What's up in your worlds?

The Democratic leadership's Beltway peers, the pundits they appreciate, and the consultancy class see it as a victory whenever the Democrats defy their own base to support some hawkish initiative.

It's these opinions they care about, and those people only make fun of the Democratic leadership when they give in to their dirty fringe crazy unsophisticated 'base'.

Scorning their own base is how Democrats get their head-pat from the Beltway Establishment, which is, far and away, what they crave most.

Acting for their own base / majority of US public to defy hawks: Timid, Yielding, Controlled By 'Interest Groups'.

keep to the Fen Causeway

CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of COCAINE

This Florida-based Gulfstream II jet aircraft, #N987SA, crash landed on September 24, 2007 after it ran out of fuel over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. (At the time) it had a cargo of several tons of Cocaine on board. Now documents have turned up on both sides of the Atlantic that link aircraft # N987SA to the CIA, who used it on at least 3 rendition flights from Europe and the USA to Guantanamo's infamous torture chambers between 2003 to 2005.

We'll call that a "whoops" shall we ? :-))

keep to the Fen Causeway

REM | It's The End Of The World As We Know It lyrics

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -
Lenny Burnside is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -
world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs. Feed it up a knock,
speed, grunt no, strength no. Ladder structure clatter with fear of height,
down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for
hire and a combat site. Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies
breathing down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered
crop. Look at that low plane! Fine then. Uh oh, overflow, population,
common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its
own needs, listen to your heart bleed. Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn,
return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning,
blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle,
light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh,
this means no fear - cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament,
a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives
and I decline.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide. Mount St. Edelite.
Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic,
slam, but neck, right? Right.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...fine...

LEONARD COHEN LYRICS - The Future

"The Future"

Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant

You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder

Things are going to slide ...

There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin'

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder

Things are going to slide ...

When they said REPENT REPENT ...

I wandered slimy as a toad
O'er grotty hill and grimy road
Until at last, the rise I top
and there, behold, the reocrd shop

I wander in with wanton smile that stretchey all the golden mile
I leap upon the counter high and then in mucous voice I cry
I like Bill Grunt and Ernie Grimv
But what I want is GORALABIMV

The assistant smiles a subtle grin
that spreads itself across his chin
Although we woodstock Ernie Grimv
I've never 'eard of Goralabimv

By chance I have my brolly near
and thrust it gently through his ear
he screams, he pleads, he shouts, he cries
and then, brain pierced, he slowly dies

I mutter as I hobble out,
it serves him right the foolish lout
he should have stocked goralabimv
after all, I fought a war for him

Just wondering

keep to the Fen Causeway

The war of words between the US and the EU over climate change policy escalated today as the EU threatened to boycott US-led talks on the environment if it continued to block emissions targets.

As the deadlocked UN climate change conference in Bali entered its final days, delegates had still not agreed on a deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a UN pact which caps greenhouse gas emissions of all industrial nations except the US until 2012.

The US is opposing plans to make industrialised countries reduce emissions by between 25% and 40% by 2020. Next month it is hosting a meeting of 17 of the world's top-emitting nations, including China, Russia and India, to discuss long-term curbs on greenhouse gases.

However Humberto Rosa, the environment secretary of Portugal, which currently holds the EU presidency, said today: 'If we [were to] have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a Major Economies' Meeting (MEM) in the United States.

"We are not blackmailing," he said at the 190-nation meeting. "If no Bali, no MEM."

In my opinion, the EU should really be ready with carbon tariffs on everything (from flights to goods to software to services) and, if necessary, economic sanctions against the U.S. and the other eco-terrorist nations. This sort of threat is meaningless. The U.S. is heading into a recession, the time to use economic pain is now.

Police in southern India are hunting for two men who attacked a Hindu holy man, cut off his right leg and then made off with it.

The 80-year-old holy man, Yanadi Kondaiah, claimed to have healing powers in the leg.

He is now recovering from his ordeal in hospital in the city of Tirupati in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Local people believed they could be healed of spiritual and physical problems if they touched his leg.

The European Union's highest court has backed the right of companies to move to another EU state to cut costs.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) was ruling on a Finnish ferry company, Viking, which replaced the crew on one of its ships with Estonian workers.

Trade unions intervened, preventing Estonian union members from negotiating with the company.

The court said unions were allowed to take collective action, if jobs and work conditions were under threat.

The ECJ decided it was up to the national court to decide whether jobs were likely to be affected.

But it warned the unions that collective action would be illegal if it restricted the EU's freedom of establishment, which guarantees a company's right to carry out economic activity in other member states.

(See also the Wednesday Salon, with a fair, even-handed article from the EUobserver on the same ruling)

Christoph is the Bundesrat that has been ousted yesterday.

