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Archive for September, 2006
“Shiver my timbers!” Tis Talk like a Pirate’s Day again!!! 
Hey JJ – Rock and Roll is Here to Stay –
soo do ya wanna rock out?…
Kelli and Ann Richard [photo by Rosie O’Donnell}
Ann Richards on How to Be a Good Republican:
1. You have to believe that the nation’s current 8-year prosperity was due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but yesterday’s gasoline prices are all Clinton’s fault.
2. You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.
3. You have to be against all government programs, but expect Social Security checks on time.
4. You have to believe that AIDS victims deserve their disease, but smokers with lung cancer and overweight individuals with heart disease don’t deserve theirs.
5. You have to appreciate the power rush that comes with sporting a gun.
6. You have to believe…everything Rush Limbaugh says.
7. You have to believe that the agricultural, restaurant, housing and hotel industries can survive without immigrant labor.
8. You have to believe God hates homosexuality, but loves the death penalty.
9. You have to believe society is color-blind and growing up black in America doesn’t diminish your opportunities, but you still won’t vote for Alan Keyes.
10. You have to believe that pollution is OK as long as it makes a profit.
11. You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don’t pray to Allah or Buddha.
12. You have to believe Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde were really faithful husbands.
13. You have to believe speaking a few Spanish phrases makes you instantly popular in the barrio.
14. You have to believe that only your own teenagers are still virgins.
15. You have to be against government interference in business, until your oil company, corporation or Savings and Loan is about to go broke and you beg for a government bail out.
16. You love Jesus and Jesus loves you and, by the way, Jesus shares your hatred for AIDS victims, homosexuals, and President Clinton.
17. You have to believe government has nothing to do with providing police protection, national defense, and building roads.
18. You have to believe a poor, minority student with a disciplinary history and failing grades will be admitted into an elite private school with a $1,000 voucher.
MS Ann Richards – first women governor in Texas – made a difference in seeing that more women and minorities were given oppotunities in government. One of favourite comments she made about George Bush SR. – “Bless George’s heart – he can’t help it if he was born with a silver foot in his mouth” – MS Richards – we say goodbye for now and thank you for being here. Thank you for making a big difference in our lives.
…to let the ones you love/care about – know it – one never really knows when something can happen. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Keep Walkin’ your talk – Be safe.
Never forget – always remember they are all still there in our hearts…
By Hamish Townsend
11 September 2006 01:00am
HUNDREDS of surfers yesterday commemorated the life of Steve Irwin with a “paddle out” from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. But details of his private funeral and public memorial service will not be revealed until today, giving his family time to mourn. It is believed a small private funeral was held on Saturday at Irwin’s Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast, which is expected to be his final resting place.
Irwin, 44, died last Monday after he was pierced in the heart by a stingray’s barb while filming a documentary off the far north Queensland coast. Manager John Stainton said he had promised the Irwin family he would not publicly discuss the funeral. A family member, probably Irwin’s father, Bob, would reveal details today, he said. Paul Regnault was among those in the water at Alexandra Headland on a chilly, overcast morning to honour Irwin, who surfed on the Sunshine Coast. “It was huge. I’ve never seen that many people at a paddle-out, even for a pro surfer,” he said.
Joining the surfers were staff from Australia Zoo, and as the board riders took to the water a didgeridoo droned out from the headland. Up to 500 surfers joined hands and formed a circle with Australia Zoo staff in the centre for a minute’s silence before throwing wreaths and flowers and yelling what some on shore said sounded like “crikey”.
Irwin’s coffin and several formally dressed guests, including Mr Stainton and Bob Irwin, were seen entering Australia Zoo on the weekend. Chairs had been set up at a secluded wooden rotunda surrounded by a creek. But no one from Irwin’s family or staff made a statement on funeral plans. Last week, the family declined an offer of a state funeral. A public memorial service could be held at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium.
In persistent rain, mourners and sightseers continued to visit the shrine to Irwin at the zoo. Thousand of bouquets were piled at the front gate and lines stretched more than 50m.
SAME OLD SAME-OLD ON OUR HILL OF WHOREDOM?
By Joe Klock, Sr.
One of the more valuable bits of advice I’ve ever heard or read is that when you find yourself in a hole or rut, the first thing you should do is stop digging.
