Good Riddance.

2010 sucked. Not sorry at all to see it go. In fact, I won't even stay awake.

Sydney New Year's Eve Fireworks

Welcome to 2011! It's hard to believe that another year has come has gone. Writing Grab Your Fork has been a huge part of it, and I'm grateful for the friendships I've made, the comments I've received, the opportunities I've been given, and the readers (yes you!) who stop by everyday.In 2010 I published a total of 224 posts, all written after I've clocked off from my day job - I've yet to find a

Our Dick Cheney

Here’s how it basically went down:


“All right, ya rat fuck. I got you dead to rights. You an' me both know ya bribed some fuck who already pled guilty to bribery and corruption. So here’s da deal: Pay a $26,000,000 bribe to da state treasury, stay the fuck away from peoples’ pensions for the rest of your life and we can fugettiaboutit, huh?”


“Go fuck yourself.”


“Oh, that so, tough guy? OK, lemme put it in toims even you can unnerstand: Give us a $20,000,000 bribe and we both walk away.”


“You ever heard of ‘sloppy seconds’, Andy?”


“OK, ya rat fucker, Final offer: Ya pay us $10 million in bribes and ya stay away from New York Securities fer two years. Dat’s my final offer, doitbag. Take it or leave it.”






"Hold on a minute, leg breaker."


“Take it, Stevie. It’s the best deal you’ll get."
"But I got him where I want him, Barry! Another couple of minutes, he'll let me fuck his new trophy wife."
"Look, Dick Cheney’s thugs had to pay a quarter of a billion to Nigeria to get his fat, pasty ass off the hook, for crissake.”
"Oh, all right."


“Well? I’m waitin’!”


“On the advice of counsel, I’ll take it. But you’d better blow me first before you’re sworn in. And you better go easy on the back stroke, ya toothy wop.”


“Once again, justice is soived! Well, I’m off to da Governor’s mansion.”
"Andy, I'm waiting!"

Yeah, basically it went down exactly like that.

You want small government? New York City this week is what it looks like

Susie Madrak has a must-read post at Crooks and Liars about how cuts in sanitation personnel left New York City as the poster child for small-government oligarchy. The streets where the wealthy live were plowed; those in the outer boroughs weren't. That's just a small taste, as Susie explains:

One of my New York-native friends said her relatives were calling the post-blizzard city a "zombie apocalypse."

It's bad enough that NYC has laid off 500 sanitation workers in the last two years (you know, instead of taxing Wall Street) or that there were plows sitting idle because they didn't have enough people to drive them, or that people died because the EMTs couldn't get down their streets.

But that the mayor didn't even bother to call a snow emergency? That's plain crazy.

Make fun of Philly all you want, but by canceling Sunday night's Eagles game, we kept 60,000 cars off the streets at the height of the blizzard that didn't need to be there. Looking at the pictures of New York with abandoned cars and buses everywhere is just surreal. (Of course, Mayor Mike Bloomberg's street was nicely plowed.)

Not to mention, NYC residents couldn't go back to work. Manhattan was cleared, but people couldn't get in to work from the outer boroughs. Wonder how much taxable revenue was lost this week?

This is why it's such a bad idea to run government like a business. This isn't a business, it's a government. It has to provide basic services, no matter what.

It's probably no secret that Wall Street has the same attitude toward New York City that they have toward the rest of the country: "You're lucky to have us." That's why, instead of taxing them, Bloomberg bends over backwards to make them happy. After all, they might move to New Jersey!

So Bloomberg keeps cutting. He laid off 500 sanitation workers and privatized much of the snow plow operations. Guess what? Plows sat idle because employees of the private contractors were on vacation during the holiday.

This is what small government looks like.

Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 2 ou lhilte tof l3are en tachlhite

Voir Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 2 ou lhilte tof l3are en tachlhite
en direct sur net gratuit
regarder le film Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 2 sur votre pc
free en video hd ici :

Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 1 ou lhilte tof l3are en tachlhite

Voir Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 1 ou lhilte tof l3are en tachlhite
en direct sur net gratuit
regarder le film Film lhilt tof l3ar vol 1 sur votre pc
en video hd ici :

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010

Just when we were beginning to get used to a blogosphere without Steve Gilliard in it (and how much fun would it have been to read his thoughts on Haley Barbour's fond remembrance of the White Citizens Councils), we lost another irreplaceable voice this year in the persona of Jon Swift, the nom de plume of critic and all-around wordsmith Al Weisel, who left us at the terrifyingly young age of 46.