Maureen Dowd derides Feith and the neo-cons:

...Feith told Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker that "My family got wiped out by Hitler, and ... all this stuff about working things out -- well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn't make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that `War is not the answer,' are they making a serious comment? What's the answer to Pearl Harbor? What's the answer to the Holocaust?"

What's the answer to bin Laden? According to Feith, it was an attack on an unrelated dictator. He oversaw the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, whose mission was to amp up links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

It defies reason, but there are still some who think the chuckleheads who orchestrated the Iraq misadventure have wisdom to impart.

The Pentagon neocons dumped Condi Rice out of the loop. Yet, according to Newsweek's Mike Isikoff, Condi has now offered Wolfie a job. It wasn't enough that he trashed Iraq and the World Bank. (He's still larking around town with Shaha, the sweetheart he gave the sweetheart deal to.)

Condi wants Wolfie to advise her on nuclear proliferation and W.M.D. as part of a State Department panel that has access to highly classified intelligence.

Once you've helped distort W.M.D. intelligence to trick the country into war, shouldn't you be banned for life from ever having another top-level government post concerning W.M.D.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/12dowd.html

Gail Collins ridicules the Republican candidates:

Huckabee! Huckabee! The man of the hour! What is it that voters love so much about this guy? Is it a hitherto inchoate yearning for a president who knows less about international affairs than they do? Hope that a man who can lose 100 pounds could also get rid of the federal deficit?

Mike is soaring ahead in the early polls, in a surge to the front of the pack that suggests Republicans cannot come to grips with the idea that they are supposed to nominate either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani for president. There has to be a way out! What about Huckabee? He has a good heart! True, his brain doesn't seem to have a single thought about foreign policy or know much about domestic policy, for that matter. But one well-functioning body part is better than nothing.

Yesterday, the Republican candidates for president had their last debate of 2007, and let me say, there's nothing that gets you in the holiday spirit like Rudy Giuliani pointing out that Islamic fanatics want us dead. While this was supposed to be Romney's big chance to regain momentum in Iowa, it wound up being a pretty dull affair. Mitt did not even get a chance to ask Huckabee why, in a new Times Magazine interview, he coyly dropped the question of whether Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers.

(Coming next: Mike innocently asks whether it's true that New York mayors worship false idols.)
...
The Republican pack is one extremely unappealing bunch of politicians, and it's no wonder that the poor voters have developed buyers' remorse before they've come near the cash register. Huckabee is this week's exercise in avoidance, and he's not likely to be the last.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/opinion/13collins.html

Meanwhile, the editors attack Bush for threatening to veto an energy bill:

... the bill, as it now stands, contains not only the new fuel standards, which is a huge step forward, but also generous incentives for energy efficiency, for cleaner alternative fuels and for the new technologies that will be required to reduce the country's output of greenhouse gases. By almost any measure, it is the most important energy bill that Congress has entertained in many years.

It is thus astonishing that President Bush would even think of vetoing it, especially since he called for much the same improvements in automobile mileage as those contained in the bill. In a statement Tuesday, however, the White House demanded that the bill be amended to make the industry-friendly Transportation Department solely responsible for regulating fuel economy as well as carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

This would directly reverse the Supreme Court's historic decision in April declaring that greenhouses gases are air pollutants under the meaning of the Clean Air Act and giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate them. It would also have the effect of stripping California and other states of the power to impose their own automobile emissions standards.

It is no secret that the carmakers and many of their industrial allies detest the E.P.A. and hate the idea that environmentally aggressive states like California have the right to set their own rules -- a right reaffirmed yesterday in federal court in California. But for the White House to advance industry's cause at the 11th hour of the debate over a breakthrough energy bill is inexcusable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/opinion/13thu2.html

Dear MillMan,
Account number ending in: xxxx

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For a full 24 hours eligible stock, options and futures trades entered at E*TRADE Securities will not be charged a commission.¹ We hope this gives you a convenient chance to evaluate your investments, balance your taxable gains and losses, or capitalize on trading opportunities prior to year end.

At E*TRADE, nothing is more important to us than our customers. We thank you for your ongoing faith in us, and look forward to serving you for many years to come.

Sincerely,

Jarrett Lilien
Chief Executive Officer
E*TRADE Securities LLC

I'll just note that my Bank of America accounts are still open.

you are the media you consume.

A mobile Santa's grotto in Ceredigion has come to a halt after 30 years because of concerns about "elf" and safety.

Santa has toured Lampeter and surrounding villages on the back of a trailer since 1977, but there are worries now that it is too dangerous.

Lampeter Rotary Club, which runs the grotto, said it was concerned about children's health and safety.

Youngsters will be able to visit Father Christmas at two supermarkets instead.