This is a lesson apparently lost on American voters, who are whelmingly disgusted with politicians in general and Congresspeople in particular, but will probably re-elect most of them come November.
Meanwhile, those detestable electables are, as this is written, gathered on Harlotry Hill for the ritual dance that precedes their home stretch sprint of campaigning.
If pejoratives such as whoredom and harlotry seem excessively harsh, note that both words apply to selling one’s favors for personal gain – a practice that our Sinators and Reprehensibles have fashioned into a dark art.
Specifically, their personal gain comes in the forms of both money and power, those two as intimately related as the itch and the scratch.
Going back a few centuries in etymology, harlots were jugglers and jesters of either sex, before (nobody knows why) they became non-ladies of ill repute. “Whore,” on the other hand, has always been the unisex label hung on those who regard honor and decency as inferior assets.
The aforementioned congressional ritual somewhat resembles the mating dance of the Whooping Crane, which consists of weaving, bobbing, jumping and loud vocalizing that culminates in the laying of eggs.
If you regard this as an unfair metaphor for congressional goings-on, tune in to C-Span and C-Span 2 before the whooping subsides and the whoopers return home to spread whoppers in advance of Election Day.
There on the tube of tedium you will see and hear an excellent example of what Macbeth referred to as “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Rather than seeking solutions and compromise, the performers will lip-synch with their parties’ daily-distributed talking points papers and march in lock-step with their partisan jugglers and jesters.
They will fervently point with pride to everything said, done or intended by themselves and like-minded allies, while viewing with alarm even the most innocuous utterances from the opposing camp.
They will not join hands across the aisle to grapple with the problems and fears besetting us of the politically unwashed masses, nor will they venture within a cannon-shot of “third rails.”
These “no-no” issues include, but are not limited to, illegal (that is to say, against-the-law) immigration, genuine campaign financing reform and the embezzlement of public funds through the sale of power to special interests. (Note references above to the “w” and “h” words.)
What they WILL do is cover their political assets by planting in the Congressional Record (most often to nearly-empty chambers) and repeating in stump speeches (most often before mindless minions and suck-up sycophants) their valiant efforts to provide good government and “work with” their intractable opponents across the aisle.
One can hardly criticize the pols for this bizarre behavior, and even for their blatant betrayal of the public’s trust, since their avowed mission statement is either the acquisition or retention of power and the system is working with the efficiency of a flu germ or a teenage fashion fad.
It is we, the people, who not only condone, but perpetuate the very same practices we so passionately deplore.
It is only we, those same people, who can bring about a change in the conditions about which we are united in disapproval.
But it will be us, the same victims of political villainy, who are likely to continue digging the same hole by swallowing the rhetoric of the same imbedded incumbents – lock, stock and babble.
Want to have some fun? Write a letter, send an e-mail or call the local office of your trustee on Crapitall Hill and pose these questions to him or her:
1. On what specific issues do you disagree with your party’s position?
2. On what specific issues do you agree with your political opponents?
If you choose not to do that, welcome to the cult of apathy which enables those in power to stay in power, prevents those who might do a better job from getting a shot at it and guarantees that we’ll witness endless ritual dancing by those we send to the floor.
Unlike the Whooping Cranes, they are not an endangered species, so long as we protect their habitats and condone their habits.
If there are no changes after November (with apologies to Papa Hemingway), ask not for whom the bullscat tolls, it tolls for thee!
Freelance wordworker Joe Klock, Sr. (joeklock@aol.com) is a winter Floridian who summers on Golden Pond in New Hampshire. More of his “Klockwork,” is at www.joeklock.com. ###
Personal comment – I still maintain that APATHY – COMPLACENCY and DENIAL have permeated our spirit and somehow we have to overcome them – somehow…
Apparently it’s okay that this person got into the White House – the question is will GWB really survive Cheney – survive in history that is – hmmm we will see…we certainly will see…
The Curse of Dick Cheney
By T.D. ALLMAN, Rolling Stone Magazine
Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of
being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick
Cheney to a post in his administration.
