If you thought that last "flash mob" was fun...

I think this one was even better.

Again, let's organize and coordinate some flash mobs like this on the Plaza for Saturday night entertainment with people from all over the city. We could do them in Mill Creek Park.

Anybody game?

This, then, is a "flash mob"

Could we organize these on the Plaza on Saturday nights?

It looks like everyone had a good time, everyone was entertained and no one was intimitdated or hurt and no laws were broken.

Arizona's new slogan

Arizona: Come for the racism. Stay for the Fascism.

Brilliant silver linings to ugly, ugly clouds

The "clouds" I'm speaking of?

The first is Arizona's law against the illegal immigrants, creating their ability to profile and arrest at will.

The silver lining to that one is that it has solidified the immigrants, Hispanics, Liberals and the Left against this law and its tactics and has even now moved the Federal Government to address the situation.

The second "cloud" is the whole mess down in the Gulf of Mexico, with the oil spill.

This just out :

Reuters is reporting that another offshore drilling rig has overturned in the gulf coast, this time in inland waters close to Morgan City, LA.

This has already been predicted to be possibly another of the worst environmental disasters in the country's history, before this 2nd rig went down.

Now?

Fugghedaboudit.

It's going to be one raging, bloody mess.

The "silver lining" to this environmental cloud is you can pretty much forget about expanding drilling for oil off the coasts of the US for the forseeable future.

There's more, too--another beautiful lining to this, I think, because it's believed right now that Halliburton may be culpable for the cementing on the first oil rig that blew.

Sorry, but if someone's to blame for this and it turns out it's Halliburton, that's just the best scenario I can imagine.

Well, it is unless somehow Dick Cheney's signature is on the sign-off for it.


Have a great weekend, y'all.

China---wth??

News out this morning:

5 preschoolers hit with hammer in new China attack

BEIJING – A farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, injuring five, before burning himself to death Friday in China's third such assault in as many days and prompting the government to demand stricter school security nationwide.


More:

The hammer attack follows a rampage Thursday by a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife at a kindergarten. Some 29 students, aged 4 or 5 years old, were wounded, five of them seriously at the school in Taixing city in neighboring Jiangsu province.

And on Wednesday, a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the city of Leizhou in southern Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife. The attacker had been on sick leave from another school since 2006 for mental health problems.

Really. What the heck?

What would cause anyone, especially any adult, to attack children like this?

What is it about the Chinese culture, it would seem, that would cause grown adult men to attack virtually totally defenseless children with knives, as in the first two attacks, and now, here, with a hammer?

I would love to have some psychologist and/or sociologist who knows the Chinese either explain this or study it and get back to us as to why these people acted out like this.

There is this from the article:

Most of the recent school attacks have been blamed on people with personal grudges or mental illness — seen as a growing problem because of feelings of social injustice and alienation in the fast-changing country.

But children? Attacking children?

To save my life I can't figure it out. Mental illness would have to be the closest I could come to 'splainin' this one.

Link to original story here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100430/ap_on_re_as/as_china_students_attacked

A person from Time Magazine's "100 List" you should particularly know about

From Time Magazine's cover story, "100 Most Influential People in the World", there is one person who, it seems to me, we particularly need to know about, so we can learn from her story and change more things for females in the world:

Reem Al Numery

Al Numery was forced to marry her 30-year-old cousin when she was only 12, and her own father threatened to murder her when she fought back and ran away. Yemeni officials refused her petition for a divorce, and she was unable to attend a ceremony in her honor in the U.S. because she was forbidden to leave her home country. "While my hair was styled for the ceremony, I thought of ways to set fire to my wedding dress," she said. "When I protested, my dad gagged me and tied me up. After the wedding, I tried to kill myself twice." She was finally granted a divorce from the Yemeni legal system and is an advocate for ending child marriage. In her tribute in Time, feminist leader Gloria Steinem describes Reem "one of the brave girl children who are risking everything to protest being sold into marriage by fathers and becoming the endangered and uneducated chattel of husbands."

Link to original post here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1847

California: what a mess

Okay, we know California has horrible budget problems, is broke and can't afford, nearly, to even exist but now comes news that they have five of the worst cities , nationally, for air quality, too.

