Happy Holidays!

If you are an American, and if you believe in God, regardless of your religion, or lack thereof, know this------ people are being murdered every day in YOUR name. We are ALL responsible for this whether we ever supported Bush or not. The Bush administration has turned us all into murderers. Not liberators, but murderers. Ask yourself what your God would think of that.
Oh, and be very careful unwrapping those presents, you have blood on your hands. Be part of the solution or remain a part of the problem. Maybe it's time to take stock and rethink who and what we are and who it is we want to be. You have the power. Use it.

Congratulations, California!

You now have even more BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS! I keep wondering when we are going to evolve into genuine human beings who see that we have no right to take a life. And for ANYONE who participated (in ANY way) in this most recent execution, it is not only living in your conscience, but it has taken up permanent residence in your soul. Think about it.

Now I am Truly Faced With a Tough Decision

I'm a confessed chocoholic. And, now I find out this "sweet" little piece of news:

Nestle USA
The problem of illegal and forced child labor is rampant in the chocolate industry, because more than 40% of the world's cocoa supply comes from the Ivory Coast, a country that the US State Department estimates had approximately 109,000 child laborers working in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms. In 2001, Save the Children Canada reported that 15,000 children between 9 and 12 years old, many from impoverished Mali, had been tricked or sold into slavery on West African cocoa farms, many for just $30 each.
Nestle, the third largest buyer of cocoa from the Ivory Coast, is well aware of the tragically unjust labor practices taking place on the farms with which it continues to do business. Nestle and other chocolate manufacturers agreed to end the use of abusive and forced child labor on cocoa farms by July 1, 2005, but they failed to do so.
Nestle is also notorious for its aggressive marketing of infant formula in poor countries in the 1980s. Because of this practice, Nestle is still one of the most boycotted corporations in the world, and its infant formula is still controversial. In Italy in 2005, police seized more than two million liters of Nestle infant formula that was contaminated with the chemical isopropylthioxanthone (ITX).
Additionally, violations of labor rights are reported from Nestle factories in numerous countries. In Colombia, Nestle replaced the entire factory staff with lower-wage workers and did not renew the collective employment contract.

Yes, We Miss You John

And some of us still IMAGINE.

Those Wacky Christians!

Why on earth would a Christian want to be in the House of God to celebrate God's son's birthday?!

Some megachurches closing on Christmas
Pastors anticipate low attendance because day falls on Sunday
(AP) -- This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country.
Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anticipating low attendance on what they call a family day.
Critics within the evangelical community, more accustomed to doing battle with department stores and public schools over keeping religion in Christmas, are stunned by the shutdown.
It is almost unheard of for a Christian church to cancel services on a Sunday, and opponents of the closures are accusing these congregations of bowing to secular culture.
"This is a consumer mentality at work: 'Let's not impose the church on people. Let's not make church in any way inconvenient,' " said David Wells, professor of history and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical school in Hamilton, Massachusetts.
"I think what this does is feed into the individualism that is found throughout American culture, where everyone does their own thing."
Resource considerations
The churches closing on Christmas plan multiple services in the days leading up to the holiday, including on Christmas Eve.
Most normally do not hold Christmas Day services, preferring instead to mark the holiday in the days and night before.
But Sunday worship has been a Christian practice since ancient times.
Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources.
The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.
"If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don't go to church, how likely is it that they'll be going to church on Christmas morning?" she said.
Among the other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Kentucky, near Lexington, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside Dallas.
North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, outside Atlanta, said on its Web site that no services will be held on Christmas Day or New Year's Day, which also falls on a Sunday. A spokesman for North Point did not respond to requests for comment.

One Nation, Under God, With Liberty and Justice for All!

And God would be so very, very proud of us:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USAPRESS RELEASE
November 29, 2005
United States Executed 1,000, As 70 Nations Abolished Death Penalty
AIUSA Says System Too Plagued With Error and Bias To Be Fair, Just or Necessary
(Washington, D.C.)
With the United States poised to carry out the 1,000th state-sanctioned execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), along with a broad spectrum of human rights organizations and social justice groups, is calling on state and federal authorities to immediately end all executions. Since 1976, more than 120 of 194 countries are abolitionists in law or practice.
"One hundred and twenty two individuals have been exonerated from death row since 1973, meaning that one wrongfully convicted person has been released for every eight that have been executed," said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director, AIUSA. "Where else has the government been allowed to make this many serious mistakes before the public demanded change? Public officials should take note of both the gruesome nature of this milestone and the failures of a system that is allowed to function with such a high error rate. If they do, they will clearly see that the time to abolish the death penalty is long overdue."
Statistics in the United States mirror the international trend toward abolition. Since the late 1990s, U.S. death sentences have declined by more than 50 percent. Executions are down by 40% since 1999, and the size of death row has declined every year since 2001. New York recently abandoned the death penalty, and Illinois and New Jersey have a hold on executions as numerous questions are being raised about the fairness and effectiveness of the capital punishment system. Persistent questions about whether the death penalty is applied accurately and fairly have resulted in greater public skepticism and raised serious doubts about capital punishment among many state and national officials.
Dr. Schulz went on to say, "The 1,000 executions remind us of the more than 1,500 murder victims that had families and friends. The victims and the people who knew and loved them all deserve justice. However, AIUSA does not believe that justice and the death penalty are synonymous. It is impossible for a system so fundamentally plagued with error and bias to be fair, just or necessary."
Of the 122 wrongfully convicted people who have been released from death row, many were economically disadvantaged, people of color and those who had little or no access to competent counsel. Many suffered from mental retardation or were child offenders--groups that are exempt from the death penalty under international human rights standards. Others suffered from severe mental illness. Additionally, the US Supreme Court has since ruled that executing child offenders and those suffering from mental retardation is unconstitutional.
Eighty percent of all executions have been carried out in the South and concentrated in only a handful of states. Nearly half of the 1,000 executions took place in two states--Texas and Virginia.