The Cheney jinx first manifested itself at the presidential level back in
1969, when Richard Nixon appointed him to his first job in the executive
branch. It surfaced again in 1975, when Gerald Ford made Cheney his chief of
staff and then — with Cheney’s help — lost the 1976 election. George H.W.
Bush, having named Cheney secretary of defense, was defeated for re-election
in 1992. The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president
since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only
one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office.
This pattern of misplaced confidence in Cheney, followed by disastrous
results, runs throughout his life — from his days as a dropout at Yale to
the geopolitical chaos he has helped create in Baghdad. Once you get to know
his history, the cycle becomes clear: First, Cheney impresses someone rich
or powerful, who causes unearned wealth and power to be conferred on him.
Then, when things go wrong, he blames others and moves on to a new situation
even more advantageous to himself.
“Cheney’s manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities,”
says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush’s father as ambassador to Saudi
Arabia. “It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision –
but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand
that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on
the ass.”
Cheney’s record of mistakes begins in 1959, when Tom Stroock, a Republican
politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at
Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. “Dick was the
all-American boy, in the top ten percent of his class,” Stroock says. “He
seemed a natural.”
But instead of triumphing, Cheney failed. “He spent his time partying with
guys who loved football but weren’t varsity quality,” recalls Stephen
Billings, an Episcopalian minister who roomed with him during Cheney’s
freshman (and only full) year at Yale. “His idea was, you didn’t need to
master the material,” says his other roommate, Jacob Plotkin. “He passed one
psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that.
But there are some things you can’t bluff, and Dick reached a point where
you couldn’t recover.”
Cheney might have been flunking in the classroom, but he excelled at making
connections. “Dick always had this very calm way of talking,” recalls
Plotkin, now a retired math professor at Michigan State University. “His
thoughtful manner impressed people.” Forty years before the son of a U.S.
president picked Cheney to be his running mate, the son of a Massachusetts
governor picked him to be his sophomore-year roommate. Mark Furcolo, whose
father, Foster, had been elected governor as a Democrat, invited Cheney to
Cape Cod for a visit. “Dick came back enraptured,” Plotkin says. “He was
fascinated by the official state cars and planes. The trappings of it got
him.”
It could have been the start of a brilliant career — in the Massachusetts
of the 1960s, it would not have been too great a leap from the Furcolos to
the Kennedys. Instead, after only one term as a Yale sophomore, Cheney
dropped out. “Dick never had the experience of learning from his mistakes,”
says Tom Fake, a Natrona classmate who also won a Yale scholarship. But he
learned something perhaps more important to this future success. “He found a
path that got him into powerful positions” is how Plotkin puts it.
After leaving Yale, Cheney had one of his few experiences working in the
private sector, on a telephone-company repair crew. He showed no interest,
one way or another, in the Vietnam War — until a Texas president, nearly
forty years before George W. Bush, turned a remote foreign struggle into a
catastrophic, unwinnable war. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of
Vietnam, lounging around was suddenly no longer an option. Cheney snapped
into action. First he enrolled in Casper Community College; then he went to
the University of Wyoming. That kept him out of the draft until August 7th,
1964, when Congress initiated massive conscription in the armed forces.
Three weeks later, Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his high school girlfriend,
earning him another deferment.
Then, on October 26th, 1965, the Selective Service announced that childless
married men no longer would be exempted from having to fight for their
country. Nine months and two days later, the first of Cheney’s two
daughters, Elizabeth, was born. All told, between 1963 and 1966, Cheney
received five deferments.
In January 1967, when he was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Cheney
passed his twenty-sixth birthday, making him safe from the draft — and
making it safe for him to abandon work on a doctoral degree. He had taken to
hanging out with local politicians and acted as an unpaid assistant to
Wisconsin’s moderate Republican governor, Warren Knowles. In 1968, he used
Knowles to get a progressive Wisconsin Republican congressman named William
Steiger to let him work as an intern in his office in Washington.
For the first time, Cheney went to live in a city with a population of more
than 200,000 people. What happened next occurred with amazing ease and
speed. Having used Knowles as a steppingstone to Steiger, Cheney used
Steiger as a steppingstone to a Nixon appointee named Donald Rumsfeld, then
head of the Office of Economic Opportunity. “What I saw was a young fellow,
intelligent, purposeful, laid-back,” Rumsfeld later remembered, when asked
why he’d hired Cheney. His greatest utility, then and later, was that he
lapped up work that higher-ranking officials were happy to see disappear
from their plates. “He would take a problem, worry it through and move
things to a conclusion,” Rumsfeld recalled.