Additionally, and to make matters worse, news out this morning also shows that "Five states — New York, California, Texas, Arizona and Florida — are perilously close to losing out on congressional seats because of lackluster participation in the U.S. census."

(Side note, four of those five have really horrible real estate and economy markets, to boot, to date. You can bet the government officials are screaming at the top of their lungs about now, telling people to fill in those census forms, if it isn't too late, and to get them in.)

California: it sucks to be you.

Can you say "to hell in a handbasket"?

Watch for this: the next food trend

I just saw this article on Yahoo News, from the Food Channel, declaring "The Number One Food..." we "Should Be Eating and Probably Don't" and I figure this is how food trends start.

You watch, soon all the really trendy restaurants in town will start using sardines in more and more entree's and as more and more an option. (They're no doubt already doing it on the coasts, right?).

I always thought they were nasty, stinking little things, myself, though my parents loved them.

Just "heads up".

Have a great day, sardines or no sardines.

Are you paying attention? (Guest post)

A Still Moment

Tuesday 27 April 2010

by: James Howard Kunstler, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: "...this sucker could go down."

It's my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys -- perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak.

It's perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say "this sucker."

Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course -- say, a Midwestern public employees' union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But "this sucker" is something else: a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life -- indeed millions of whole lives -- loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization. "This sucker" was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree.
It's also perhaps useful to define what we mean by "going down." To my mind it means an awful lot of money disappears and nobody can pay for anything and an awful of things that have kept going on promises to pay and to get paid will stop keeping going. I don't think that the idea of money disappears -- that is, paper certificates representing claims on future work -- but there will be a lot less of it to go around. Eventually the idea of money could go, too, at least in its current form as Federal Reserve notes. But mostly for some years it will just be a lot of people, companies, and governments who are broke.
"Going down" will mean a society with no money and an infrastructure for daily life that requires gobs of money to run, and a populace too dazed, confused, and inflamed to do anything useful in the way of organizing new infrastructures for daily life for their new circumstances. In retrospect, the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like "The Philadelphia Story" compared to what we wake up to ten years from now.

President Obama's speech at Cooper Union last week was a remarkable performance. It managed to appear forceful and serious without containing any really serious or forceful proposals to discipline a banking system that is running a hostage-and-ransom racket on civilization. If this is finally what the Obama Experience is all about than his detractors have been right all along: he is a tool. Finance reform aside, there are still plenty of laws left on the statute books that could be applied to the frauds and rackets that ran absolutely amok on Wall Street the past few years. I would still like to know why buying CDS "insurance" against your own issue of bonds deliberately engineered to default is NOT a form of insider trading, to put it as simply as possible.

The SEC action against Goldman Sachs is likely to open a Pandora's box of troubles for that company, and perhaps all of the Too Big To Fail banks. But even so, I believe this sucker is going down before 99.9 percent of it is sorted out. Anyway, there was a lot about the SEC action that seemed curious, to put it mildly, from the timing of it, to the brevity of the document, to the strange fact that it emerged at all from an agency whose principal activity the past few years has been the viewing of internet porn, and which has otherwise behaved so indifferently in the face of numberless offenses to common decency, not to mention the public interest, that it might as well have been staffed by a thousand head of Holstein cows rather than licensed attorneys and graduates of accredited colleges.

This sucker is going down because the train of bankruptcies underway has a remorseless self-reinforcing power to provoke more and more bankruptcies at every stop along the line as every promise to pay is welshed on. The mortgages will not be paid and securities will not pay their investors and the banks will choke on the bad paper promises in their vaults and the pension funds will not pay their beneficiaries and the states and counties and municipalities will go broke and not pay their employees and creditors, and the federal government will not be able to "print" new money in sufficient quantities fast enough to compensate for all the money not being paid up-and-down the line... and one morning we will wake up and discover that all those promises to pay were sham promises based on no productive activity whatsoever... and that will be a sad day. Perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average will hit 35,000 on that day.
Nothing can stop this chain of bankruptcy. It's already baked in the cake. There is probably some wish on the part of those in charge, like Mr. Obama, to try everything possible to postpone it. And there is likewise surely a huge effort underway in the banking sector right now to cream off as much cash as possible so that when this sucker does go down they will bethink themselves better positioned to survive the consequences.

