Corporate Low-Down Depot Mart

A very important message about the further destruction of the Gulf Coast environment by Lowes, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart. Please share this video with your friends. We must stop the destruction of one of the barriers that help protect us from the ravages of Mother Nature.

Well the neo-cons are at it again!!

This time they are comparing the pardon of Mark Rich by Clinton to the commutation of Scooter Libby by Bush. Their argument is that Clinton did it why shouldn't Bush? As usual their comparisons and arguments don't hold up.

Some differences between the two cases are:

1 - Rich didn't jeopardize national security; Libby did

2 - Rich didn't place the lives of operatives that Valerie Plame dealt with in jeopardy (we still don't know if her exposure by Libby caused deaths); Libby did

3 - Rich was never convicted of a crime...he was INDICTED on charges of tax evasion and suspicion of having conducted illegal trades with Iran at the time of the Iran Hostage crisis

One thing I find interesting about this case is that Scooter Libby represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000 and supported the pardon. As a matter of fact in a letter to the NY Times Clinton noted that Libby was one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported Rich's pardon.

Presidential Scholars 2007 Petition U.S. President Bush

A couple of weeks ago Bush met with 137 high school students, all of them Presidential Scholars. The meeting took place in front of the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. One of the students presented him with a hand written letter that had been signed by 50 of the students urging him to stop the torture of ALL prisoners. He read the letter and told the students that the United States does not torture.

Here is an interview with two of the students that drafted and signed the letter. One of the interviewees presented the letter to Bush. I urge you all to take the time to watch this video. It is very inspiring and heartening to realize that there are young people like these two young ladies that are willing to step forward and protest what is going on.

Ever hear of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)? I forget how I got to their web site; it looked interesting so I did some exploring and came across a map that showed the number of hate groups, as of 2006, in the U.S. by state. Take a look:

Active U.S. Hate Groups in 2006. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project counted 844 active hate groups in the United States in 2006. Only organizations and their chapters known to be active during 2006 are included. Go here to see a map to find out more about hate groups.

If you click on Mississippi you will see that we have 28 hate groups. The groups are comprised of every manner of ideology you might think of. I was surprised to see that their was a chapter of the KKK right here on the coast. It is located in Bay St. Louis. In addition there is one in Kiln.

In Lucedale we have a chapter of the Church of Southern Identity. The SPLC defines the Church of Southern Identity as a:

Church of The Christian Identity religion asserts that whites, not Jews, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. In most of its forms, Identity theology depicts Jews as biologically descended from Satan, while non-whites are seen as soulless "mud people" created with the other Biblical "beasts of the field." Christian Identity has its roots in a 19th-century English fad called British Israelism, which asserted that European whites were descended from the ten "lost tribes" of Israel and were thus related to Jews, who were descended from the other two Hebrew tribes mentioned in the Bible. But British Israelism, which was initially friendly to Jews, was adopted and transformed in the 20th century into a rabidly anti-Semitic creed by a number of racist preachers in the United States.

Here is a link to the map of Mississippi

One day a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in my front room watching the latest Democracy Now program when I heard a knock at the door. I went to the door to see who it was. It turned out to be one of the many candidates for tax collector of Jackson County. By way of introduction he told me his name and that he was a Republican. I shook his hand and told him that he might very well be a nice man but that I couldn't vote for him in the primary because I vote strictly Democrat, especially since the jerk in the White House has ruined this country with his illegal war in Iraq. He proceeded to try to justify the Iraq war with the same old tired neo-con, and completely false, rhetoric that we had to attack Iraq to revenge the 9/11 attack on the U.S. I had heard that there were people out there that still believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, but this is the first time I had ever met one. I don't mind telling you that I was taken aback by the fact that any individual running for political office could actually still believe that Iraq was involved, was scary.

I tried to enlighten him by telling him that 13 of the 15 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and that Iraq was not involved in any way shape or form. He then tried the old WMD and al-Quaeda link ploy; I quickly shot those down. I told him that I supported Bush when he went into Afghanistan after the REAL bad guys, but when he decided to let bin Laden go and pulled out the majority of our troops to go invade the sovereign and completely innocent country of Iraq, he lost not only my support but eventually the support of the majority of Americans. He continued the right wing rhetoric about various issues. A couple of times during the conversation I asked him if he was a Fox News watcher, he completely ignored me, however near the end of the back and forth he finally admitted that he was a Fox News watcher. I told him that he really needed to start watching other news programs so he could get informed as to what is really going on in the world. Needless to say he wasn't at all happy with my suggestion.

As I pointed out earlier the fact that ANYBODY running for ANY position no matter how non-political it may be, is so uninformed is scary. We must all be on the look out for these individuals.