In 1973, while Nixon was self-destructing, Cheney, then thirty-two, got a
job at the investment firm of Bradley, Woods and Company. “Dick needed to
make some money,” Bruce Bradley explained. “He and Lynne and their girls
lived in a modest house, and he drove a used Volkswagen Beetle.” Both
Bradley and Cheney were Republicans, but they differed on Watergate. Bradley
recognized that Nixon had violated fundamental American values; Cheney saw
Watergate as a power struggle. They even debated each other, in a forum
arranged for Bradley’s clients.
“He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president’s enemies,” says
Bradley. “Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He
said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get
ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let
the other team push back.”
Nixon’s resignation opened the way for Cheney’s first truly astonishing
inside move up. When Gerald Ford succeeded to the presidency, he needed
experienced loyalists by his side who were untainted by the Nixon scandal,
so he named Rumsfeld his chief of staff. Rumsfeld brought Cheney right along
with him into the Oval Office.
The period between August 1974 and November 1976, when Ford lost the
election to Jimmy Carter, is essential to understanding George W. Bush’s
disastrous misjudgments — and Dick Cheney’s role in them. In both cases,
Cheney and Rumsfeld played the key role in turning opportunity into chaos.
Ford, like Bush later, hadn’t been elected president. As he entered office,
he was overshadowed by a secretary of state (Kissinger then, Powell later)
who was considered incontestably his better. Ford was caught as flat-footed
by the fall of Saigon in April 1975 as Bush was by the September 2001
attacks. A better president, with more astute advisers, might have arranged
a more orderly ending to the long and divisive war. But instead of heeding
the country’s desire for honesty and reconciliation, Rumsfeld and Cheney
convinced Ford that the way to turn himself into a real president was to
stir up crises in international relations while lurching to the right in
domestic politics.
Having turned Ford into their instrument, Rumsfeld and Cheney staged a
palace coup. They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger,
tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and remove
Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was
named secretary of defense, and Cheney became chief of staff to the
president. The Yale dropout and draft dodger was, at the age of thirty-four,
the second-most-powerful man in the White House.
As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the immense powers
they had arrogated to themselves to persuade Ford to scuttle the Salt II
treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford turn back Reagan’s
challenge for the party’s nomination — but at the cost of ceding the heart
of the GOP to the New Right. Then, in the presidential election, Jimmy
Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes.
In his first test-drive at the wheels of power, Cheney had played a central
role in the undoing of a president. Wrote right-wing columnist Robert Novak,
“White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney . . . is blamed by Ford insiders
for a succession of campaign blunders.” Those in the old elitist wing of the
party thought the decision to dump Rockefeller was both stupid and wrong: “I
think Ford lost the election because of it,” one of Kissinger’s former aides
says now. Ford agreed, calling it “the biggest political mistake of my
life.”
Back in Wyoming, Cheney used his connections to skim along to yet another
success. “Some fellows from Casper called me,” recalls former Sen. Alan
Simpson, “told me they had found this amazing young man and were going to
promote him for Con-gress. They gave a big to-do for him. I went to take a
look. It was the first time I set eyes on Dick Cheney. You could tell right
away he was a smart cookie.” In the 1978 election, Cheney became Wyoming’s
sole member of the House.
“The top people had decided it would be Dick, so that basically settled it,”
recalls John Perry Barlow, a fourth-generation Wyomingite who campaigned for
Cheney. “Dick had been chief of staff to a president. That made everyone
assume he knew what he was doing.”
In an overwhelmingly Republican state, Cheney now had a safe seat in
Congress for as long as he wanted. On Capitol Hill, he combined a moderate
demeanor with a radical agenda. People who find Cheney’s extremism as vice
president surprising have not looked at his congressional voting record. In
1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe
Drinking Water Act. He fought efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed
tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for
the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He
opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa. He even
voted for cop-killer bullets.
