Earlier this week, I wrote a blog regarding my early feeling on the protests occurring on Wall Street. It was an honest and heartfelt ponderence, and one that has provided much good debate. Debate is something I enjoy.

I still wonder about what is going to happen. I cannot stress enough that I want this movement to succeed. Please allow me to further pontificate.
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86 comments (Latest Comment: 09/30/2011 03:34:44 by livingonli)

Good Morning.

Today is our 3,114th day in Iraq, and our 3,642nd day in Afghanistan.

We'll start this morning as we always do; with the latest casualty figures from our ongoing wars, courtesy of antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4476
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4337
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3617
Since Obama Inauguration (1/20/09): 248
Since Operation New Dawn: 48

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 318
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,782
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 953
Contractor Employee Deaths - Iraq: 1,487
Journalists - Iraq : 348
Academics Killed - Iraq: 448

We find this morning's cost of war passing through:

$ 1, 255, 358, 750, 000 . 00
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56 comments (Latest Comment: 09/28/2011 04:14:58 by livingonli)

Good morning.

Well, we continue the downward spiral to dumb or dumberest in the Republican field. Recently, we actually had to argue whether to fund disaster relief. Really?! Yes, really. Though we continue to fund contracts for war and subsidizing Big Oil. Sheesh.

And, I keep hearing these same people whining about taxpayer dollars helping an American business, Solyndra, that sadly went bankrupt, but not one peep about how much of our money went to funding Haliburton and its' subsidies for killing innocent people and a few of our own soldiers. Not one investigation.
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8 comments (Latest Comment: 09/26/2011 01:07:31 by clintster)

Hundreds of years ago, our country was settled by refugees from England, escaping the tyranny of a state-imposed religion. They came to the New World where they could practice their religion free from persecution. It was such an important notion to the authors of the Constitution that they specifically included language in the Bill of Rights allowing every citizen to practice their own religion. That freedom - when mixed with self-delusion, ego, and what could certainly pass as schizophrenia has people declaring that God has spoken to them directly, and passing that message along as though they were God's own mouthpiece.
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66 comments (Latest Comment: 09/23/2011 22:56:28 by Mondobubba)

Watching or reading news or "non-fiction" books these days, one often yearns for the "gold old days" of journalism. Back then, the news reported the news, warts and all, and the only "rebuttals" or spin was on the talk shows. We look back to Walter Cronkite or Edward R Murrow, thinking that News Organizations were more honest and unbiased. Never mind that Murrow's "See It Now" show was cancelled after a dispute over providing "equal time" for those painted in an unsavory light by the show. Way back in 1958, he was criticizing how news had become entertainment.

So fast-forward 50 years, and look how far the genre has fallen: We have a serious blur between news and opinion, we have rumor and popular opinion passing as fact ("some say"), and we have tell-all books with quotes from unnamed sources, corroborated by further unnamed sources. Forget the amateur journalism of people like James O'Keefe, who take a couple hours of video and snip it down into pieces and rearrange them chronologically to tell a story that never existed. Respectable journalism is just as unrespectable as ever.
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55 comments (Latest Comment: 09/22/2011 02:44:37 by clintster)