One of our good blogbuddies, Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar, kindly offered to take up the mantle of one of Swift/Weisel's most generous outreaches -- his annual Blog Posts of the Year (by the bloggers themselves) feature.

I can't introduce this tradition any better than Batocchio does, so I won't:

The much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. Blogroll Amnesty Day (co-founded with skippy) is a celebration of small blogs that's still going strong, and coming up again the first weekend in February. Jon/Al also put together a roundup of the best blogs posts of the year, selected by the participating bloggers themselves. (Here's the 2007 and 2008 editions.) I wanted to revive that tradition, both as a tribute to Jon/Al and because it was something special in its own right.

If you're not familiar with Al Weisel's work as Jon Swift, his site features a "best of" list in the left column (scroll down). His journalism site is here. Meanwhile, Tom Watson and skippy compiled most of the many memorial posts written for him.

So make a cup of cocoa, put a few cookies on a place and go read. Enjoy.

Easy canapes: Seared scallops

Can you believe it's the end of another decade? It seems like only yesterday we were welcoming in the noughties.Tonight you'll find me around Sydney Harbour with 1.5 million of my closest friends. I've spent New Years Eve in New York Times Square and on London's Westminster Bridge beneath Big Ben, but I still rate the fireworks spectacular around Sydney Harbour as the best NYE party in the

What Sarah Palin fans eat

With Sarah Palin having declared vegetables as traitors to America and s'mores as the food of choice for Real Muricans Lovin' Faith Family 'n' Flag, let's take a look at the favorite new state fair foods of Snowflake Snooki's constituency (no blockquote tags because of commentary; the source is linked above):

10. Hash Brown Hot Dog – San Diego County Fair. This is ground-up gore, guts, and animal parts wrapped in shredded potatoes and deep-fat fried.

9. Deep-Fried Cheddar-Bacon Mashed Potatoes…On a Stick – Minnesota State Fair. Because regular mashed potatoes with their butter and cream just don't have quite enough saturated fat.

8. Garbage Burger – Indiana State Fair. It's a pork patty topped with pulled pork, but perhaps the nickname is more fitting.

7. Deep-Fried Frito Pie – Texas State Fair. As near as I can tell, this is batter-dipped chili-topped corn chips.

6. Deep Fried Klondike Bar – San Diego State Fair. Because all the palm kernel oil used to make the chocolate coating just doesn't coat your arteries enough all by itself.

5. Chocolate Tornado Potato – Minnesota State Fair. Now you know what to do with that spiral-cutter from Telebrands that you got for Christmas. Spiral-cut a potato, deep-fry it, then dip it in chocolate.

4. Deep-Fried Cheesesteak on a Stick – Wisconsin State Fair. Now OK, I admit to having tried the Bananas Foster bites at Wing Zone, which is probably sort of what I imagine deep-fried cheesecake tastes like. What? That's "cheesesteak"?

Never mind.

3. Sweet Potato Dog – San Diego County Fair. See #10, but because this is California and they watch their white carbs, substitute sweet potato for hash browns. It's Beta-Carotineeylicious!

2. Corn Dog Pizza – Minnesota State Fair. This HAS to be from Michele Bachmann's district. Just please tell me Franken doesn't eat this.

1. Fried Beer – Texas State Fair. If you've ever fantasized during halftime about how you could combine your beer and fried ravioli, this snack's for you. It combines the comfort of a pastry pocket with the all-American goodness of beer.

I guess fried butter didn't make the list because it's from 2009.

Now what was that about Texas' Medicaid expenses?

I realize it's Seth MacFarlane's world and we just live in it, but come on...

You'd think that with all the problems there are in this country right now, we could grow the fuck up already.

But you'd be wrong:

A story headlined "Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters" was the most popular story on Reuters.com this year, Reuters insiders Ernest Scheyder and Ken Li say on Twitter.

How punny.
My colleague Jay Yarow puts it this way: "Whoever spent tireless hours working on some investigative report for Reuters is silently weeping right now."