“I don’t believe he is an ideologue,” says former Sen. Tim Wirth of
Colorado. “But he is the most partisan politician I’ve ever met.” Many
weekends, while Congress was in session, Wirth and Cheney would take the
same flight to Chicago, where they’d change planes for Colorado and Wyoming.
“I spent a lot of time waiting for planes with Dick Cheney,” Wirth, a
Democrat, says. “He never talked about ideology. He talked about how the
Republicans were going to take over the House of Representatives.” Wirth
adds, “It seemed impossible, but that’s exactly what happened.”
Cheney knew precisely who should lead the GOP takeover. “Dick and Lynne had
their eyes on the speakership,” says Professor Fred Holborn of the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “He and Lynne wrote a book
on the speakership.” As the subtitle of Kings of the Hill indicates, it is
about how “powerful men changed the course of American history” through
control of the House.
Cheney’s strategy for gaining power was the same one he and Rumsfeld had
foisted on Ford: making sure no one in the Republican Party outflanked him
to the right. This was a deeply divisive approach, because it involved
pandering to racial and religious extremists and using complex matters of
national security as flag-waving wedge issues. “Dick’s votes against civil
rights and the environment were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing
his own power,” says Barlow, his former supporter.
In 1988, Cheney was named House minority whip, the second-ranking post in
his party’s hierarchy. Had he stayed in the House, it is possible that he
would have become speaker. But the following year, another powerful person
decided to confer great nonelective power on Cheney. When President George
H.W. Bush named him to head the Defense Department, the Senate unanimously
confirmed the choice. Not a single senator seems to have considered it
anomalous that control of the strongest armed forces on earth was being
conferred on a person who had gone to notable lengths to avoid service in
those same armed forces.
Appointed to another powerful position, Cheney promptly went about screwing
it up. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and
began moving “defense intellectuals” with no military experience into key
posts at the Pentagon. Most notable among them was Paul Wolfowitz, who later
masterminded much of the disastrous strategy that George W. Bush has pursued
in Iraq. In 1992, as undersecretary of defense, Wolfowitz turned out a
forty-page report titled “Defense Planning Guidance,” arguing that historic
allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the
modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should
the democratization of Russia. “We must maintain the mechanisms for
deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role,” the report declared. It was nothing less than a blueprint for
worldwide domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the
president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the
proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, immediately rejected them.
By the end of the first Bush administration, others had come to the
conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. “They were referred
to collectively as the crazies,” recalls Ray McGovern, a CIA professional
who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around
the same time, McGovern remembers, Secretary of State James Baker and
National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President
Bush, “Keep these guys at arm’s length.”
In November 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Cheney had his
second president shot out from under him. He knocked around Washington at
various neoconservative think tanks for two years, and the old pattern
repeated itself: Powerful benefactors once again gave Cheney a big break. As
Dan Briody recounts in his book The Halliburton Agenda, Cheney was on a
fishing trip in New Brunswick, Canada, with a group of high-powered
corporate CEOs. “The men were discussing the ongoing search for a CEO at
Halliburton,” Briody reports. “Cheney was asleep back at the lodge and, in
his absence, the men decided that Cheney would be the man for the job,
despite the fact that he had never worked in the oil business.”
Halliburton was Cheney’s first real chance to get rich; he grabbed it with
both hands. His principal action was his acquisition of a subsidiary called
Dresser Industries. Dresser struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein;
Halliburton did business with Muammar el-Qaddafi and the ayatollahs of Iran.
By the time Cheney left in 2000, Halliburton’s stock was near an all-time
high of fifty-four dollars a share. Then it turned out that Dresser had
saddled Halliburton with asbestos lawsuits that could cost the company
millions, and the stock plummeted to barely ten dollars a share. Even with
the bounce Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put
$100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would
have less than $60,000 today. Cheney, meanwhile, continues to receive
$150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, even though he is
supposed to divest himself of all conflicts of interest. The company has
been awarded $8 billion in contracts by the Bush-Cheney administration for
its work in Iraq.
It could be argued that the vice presidency was the first job Cheney got
entirely on his own — by appointing himself to it. Bush initially asked
Cheney only to advise him on whom to choose. After assuring Bush that he
himself had no ambition to be vice president, Cheney then arranged it so
that all options narrowed down to him.