Personally, I believe that the damage was mostly done during the tenure of poor dim George W. Bush, and his predecessor Bill Clinton. I suspect that Mr. Obama learned at the height of 2008 election campaign -- during those days of the Lehman collapse and the TARP -- just how completely the government -- and the people of the USA -- were in fact hostage to the banking system, and that it has been his unfortunate role to pretend that there is some other fate to bargain for besides this sucker going down. It is probably why he continues to smoke so much. He must be lighting one Marlboro off the tip of another, one after another, in whatever inner sanctum he repairs to when the midnight chimes toll around the White House. It's sad to think of this graceful, still rather young man going down in history as the chump-of-the-century, a reincarnation of Herbert Hoover on steroids, with sugar on top.

Animosities brewing as they are among the white trash elements of the country, I just hope this sucker doesn't resolve into an ugly bout of attempted ethnic cleansing. Certainly Obama's racial make-up has inspired a revival of the Ku Klux spirit around the Nascar ovals. I'm sincerely worried that the misdeeds of people name Blankfein, Rubin, and Madoff could provoke a red-white-and-blue pogrom.

The big mystery for the moment is how come a few good men of stature in important places have not stepped forward to say the right thing or do the right deed. How come no US congressperson challenged the knavish behavior of Republicans who condone malicious idiocy that they know to be false like the so-called "birther" activity. How come no putative "progressive" has called the Democrats on their disingenuous failure to call illegal immigrants what they are. How come no state attorney general has filed charges against TBTF bank misconduct even if the US attorney general lies in state over at the US DOJ. How come no political figure of any stripe has called for the resignation of Summers, Rubin, Gensler and other Goldman Sachs "sleepers" infesting high levels of government. How come Dylan Ratigan is the only visible figure in any major newsroom willing to identify the precise nature of the meta-swindle.
When this sucker goes down, our primary task will be reorganizing American life on a much more local and de-complexified basis. It's a very big assignment and especially daunting against a possible background of political disorder. The losses will be epic and the changes severe, but it doesn't have to mean the end of recognizably American culture. There will be very little money around, and it may end up being a certificate backed by gold issued by a bank other than the Federal Reserve. Or maybe we'll just be swapping stuff for the makings of dinner.

So many forces are roiling around 'out there' now that it's hard to believe that the authorities in government and banking can keep the illusion of normality going a whole lot longer. The possible litigation against Goldman Sachs-style frauds by a thousand aggrieved victims is enough to paralyze the system. Meanwhile, trillions in credit default swaps are ticking away like dirty bombs. Greece is going down, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and the UK standing by to go next. Nobody can pay their bills. Before long, the old folks won't get their checks. Then the poor folks. Lately, I wonder if there will even be an election six months from now.
______________________

Sure, keep in mind it's James Kunstler (if you don't know of him, his work or viewpoints go to Wikipedia), but he's got some very valid points.

More--but from me--tomorrow.

Link to post:
http://www.truthout.org/james-howard-kunstler-a-still-moment58898

Arizona and Iran: A lot in common

First it was Arizona legalizing profiling and arrests of Hispanics and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, in their quest to purify their state. We all heard about that.

Now, Arizonans can see how much they have in common with that beacon of intelligence, open-mindedness and acceptance, Iran, by coincidence, since they may begin arresting women there who are suntanned , since more scantily-clothed women are against fundamentalist Islamic law.

Stay classy, Arizona.

Classy, open-minded, intelligent and accepting.

Bill Kristol, protector of corporations

Protect those companies, Bill, you butt-kisser, you.

Shove your nose up there a little farther.

There's a towel on the chair, on your way out.

We agree to pay a half-billion dollar fine but no, we deny any wrongdoing

Did you see this?

The federal government on Tuesday reached a $520 million settlement with pharmaceutical manufacturer AstraZeneca, resolving allegations of illegal marketing of the company's antipsychotic drug Seroquel.

At a news conference, Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made the case a centerpiece of the federal government's crackdown on health care fraud.