I'd really love to meet this God of yours who sanctions murder, but only if he/she's in a REALLY good mood that day! If I believed in your God, I couldn't wait to die to escape his/her wrath! You American Fundmentalist Christians really are a HOOT! You know about as much about God as I do about rocket science (well, maybe not THAT much!).

God, I wish I could have one semi-original thought!

But since that seems unlikely at the moment, chew on this:

Donald Rumsfeld Is Mad As a Hatter
By Stephen Pizzo, News for RealPosted on December 6, 2005,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is mad. No, I mean seriously ill. Mentally ill. Demonstrably so.I can't say whether or not he was mad from the start, but I can tell you with some degree of certainty that he is now. And he's getting worse. Each successive news conference he sounds more and more like the character, Dr. Charles Montague, who was head of "The Place for the Very, Very Nervous" in the 1977 Mel Brooks flick, High Anxiety.
Don got so nutty during his weekly news conference last week that Joint Chiefs head, General Pace, had to reel him in; not once, but twice. The first time was when Pace used the accepted term, "insurgents," to describe the indigenous fighters in Iraq.
Rumsfeld interrupted, waving both hands over his head, to announce that over the weekend he had had an epiphany. We've been using the wrong term entirely to describe the Iraqis killing our troops over there, he pronounced from on high. They are not "insurgents," they are "Enemies of the Legally Elected Iraqi Government," or EOLEIGs. (Guess we know now why Donald never made it as a corporate jingle writer.)
Now ask yourself, what kind of person but a nut, would make such a pronouncement at a time when American kids are being blown up by the dozen each week? And to do so with such pompous grandiosity, on TV, and to cynical, hard-boiled reporters! Only a madman, a person so deeply confused in his own mind that he thinks his absurd ruling actually is contributing to a solution.
What on earth was he thinking? Actually, nothing new. Renaming fighters in Iraq has become a veritable hobby for Don. He's been re-branding the Iraqi fighters since the day we arrived there. Before the war even started he didn't even have a term for them because, he assured us, there would be no opposition to a U.S. attack on their country. But after Saddam was gone and U.S. troops started dying, Don told the same TV cameras to pay them no attention because, he said then, they were just a handful of "Dead-Enders" (D.E.'s).
As conditions in Rumsfeld's newly liberated Iraq deteriorated further, he renamed them again. No longer Dead Enders, they were now "Foreign Terrorist Fighters." And better yet, he said, they had been reduced to a rag-tag bunch that were "in their last throes."
Once Rumsfeld was done revealing his renaming epiphany he gave the microphone back to a clearly embarrassed General Pace. The general was faced with the choice of joining his boss in Looneyland, or using the now banned term, insurgents. Instead he said, Yeah, what he just said.
If Rumsfeld says such nutty things right on TV, you can imagine the thoughts he shares with subordinates back in the privacy of his office at the Pentagon. Where Yeah, what he just said becomes the day's marching orders.
The second time General Pace had to reel Rumsfeld in was when Pace was asked by reporters if U.S. troops in Iraq were supposed to step in and stop Iraqi troops from abusing fellow Iraqis. Pace was in the process of giving the right answer (Yes), when Don-in-the-Box popped up again. "No, no that's not their job," he corrected the general.
Pace had no choice. "Ah, well, yes sir, but if our troops are there they are supposed to stop such behavior."
The look on Rumsfeld's face was the same look parents get when they tell their teenagers, "If your friends start drinking or using drugs you leave that party and come straight home!" You know the look -- the eyeballs rollup as the head jerks dismissively to one side.
From that look it was clear that Rumsfeld believes that, while U.S. troops had the right to invade Iraq, topple its government and occupy the country, they have no business telling Iraqis not to beat, torture or kill their own folks. Not our job, he says. (Administration vice-enabler, Dick Cheney, appears to agree.)
So we now have a certifiable loon in charge of the most powerful military on the face of the earth. Shouldn't someone do something? I mean, if Bush insists on having a nut in this post, at least hire a harmless nut. The world is full of them. He could find less nutty nuts downtown in any major city. Pick one with less dangerous notions than Don has. That way the weekly Pentagon news conferences would continue being ever so entertaining, but fewer people would get killed.
It's time for someone to tell Donald Rumsfeld, "No more fruit cup for you!"
Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Democratic Party Plan for Iraq

IT'S NOT THEIR JOB TO COME UP WITH ONE BECAUSE IT IS NOT THEIR WAR. Hello! Every single right-wing news commentator is saying, "Where's the Democrat's plan to get us out of Iraq?" Well, my question is, why should they have one???!!!!! Bush got us in ON HIS OWN and now he can damn well get us out ON HIS OWN. It is not the job of the Democratic Party to BAIL OUT GEORGE BUSH. This is just silliness. Come on people. Open those peepers! If I were a Democratic Congressperson or Senator (perish the thought!) I'd say, Hell, no, I'm not giving you a plan. Go figure it out for yourself. It's YOUR mistake so YOU fix it! That's not my job!!!! Bill O'Reilly is especially good at this. "Where's the Democrats' Plan?!" Well, Bill, why in the hell should they even have one. The Whitehouse is Republican, the Senate is Republican, the Congress is Republican, so it sure as hell seems like an All-Republican issue to me. I say the Dems should be sitting back watching the Repugnicans making total asses out of themselves, with their feet up, a good book beside them, and a refreshing drink in their hands. War, smar.... Not my problem!