Since Cheney lived in Texas at the time, choosing him led Bush into a
situation that, if the words of our Founding Fathers still have any meaning,
is unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids a state’s electors from voting
for candidates for president and vice president who are both “an inhabitant
of the same state as themselves.” Yet by voting for Bush and Cheney,
electors in Texas did precisely that. Cheney lived in Texas, had a Texas
driver’s license and filed his federal income tax using a Texas address. He
had also voted in Texas, not in Wyoming, a state where he had not lived
full-time for decades.
As vice president, Cheney has been the decisive force pushing America into
war. In the inner councils of the administration, it was he who emasculated
Colin Powell, cut the State Department out of effective policymaking,
foisted fake reports on the intelligence agencies and supplanted the
National Security Council. It was also Cheney who placed appointees
personally loyal to him, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, in charge of the
Pentagon and speckled the warmaking bureaucracy with desk officers culled
from neoconservative Washington think tanks — ideologues with no military
experience.
“They were like cancer cells,” says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who
worked on the Defense Department’s Near East and South Asia desk during the
buildup to the Iraq war. “They didn’t care about the truth. They had an
agenda. I’d never seen anything like it. They deformed everything.”
Even within the State Department, officials of Cheney’s choosing — not
Powell’s — controlled the key positions when it came to maneuvering the
United States into the Iraq war. “Even when there was a show of Defense
listening to State, it was just one Cheney operative talking to another,”
says Greg Thielmann, a former member of the State Department Intelligence
Agency. “We were simply bypassed from the start.”
Over at Defense, competent intelligence professionals were purged in order
to ease the way to war. Douglas Feith, brought in under Rumsfeld to serve as
undersecretary of defense for policy, applied an ideological test to his
staff: He didn’t want competence; he wanted fervor. Col. Pat Lang, a Middle
East expert who served under five presidents, Republican and Democratic, in
key posts in military intelligence, recalls being considered for a job at
the Pentagon. During the job interview, Feith scanned Lang’s impressive
resume. “I see you speak Arabic,” Feith said. When Lang nodded, Feith said,
“Too bad,” and dismissed him.
Cheney suffered his biggest failure in March 2002, when he visited nine Arab
and Muslim countries six months after the 9/11 attacks. The vice president
anticipated a triumphal tour of the region as, one by one, he enlisted the
countries he visited in the cause of “taking out” Saddam Hussein. In the
end, not a single country Cheney visited provided troops for the Bush-Cheney
war — including staunch American allies in Jordan and Turkey — and almost
all refused to let their territory be used for the attack.
Once again, however, Cheney did not let reality dissuade him from his
course. As the disaster has unfolded in Iraq, he has continued to insist
against all evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that
the dictator was aiding Al Qaeda, that nothing the Bush administration has
done was a mistake. Those who have known him over the years remain astounded
by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts
and feelings of others. “He has the least interest in human beings of anyone
I have ever met,” says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s
freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: “If I could ask Dick one
question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.”
It’s a question Cheney is unlikely ever to answer. Throughout the years, he
has sealed himself off from the possibility of such inquiries. The most
famous example is his draft evasion during the Vietnam War. He has never
candidly discussed his feelings about the war, the traumatic, formative
event for American males of his age. Only once, in fact, has he even
answered a question as to why he avoided serving.
“I had other priorities,” was all he has ever said.
Really did have other priorities didn’t you?…
It’s called: “We three kings of Orient are; Bearing gifts we TRAVERNED afar…
Santa Fe’s Burning of the Dark Forces of Gloom and Doom
Zozobra’s Last Dance
Oh – NO – Not again!
GoodBye
GoodBye
GoodBye
The burning of Zozobra is the excuse Santa Fe uses each year to get crazy – this year there was a monsoonal storm – so they had a new kind of crazy going on – he-haw…
On a Clear Day you can see Flowers – EVERYWHERE… 
Thanks to the very generous monsoon this year – wait til winter… brr… Seeing the wooly worms or caterpillars – button up your overcoat – when the wind blows free – Take good care of yourself…
In the meantime are these flowers awesome?
There is an abundance of the Purple Russian Sage – too. TYGS!