AstraZeneca allegedly marketed Seroquel for off-label uses — those not approved by federal drug regulators — including insomnia and psychiatric conditions other than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

U.S. Attorney Michael Levy of Philadelphia, where the settlement was filed, said that the company had "turned patients into guinea pigs in an unsupervised drug test."

AstraZeneca, which has its U.S. headquarters in Wilmington, Del., faces more than 25,000 product liability lawsuits over Seroquel, with most alleging that the drug caused diabetes. Seroquel has been on the market since 1997.

The government said AstraZeneca paid kickbacks to doctors recruited to serve as authors of articles by Astra Zeneca and the company's agents about the unapproved uses of Seroquel.

The company also made payments to doctors to travel to resort locations to advise AstraZeneca about marketing messages for unapproved uses of the drug, the government stated.

AstraZeneca denied the allegations leveled by the government in the civil case settled Tuesday, saying it wanted to avoid the delay, uncertainty and expense of a protracted legal battle.

Right.

You, AstraZeneca, just paid more than a HALF BILLION DOLLARS to the Federal Government but you "deny any allegations..."

Right.

And Goldman Sachs is an honest, forthright company that didn't swindle the America people.

Got it.

Link to original story:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100427/ap_on_bi_ge/us_doj_astrazeneca

What I'm concerned we're going to get for financial reform

So it begins--it took one month

Royals in last place after 9-7 loss to Twins in 12 innings



Link to original story:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/04/24/1900711/twins-9-royals-7-after-12-innings.html

Video TKC will love (and since it's Bill Maher, you know I do)

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/bill-maher-the-problem-in-this-country-is-older-white-people/

To quote Representative Alan Grayson: "The forces of white Christianity are fighting back."

A week old but still good and certainly appropos

Have a great weekend, y'all.

What all media 'round the world should have done, long ago

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
South Park Death Threats
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I said a long time ago, all the media, 'round the world, should run a cartoon of Mohammed on their op/ed page, all on the same day so we can all move past this. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are the only ones, apparently, who have the cajone's to stand up to this neanderthal, 2nd century way of thinking.

From a man who led in war

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

--Former President and Five Star General Dwight D. Eisenower



We need to stop feeding the war machine.

Money for the war machine, instead of for here, peace and sanity

Go to this link to compare what's been spent on war, instead of having spent it otherwise:

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/tradeoffs

Quote of the day--on our interminable war(s)

"The LA Times offers an eye-opening example of just how far our mission in Afghanistan has "creeped," describing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling an Afghan leader that the goals of the upcoming surge in Kandahar include "providing jobs." Is that really why we are still fighting a war there nine years later, spending American blood and treasure? The Bush-era rationale for these overseas misadventures was always: We'll fight 'em over there, so we don't have to fight 'em over here. Today, it seems, we're fighting to create jobs for 'em over there, while we don't have enough jobs for our people over here. At a time when so many hardworking middle class families are reeling from the economic crisis that seems like the most perverted of priorities."

--Ariana Huffington
The Huffington Post

Link to original post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/guns-vs-butter-2010_b_548620.html

Happy Earth Day

Happy 40th Anniversary.

It was 40 years ago this year, I imagine you've heard, that we started this "Earth Day", when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Ohio.

Thank goodness that doesn't happen anymore.

But that sewer we call Brush Creek--and a whole lot more like them--are all over the country and we're not taking care of them.

And then there is what China is doing to that whole quarter of the planet.

I think pages and pages can be written, right now, on what we can and should do to better treat our planet--and so, ourselves--so we're not polluting or damaging it and doing damage, then, to ourselves.

I'll only mention a couple, here, now:

First, I think it's obvious we need to stop poisoning our world with the chemicals and pesticides we've been using so heavily and with such ugly, damaging results (in spite of what Monsanto and the chemical companies say).

Between the fish kills, the "dead zone" out in the Gulf of Mexico and the die-off of so many millions of bees worldwide, it seems obvious we're poisoning the world we need in order to survive.

The second thing we ought to do, it seems clear, is to stop "mountaintop removal" that the coal companies are using to get their coal ever so much cheaper.

"Mountaintop removal."

How could anyone, anywhere claim that this "mountainto removal" is anything but horribly damaging to the riverways and entire area surrounding what was removed and damaged?