The (occasional? One-time?) return of Critics Over Coffee

Editor's note: Newer readers of this blog may not know that from 1997 to 2005, I reviewed movies online. After starting with the now-defunct Virtual Urth, I started my own site in 2000 and then teamed up with then-fellow-Online Film Critics Society member Gabriel Shanks to form Mixed Reviews, the archive of which is still online here. Periodically we'd get together for a movie, then get together at the nearest diner or coffee bar to talk about the movie. These days this is at best a once-a-year event, and this week we took in The King's Speech at the Edgewater (NJ) Multiplex, followed by coffee, tea, and scones at Panera Bread.

************
JILL: It is Tuesday, December 28, and this is our first of what used to be Critics over Coffee (well, ONE of us having coffee) --

GABRIEL: Right. Now we're older, so only one of us is having coffee so now it's Critics Over Tea.

JILL: Old Farts over Tea.

GABRIEL: Do Brilliant at Breakfast readers know the history?

JILL: Do you want to give an intro?

GABRIEL: Well, before she was the Web's most vitriolic political blogger, Jill was a film reviewer...

JILL: Now I think of myself as a ranteuse.

GABRUEL: -- ...at Cozzi Fan Tutti and then at MixedReviews.net, where we started this series and it's actually old home week, because I don't know if your readers know, but we used to be part of a group called Cinemarati, which was a Web critics' alliance and it went out of business, but recently, someone formed a Facebook group, and so all these Web critics from ten years ago are finding each other again, and it's kind of Old Home Week. So now we have this Critics over Coffee where you and I would go see a movie and then complain about it bitterly, usually, and now after two years we've seen a movie together again. So we get to do this. And we've just seen The King's Speech, the incredibly Oscar®-baity film by Tom Hooper.

JILL: Whom I believe is a first-time movie director.

GABRIEL: It stars an entire rogue's gallery of Masterpiece Theatre for the 21st century.

JILL: Yes, everybody who isn't doing Harry Potter is in this movie.

GABRIEL: Except Michael Gambon, who seems to be in both. But it's got Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, that actress playing the mother who we both know but can't remember her name [LATER NOTE: Claire Bloom], and Timothy Spall, who is playing Churchill and holding his face in a very Churchillian way. So what did you think of it?

JILL: Well, aside from the fact that it's not a Renaissance-era costume picture, and that I'm not really an Anglophile of that particular period, I thought it was more engaging than I expected it to be.

GABRIEL: It's a crowd-pleaser, for sure.

JILL: I think the script is clever; I'm not sure it's quite as clever as it seems, or if Geoffrey Rush is just that good.

GABRIEL: I certainly felt that way. I felt that the screenplay was good, made better by the acting of the ensemble. It's pretty conventional, it's the triumph-over-adversity -- King George VI stutters and enlists a speech therapist to help him, and surprise, surprise -- he gets over the stutter.

JILL: And the speech therapist is very unorthodox and witty --

GABRIEL: I guess I should say "spoiler alert" before that, but really, if you're going to this movie --

JILL: The history is out there, and if you consult Teh Google, you'll know the story.

GABRIEL: Right.

JILL: So, there's elements of a lot of movies in this. It's very thematic, very conventional -- the troubled man and the loyal woman who stands next to him...and this is a nice change for Helena Bonham Carter, getting away from the Goth Grrl thing that she seems to be doing in her middle age. I think this movie will do very well because there isn't a woman in America that isn't madly in love with Colin Firth. And his Colin Firthiness is on full display in this movie in that he manages to do the tortured, brooding English male without being the archetypal scrawny, pathetic, brooding English male.

GABRIEL: Well, on the Colin Firth score, it's such a companion piece to A Single Man last year; both of which are kind of "tuxedo porn". Colin Firth wearing suits is better than most men naked. He wears incredibly tailored tuxes and suits in this, and he looks great. The movie looks great. The whole thing has a sort of blue vintage filter on the lens so it feels "important". It has all this Oscar-baity stuff that you wnat from a British costume drama, especially a British historical drama. It looks rich. It's a satisfying experience for a matinee. You're going to get a story. It's not a story that's going to throw you a lot of curve balls, you have a protagonist you can pull for, and it's not so rigid in its form, thanks to the acting ensemble, that you become completely irritated by the clichés. There's a lot of clichés in the filmmaking, but as opposed to something like The Fire where it's so derivative that it just reeks of cliché and convention, this has an acting ensemble that is surprising, that is continuing to keep you in the moment.

