he’s followed the money trail.
The Bush administration has asked Congress to approve $93.4 billion in emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of 2007 and another $141.7 billion for next year. This, on top of a proposed 2008 defense budget of $481.4 billion.
Please note that the two supplemental appropriations requests are termed “emergency,” which ought to mean unexpected or unpredictable costs. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded through emergency spending requests since they began. …
Why is a supplemental request the budget vehicle of choice? Because as an emergency measure, it doesn’t count against the budget ceiling that Congress adopts to guide spending, and therefore isn’t figured into government estimates of our annual budget deficit. So, for the last four years, these emergency spending bills have helped President Bush obscure the true cost of the war.
As “emergency” legislation, these supplemental requests don’t get the same scrutiny as regular annual appropriation bills. In fact, for the last five years, there’s been heavy pressure from the administration and the Republican majority in Congress to approve them quickly and without argument. Those who have opposed, or even questioned, any part have been accused of “not supporting our troops.”
The Bush administration is already saying that if it doesn’t get everything it wants — or if Congress adds requirements for troop readiness or demands for protective equipment — our men and women in combat will run out of bullets or be left stranded in the desert.
Baloney.
PBS is working on a two-part special on Mormons, set to air April 30 and May 1. The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam says it could hurt Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney, since the less Joe Sixpack knows about the tenets of the cult (oops, I said the C-word), the better.
The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons call themselves, cooperated with “The American Experience ” and “Frontline, ” the show’s co-producers. [Filmmaker Helen] Whitney in turn pays the church the compliment of taking its faith very seriously indeed. The positives are there for all to see: the Mormons’ triumph over persecution in mid-century America; the dramatic “exodus” from Illinois to Utah, the “country no one else wanted,” according to Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of the Mormon pioneers; the devotion to family and community.
But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange…
“The Mormons” even tackles the ultimate red herring, “celestial marriage,” Joseph Smith’s term for polygamy…”The Mormons” estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 fundamentalist believers practice polygamy. Whitney has footage of 11 happy children passing plates around the dinner table, with three mothers and a father in attendance. Heather has three Mommies! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Michael Sullivan, “Frontline” executive producer for special projects, calls the project “respectful but frank. We’re not out to get the Mormons.” He says “there is a small section on Romney” in the portion of the documentary that is still being edited. Romney declined to be interviewed for the show.
What does it all mean? PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let’s say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches “The Mormons.” That’s almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It’s bad math for the Mittster.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