It's indefensible.

We need to push our representatives in Washington and everywhere we can to stop this and as soon as possible.

I think it should be one of the things at the top of our list this Earth Day, 2010.

Now, go recycle some paper, cans, plastics and more today and pick up some trash.

Let's celebrate Earth Day this year and make this a better place to be.

Quote for the day--note to Kansas City

“But we're all in the same boat now, and we've got to learn to work together.”

--Dorothy Height

Notes on last night's Country Music Awards

Okay, so I was home AND READING--I swear I was reading--and had the television on and NOTHING was on, not even three channels of KCPT/PBS so I confess, I flipped it over to the Academy of Country Music Awards (not to be confused, apparently, with the Country Music Awards--??) so I just had to make a few notes.

1) Randy Travis looks more and more like Lyle Lovett all the time, don't you think? Do you suppose they were separated at birth or something? (Note to Randy Travis: come out of the closet, dude. You have a load of money. What could it hurt?).

2) The people in the audience kill me. Everyone's always singing along with the live performers who are on stage, performing their own songs, so that they--the people in the audience--can a) look like they care and b) get on live television. They're singing along so giddily it's embarassing. But if it isn't for the laughs like this, why watch, right?

3) Thank the heavens above Brooks and Dunn are retiring. Yikes. How overdue is that? And while we're at it, why does Brooks look so alive, awake and healthy--even younger--while Dunn looks like total, old-aged crap? It's an awful comparison. In the meantime, though they're retiring, they're milking they're exit for all it's worth, with a TV show and tour, the whole thing.

4) I swear, if one more person on the show thanked God for their success, I was going to have to have a Transfiguration, right there in my living room. This is what happens, though, when religious people--particularly fundamentalists--and right-wingers have to set out to prove that they're the most believing of all believers. It's disgusting.

5) Okay, someone tell me what the draw is for a performer to come out live on stage with a video camera, filming the audience he's supposed to be performing for, ala' Keith Urban, toward the end. What the hell is that about? Who cares but the few people in the front row?

6) And Keith, your song sucked. Just sayin'.

7) Finally, right at the end, Darius Rucker--formerly lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish--comes out and sings a song and it hit me--this is the first Black person on the whole show. It killed me. AND HE WAS THE LAST PERFORMER. Notes on this note:

--He was so obviously, I hate to say it but it's true, a "token";

--He's far too talented to be pawned off like this;

--I wasn't sure if I was watching a Tea Party protest or the Republican National Convention or what;

--Suddenly, it was as though he were Michael Steele, but in a much more pleasant way, certainly.

What a show it was. What didn't repel me made me laugh.

Oh, and just so you know they aren't all "backwards" 'n stuff, they even have one o' them thar website thingys": www.acmcountry.com

Quote of the day--on this President and too many Americans

"As Frank Rich elucidated in his NYTimes column on April 18th, it doesn't take a DNA swab to figure out that Race (like it's other equally monosyllabic cousin Sex) is at the root of it. As simple as black and white, the reasons for the rise in so-called populist anger, while marginally about generations of dissatisfaction with the inevitably bureauocratic and crony-encrusted political process, are only now becoming clearly defined when the nation's most lionized authority figure---the president---is the incarnation of the racist's nightmare."

Link to original post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/idiots-unite-you-have-not_b_542908.html

Two breaking news stories on the Catholic Church this morning

In the first one, Priest calls for pope's resignation from CNN "the Rev. James Scahill called in a sermon last weekend for the pope to resign over the church's sexual abuse scandal."

Good for him. I doubt he'll be the last.

"'If he can't take the consequences of being truthful on this matter, his integrity should lead him, for the good of the church, to step down and to have the conclave of cardinals elect a pope with the understanding that the elected pope would be willing to take on this issue, not just in promise,' Scahill said."

"His church has received more than 100 emails and dozens of calls, of which only two were negative, Sister Betty Braughan said."

More:

"'The church took action after years of sexual abuse only because it had been exposed through the media,' Scahill said."

"Although he has received great support from his parishioners, he admits it has been hard to speak out against the church and the pope."