JILL: Well, it's very familiar. There are strong elements of My Fair Lady to this, only in reverse. You have this very conventional, rigid man and this unconventional therapist. And the unconventional therapist is a theme that repeats in movie after movie. The sports movie equivalent is obviously Rocky --

GABRIEL: The disability movie....

JILL: Right. But the other thing that makes this Oscar-baity for Colin Firth, is that -- and this is interesting that this time it's Geoffrey Rush playing the one without the disablity -- that if you want to win the Oscar®, and Colin Firth has done so much good work for so long, some of it in dreadful movies, that finally, it seems as if he said "Oh, the hell with it. Let's do the disability movie and get the damn statue already.

GABRIEL: Yeah. I think in terms of the Oscar race, it will be hard to fight the fact that he is good in this movie, and that he has a track record of being good in a lot of movies. He's very rarely bad, and I believe that Hollywood probably thinks he's due, in a way that James Franco, say, in 127 Hours, is not yet due.

JILL: And besides, Franco is hosting.

GABRIEL: You think about Jeff Bridges coming out of nowhere last year for Crazy Heart -- a lot of that was fueled by the sense that the Oscar has become something that is bestowed on a career, rather than an award for a particular performance. And in that regard I think that helps Colin Firth a lot, because he is probably one of the few -- five or six actors -- who have never won but probably should have by now.

JILL: What I liked about this movie almost more than anything else was -- and I'm not sure if this is just what is happening to Geoffrey Rush's face of if this is done with lenses, but they made him look like a cartoon character. Every line in his face seems to be deeper, and he's sort of bug-eyed, and he has that interesting marcel wave in his hair. But in every shot, he looks like a cartoon, and that helps to lighten the proceedings. Because otherwise it could be somewhat ponderous for all that it's interesting to see -- I guess today, with British royalty being more on the table in terms of what the family's neurosis is, but to see this man's serious issues with his father and his brother, all the issues in this family -- this is a side of this family that we have not seen before, in that we all know about the abdication, but I don't think many people are aware of just how much of a role of Designated Family Shithead this man had to bear, for all that at the end, and in the movie we find out, and the father says this, that he has more guts than any of the other brothers.

GABRIEL: Yes, And the parents are definitely hard on him in a way that they aren't hard on the other children. But it's a movie about people who have expectations and either meet them or don't. I think Guy Pearce's performance as Edward VIII is certainly interesting in that regard, ans so is Geoffrey Rush's, who has the expectations of an entire nation on his ability to do this particular job, and without giving away too many plot points, there are some interesting revelations about Geoffrey Rush's character that play into that. One of the things that the movie doesn't do very well, which I would have enjoyed, is having a discussion of class. Lionel Logue is not only not nobility, or landed gentry, he is working class and he's also Australian, both of which are Very Big Deals that the movie brushes past in the story. But certainly a commoner being invited into the inner circle of the king could be a fascinating story in itself. You get a great scene, with -- is it Jennifer Ehle playing his wife? I think it is; her hair threw me off, she usually has this HAIR and it's very compacted in this movie -- that great scene with her where she realizes who her husband's client is, and you get this brief brush of the way you treat royalty vs. the way you treat "regular people". And I would have enjoyed seeing more of the difficulties of that divide.

JILL: Unfortunately, that's a different movie that would have required more than the hour and a half that this movie runs. I'm not sure there's a lot to say about it. It's entertaining, it's well-cast, it's an engaging afternoon at the movie. Given the quality of many of the movies that have come out this year, I think it's about all you can ask. As we head into the end of the year, into Oscar® season -- it used to be a big deal for us, to me it's almost insignificant now -- because the only other movie I've seen in a theatre is The Social Network, which I thought was terrific, whether or not it's the true story of Facebook.

GABRIEL: I thought The Social Network was a good movie, I think it's a bit overpraised, just because it's so of the moment and au courant, that I think it has captured the zeitgeist in a way it doesn't deserve. But the performances are good. But I'm with you -- stepping away from blogging, not blogging for Modern Fabulousity anymore, not blogging for Mixed Reviews anymore...I think Oscar® has a more healthy place in my life than it used to have. I 'm not quite as furious this time of year to see all the releases and gauge them against one another. But I saw The Social Network last fall and I thought it was a good film, hoped it would be better, I have seen better. I think The King's Speech is award-worthy for some of its performances but I'm not sure I think it's award-worthy in the Best Picture category. But I do think there have been some films you should see this year. Luckily some of them are playing on instant Netflix and On-Demand right now, so we're in a good place for that.