"'This has not been a healthy thing for me. It's a lot of stress, but I believe the truth needs to be spoken, and I believe the people want to hear the truth and [that] they are sick of the smoke and mirror approach.'"

Indeed, we are all--believers and unbelievers, both sick of the smoke and mirror approach.

Secondly, also from CNN, is this, too:

"Most Americans -- and most American Catholics -- think Pope Benedict XVI has done a bad job of dealing with the problem of sexual abuse by Catholics priests, according to a new national poll."

"CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey results released Friday also indicate that recent revelations about that matter have hurt the pope's standing with the public."

"Fifty-nine percent of American Catholics questioned in the poll have a favorable view of the pope, down 19 points from February. Among all Americans, the slippage is even greater: from 59 percent in February to just 35 percent today."

"According to the survey, 56 percent of U.S. Catholics disapprove of how Pope Benedict XVI has dealt with the problem of sexual abuse committed by priests; only about one in three Catholics has a positive view of how he has dealt with that subject. An even larger number -- 74 percent -- disapproves of how the church overall has handled that matter."

So it's bad and getting worse for the Pope. Unfortunately, it's not a big surprise. You can't shove something like all these cases of abuse under a figurative rug and expect they'll go away.

I don't think anyone can, as yet, predict quite how this will turn out and how far this will push Pope Benedict.

Side note to the Pope: Happy 83rd birthday. Enjoy.

Behold the common and ever-present coward and bully

The report this morning from The Kansas City Star is that all was well again last evening on the Plaza.

And of course it was.

Because that is precisely how the bully and the coward and the cowardly bully all operate--they pick on the smaller person, the more helpless, and, in this case, the unarmed, the defenseless and those who aren't expecting any trouble or that they should have to defend themselves on the Country Club Plaza on a mild, otherwise pleasant Saturday night.

Couple having coffee, as they stroll the area?

Knock the coffee out of their hands.

Potted planters to decorate the area?

Pick them up and break them into pieces.

etc., etc.

Cowards. Bullies, all.

So they knew there would be a big police presence on the Plaza last evening. I guessed that they'd not show precisely because of this cowardice and I was right.

But, knowing this is how bullies and cowards act, naturally we can't assume this has taken care of itself.

Chief Corwin and the KCMO Police Department will have to, at least for a while, if not forever, prepare themselves for any possible "flash mob" like this, in case they decide to converge again on a spot and on people and be the bullies and cowards they've shown themselves to be.

Sad, pitiful and tragic but true.

This is the reality we'll have to live in, at least for a while, if not permanently.

Fortunately, the police surely know this.

An ugly anniversary for the country

"Echoes of the NRA's insurrectionist rhetoric can be heard from the leaders of the gun activists who plan to converge on Washington, D.C. on April 19, a date with great emotional resonance for the "gun rights" movement and, for different reasons, for the rest of us. It is both the anniversary of Lexington/Concord and of the tragic federal assault on the David Koresh compound in Waco, Texas in 1993. It also is the anniversary of what was, to that date, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history - Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."

From Dennis A. Henigan of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence (www.BradyCenter.org) via the Huffington Post (Link to original post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-a-henigan/gun-rights-and-political_b_530253.html)


Unfortunately, coincidentally, tragically, to me, anyway, it is also the date my Mom was born.

It was one more reason to resent Timothy McVeigh's cowardly, stupid, irresponsible, ugly actions that day in Oklahoma City.

It would be nice if, one day soon--today?--the ignorance of what Timothy McVeigh did that day were a lesson for the Right Wing extremists of today.

As I so frequently say here, hey, I can dream, can't I?

The next mayoral race right now, in money (wanna' good laugh?)

Again, according to The Kansas City Star today , the next mayoral race is heating up.

This was pretty staggering to me--it was a real eye-opener: Attorney Sly James "continues to have the biggest war chest. He has raised $370,760 to date, including $37,508 in the first quarter of this year. He had $194,987 cash on hand, and he has lent his campaign $23,000."

Wowzer. That's a heap.

And the person who's next in line, in terms of raising money for this race, is former city councilman Jim Rowland with $41,045.

Not even close.

So it looks like it might be Sly James race to lose, at this point, if money is any indicator. And, of course, in American political campaigns, it absolutely is.