It's been a good year for documentaries. I liked Exit Through the Gift Shop very much, I liked Client 9 very much, I enjoyed Restrepo very much. Even some films that aren't going to be nominated, like Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work was kind of fascinating in some way. But I see many fewer movies than I used to and I'm excitedly happy about that.

******************

Next up: Jill and Gabriel talk about some of the quality television that's out there right now, the future of film criticism in the context of social network, about blogging, and where in the political system is there a place for progressives to go.

Hey, Governor Christie, meet your re-election opponent

While Chris Christie, the latest Republican rising star who makes a thrill go up Joe Scarborough's leg, got outta Dodge and took his kids to Disney World when the snowflakes from the Sunday blizzard were already falling, here's what another New Jersey pol was doing:

And if Christie thinks that this video is not going to be in heavy rotation when Christie runs for re-election, or even if he decides for President, guess again. Ditto for Mike Bloomberg -- another would-be Savior of Our Great Nation.

The Flute Bakery, Fyshwick Canberra

The Flute Bakery is in the last possible place you'd expect to find it. Tucked down a barren street lined with industrial estates in Fyshwick, it appears like a shimmering mirage of gustatory salvation.

Even then, the canvas awnings and outdoor seating reveal little of what lays within. We push open the door to find an elegant French patisserie, pies and quiches in the warmer, a gleaming glass

Laffing All the Way to the Bank

And the moral, boys and girls, is that taxes are evil and shame on the liberals for chasing away the multimillionaires and billionaires. So saith Fox Business News and Art Laffer.

For those of you who don’t live in Oregon and had never heard of Measure 66 and its little sister, Measure 67, here’s a newspaper article from last August to give you the rundown. And even though the tax cuts were extended by another two years, right wingers are still pouncing on Oregon as a bellwether of what would’ve happened if the federal government had (gasp!! O, the horrors!) let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest 2%.



That’s why Fox Business trotted out Art Laffer, a smiling psychopath reminiscent of that laughing doll in the Saw series. Art Laffer is the guy falsely credited with the Laffer Curve (even Laffer said it wasn’t an original concept) that would become part of the hallowed bedrock of the uberdestructive economic clusterfuck known as Reaganomics or Supply Side economics that saw personal income tax go down from 70% to 31%.

At least half of the Laffer Curve (which gained traction after it was explained in 1974 to none other than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) springs from a straw man argument. According to this misleading, oversimplified graph, revenue would plainly be nonexistent if the tax rate was 0%. But then Laffer went to the other extreme and said that tax revenue would also be nonexistent if it was 100%, something no politician in his or her right mind would ever propose.



You would think the magic number that the Laffer Curve purports to seek is somewhere around 50%, which would be acceptable to a lot of liberals and progressives but you’d be wrong. Essentially, Laffer’s curve says, with a straight face, that the less we tax the rich, the more income states and the federal government generate. The more we tax the wealthy, the less revenue we’ll generate because we’ll scare them away.

The Laffer Curve was novel only in the respect that, like Issac Asimov’s psychohistory, it sought to predict trends in human behavior by using as its rubric largely ridiculous tax scenarios (0% and 100% tax rates). Laffer’s curve advocates the wealthy paying just barely enough taxes to keep things running but doesn’t call the wealthy on being the greedy sociopaths they largely are.

And this is exactly what happened in Oregon this year. When Measure 66 (raising individual tax rates) and Measure 67 (raising tax rates on corporations) went into law, the landed gentry in Oregon were terrorized that they may not be able to afford that third house or 10th car and fled like bloated rats leaving a slightly listing ship.

And, according to Fox Business News and Art Laffer, it’s all the fault of stupid liberal, tax-thirsty Democrat politicians. It’s also serving as a morality tale on what would’ve happened if we’d “raised” taxes on the wealthy after this Saturday. The wealthy would’ve simply fled the country and bought a villa on the Riviera or 100,000 acres in Paraguay. Or, heaven help us, ship American jobs by the millions overseas by folding up their tents while still enjoying tax breaks and incentives for doing so.

Reality time out: Measures 66 and 67 were passed by a statewide ballot. Democrats, alarmed at the $733 million dollar shortfall in the 2009-11 budgets, logically sought higher taxes for the wealthiest families making $250,000 and individuals making half that much. The people of Oregon, at least those not making six and seven figure incomes, wanted this. So, according to Art Laffer and the Fox ventriloquist dummy on the left, blame democracy. Or blame liberal Democrat pols. Blame everyone but the wealthy and their greed-motivated selfishness.

And the wealthiest, alarmed at having their tax rates modestly raised a couple of percentage points, took their expensive ball and left the state. This was also predictable. The same thing happened in other states, most notably in Maryland in 2008 when the state legislature instituted their own millionaire tax.

But to listen to right wingers talk, it’s all the fault of the evil liberal politicians killing the goose that laid the golden egg because they wanted to maintain funding of schools and social services instead of having to lay people off.

It’s not the fault of the wealthy who have never once felt themselves to be part of a community and have for centuries if not millenniums felt as if they were not responsible for the general welfare of a system that had enabled them to amass great individual wealth without a shred of individual responsibility.

The Laffer Curve so warmly embraced by Ronald Reagan, a man still terrified of the memory of his poverty-stricken days in Hollywood when his tax rate was 90% when he was still a successful actor and president of a union known as the Screen Actors Guild, is completely supported under the proposition that while the wealthy cannot be called on or criticized for such cowardly and selfish behavior, those who set the tax code should be ashamed of themselves for making the wealthy resort to economic treason.

It automatically absolves or shields the wealthy of any lack of responsibility to a capitalistic system of goods and services and taxation that was so good to it, sociopaths who have grabbed all they could for themselves like mortgage lenders in a Las Vegas money booth.

Laffer also makes a sweeping, and very wrong, assumption that all wealthy people are “job producers” who are perfectly free and perfectly right to simply fold up their tents and take their jobs with them when any liberal even whispers the words “shared sacrifice.” They are not all job producers. Aside from the team of 24 massage therapists and crane operators required to give him a full body massage, how many people does Rush Limbaugh actually employ? And, a few minimum wage-earning horse groomers and landscapers aside, how many does Lou Dobbs actually employ?

The Laffer Curve is simply, aside from Milton Friedman, the single most destructive economic force in our nation’s history. It advocates taking money out of the federal and state treasuries without assigning any culpability to the wealthiest who are portrayed more as victims for being burdened with higher taxes than as economic hit men for shirking their tax duties. These are the same exact people who have no use for a centralized government except for when they want oversight and regulations lifted and their taxes lowered even more regardless of the deficit, national debt, inflation and levels of unemployment.

The Laffer Curve, and supply side economics, should’ve been put to pasture no later than the Reagan administration that tripled the debt while lowering personal income taxes from 70% to 31%. National economies are like massive ponds and the ripples of what we did or didn’t do sometimes decades before are still shaping the face of that pond. The few boom years we had under Clinton were a mere respite from the long-term, decades-long damage under Reagan-Bush I that hasn’t even been accurately or comprehensively catalogued. It’s a slide toward complete and utter ruin, with a tax code that is predicated entirely on personal greed while going after much poorer people who can’t hire tax attorneys when they get audited for sums in multiples of hundreds.

Blogrolling In Our Time

Say hello to a blog/resource/online community whose time has come: Help the 99ers.

Clavier Arabe En Ligne plus moteur de recherche

clavier arabe virtuelle en ligne
écrire arabe sans clavier Windows
clavier arabe maroc gratuit sur internet

Musique Abdelkader Way Way 2010 > 2011

Abdelkader Way Way 2010 > 2011 en ligne gratuit sur se site
Entendez le chab Abdelkader Way Way Dancer Dancer 2011 en direct sur votre pc
Abdelkader Way Way 2010 > 2011 en mp3 ici :

Musique Hamid Inerzaf en ligne

Hamid Inerzaf en direct gratuit live sur net
Entendre Hamid Inerzaf sur votre pc en direct free live sur se site
hamid eynerzaf en mp3 ici :

American Life in Stasis

It’s a paradox, really.

The further you travel, the wider your opportunities even as the end of the road poking the horizon narrows to the head of a pin. The hand gets slick on the wheel and your eyes gloss over the seemingly endless spool of white or yellow paint in the middle of the road.

What’s that? The rumble strip or the intermittent pieces of metal they put in the middle of the road to warn you you’re about to get hypnotized into one undesirable direction or another. The road never seems to reach its termination yet your gas tank gets lower and lower and the engine gets hotter and hotter.