And sure, I mention this because it's pretty big news, as far as the race goes, and it's good to know, as a citizen of the city.

But here's the real reason I write this entry today--here's the real kicker, since we can always use a good laugh: Mayor Mark Funkhouser's campaign to retake his office?

"Mayor Mark Funkhouser listed $3,000 in contributions since the first of the year."

Wait. It gets better.

"Funkhouser had $1,948 cash on hand, andhis campaign committee still owes him $1,000."

Looks like we won't have the ol' Funk to "kick around anymore", as Dick Nixon said, so many years ago.

Man, it's a beautiful weekend, isn't it?

Kansas City: Let's use this moment to come together, at last

I see from the newspaper this morning--again--that there will be additional police out in town tonight, most specifically on the Plaza.

The Mayor announced yesterday that he'll be walking around down there. (Thanks for the warning, Mayor).

Then there's this: "A group of African-American community leaders, led by Alvin Brooks, who is a police commissioner, held a news conference Friday to announce they will be present tonighton the Plaza to make sure any youth gathering remains peaceful and safe."

Thank you, once again, Mr. Brooks.

More: "Brooks, who is president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, was joined by ministers, Kansas City school board president Airick Leonard West and others. They said they wanted to have a good dialogue with any youths who gathered."

This, then, is how a great deal of good can and, of course should, come out of this whole "Plaza melee'" mess from the last few weeks.

Can we not, now, learn something from all this?

Can we not, now, come together as a city and as one group of people who live here and work together, as one, to better this city?

We could.

We should.

We can.

We should use this as a catalyst to stop being East Side/inner city/West Side/suburbanite, etc., and, again, come together as one city and work to solve our problems.

And right now, we have the attention of the Mayor and his office, the "establishment", represented by Highwoods Properties (the Plaza owners and managers), all the retail store owners and managers down there, the leaders of the African-American community, virtually everyone.

We all have a stake, certainly, in seeing to it that no one group terrorizes or intimidates another, anywhere in the city, at any time.

It's not who we are.

It's not how good cities work, of course.

And we all have a larger stake, too, in having our problems addressed by all of us, for the good of all.

Alvin Brooks or Mayor Funkhouser or Airick West or somebody needs to say as much, in a very public way, while the television cameras are rolling and the media has their attention.

Let's get at this, people.

A week of some "good calls"

First it was the President, surprisingly ordering "his health secretary to issue new rules aimed at granting hospital visiting rights to same-sex partners", bringing everyone in America that much closer to equality for all.

Good on ya', Mr. President. Well done. And thank you. As you know, sir, it was long overdue.

Then it fell to Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson for the next sound judgement call:

"...Gov. Mark Parkinson on Thursday vetoed legislation designed to tighten the rules on late-term abortion."

"The legislation would have required physicians who sign off on late-term abortions to document the specific medical diagnosis used to authorize the procedure. It’s similar to a bill vetoed last year by Kathleen Sebelius."

And here's the good part--Gov. Parkinson called "abortion a “tragedy” but..." said that "Kansas lawmakers shouldn’t intrude in a private decision..."

Because after all, isn't that big, intrusive government reaching into our personal lives?

Isn't that what "conservatives" want is government out of our private lives?

For the next "good call", "A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional Thursday, saying the day amounts to a call for religious action."

Yeehaw! It just keeps getting better and better.

Could we have "separation of church and state"? Please?

Finally, in this brief list of "good calls" this week, it was announced a few hours ago that the government is pressing charges of fraud against the seemingly untouchable Goldman Sachs for "defrauding investors by failing to disclose conflicts of interest in mortgage investments it sold as the housing market was collapsing."

I don't know how this will play out since Goldman Sachs is, for all intents and purposes, in the White House and has been for years but it surely was good news.

Maybe they'll go after some more of the big companies that defrauded America and Americans in similar ways. That would be nice.

In the meantime, because of this, the price of a barrel of oil decreased, too, just because the government is going after GS.

Check it out--a "two-fer" for the common, working stiff, all in the same day.

Anyway, after the more local mess that was the Saturday night melee' here in town, it was a nice change that these kinds of things happened.


Let's have a great weekend, y'all!