This is what it’s like being unemployed year after year. Predatory creditors and temp agencies dot the road while getting more and more numerous, little Rutger Hauers and Sean Beans just writhing to climb into your car and to do what they do worst.

Maybe if you’re smart, you’ll learn before it’s too late not to pick up strangers. Those with better cars than you learned that long ago. They’d learned that the people without cars are precisely the ones you should not and cannot help. Employers and literary agencies also learned that Randian lesson- not to give a helping hand to the unemployed and the unpublished.

On second thought, Gentle Reader, this isn’t Highway 66, its wide, arable land of opportunities beckoning with its inaudible siren calls. It’s Death Valley and only those with referrals worn on the chest like pasteboard placards offering work for food can get considered.

It wasn’t like this when I first got my driver’s license. Back in 1978, I was a fresh-faced 19 year-old kid just out on his own making just over $3 an hour and still able to support myself and put money in the bank every week. If my father drummed anything into my sieve of a skull, it was this:

Pay your own way, in cash, live within your means and you’ll do just fine, sonny boy.

My Dad had one, maybe two credit cards and maintained a respectable line of credit that he only dipped into when he had to. Back then, it wasn’t so easy to get a credit card. You had to prove you needed it and that you were solvent enough to get one. It was a privilege having a credit card.

By the 80’s, dogs were getting gold cards.

But then, slowly but surely, something evil began happening on the road of my life that even my dear old, trusted, pragmatic Dad couldn’t have foreseen.

By the early 90’s, potential employers interviewing for crappy, dead-end retail jobs began doing background checks on one’s credit history. By now, it’s almost the norm. Now, to even get a consideration for an even crappier temp job at minimum wage, you’re made to take literacy tests, math tests, quizzes on safety films, eye tests, pass CORI (criminal background), drug and credit rating checks.

Dad, oh Daddy-O, how could you not see this coming? You used to work for Digital. Why didn’t you tell me that the day would come when a guy could hardly hope for a job unless he took some computer science or software class?

Not that they even exist, anymore. Now, the US Chamber of Commerce has made the road more desolate than ever by not so secretly outsourcing jobs overseas to get around that irritating minimum wage so people in the Third World can do the same jobs for pennies an hour, jobs for which we’d trained ourselves at our expense or on the government's dime (until Reagan and David Stockman destroyed CETA).

Somewhere around the same time, credit card companies and other lenders also realized that their customers paying their bills on time was such an antiquated way of doing business. Now, they’ve found a way to make lots more money by stacking the deck against you and making you default on your credit card and mortgage payments and raising your formerly low APR just because you paid late a bill that was completely unrelated to your card.

And, even if you, despite all that goal-post moving, continue making your mortgage payments on time and even own your house outright, well, places like Bank of America found their way around that pesky little ownership thingie, too, and just foreclose on you by signing you up for credit-destroying home loan modifications even if you don’t ask for it.

So, in summation, the road gets drier and more desolate, save for the occasional Rutger Hauers, Sean Beans and other assorted and sundry predators and you’re literally running on fumes. The government that has victimized you by giving away trillions to the same predators who are even now cinching the noose tighter and tighter as jobs are harder and harder to get helps you out once in a while by sending a tow truck your way that’ll drop you off at an abandoned gas station where you’re then left to your own devices. The little bit of help they intermittently give gets you just enough gas to break down within towing distance of the next gas station and the end of the road is now the point of a dagger stabbing at the bruised underbelly of heaven.

Wall Street’s craps game with derivatives and mortgage-backed securities has cost us millions of jobs. The US Chamber of Commerce has cost us millions more with its brazen, despicable agenda to outsource as many manufacturing jobs as possible. And corporations, whether at the behest of Tom Donohue or not, are outsourcing more jobs to be done for as little as .03¢ an hour, have outsourced countless millions more while still enjoying the tax breaks that offshore corporations still get to this day.

But the little guy driving his car still has to pay his state, federal and excise taxes on his overheating car every year. It’s a Mad Max movie out there and the Mohawked lunatics with the bigger and better jalopies are winning the war.

And you wonder as you shift the wheel a bit this way and that, trying to keep it straight and narrow, when things will begin to change and what that would have to involve. Those on the left and right side of the shimmering road can easily agree that our country and the government that guides it has been completely taken over by, or merged with, the corporate sector.

Heaven has run out of manna and saviors and we've killed off the last Good Samaritans. When will it end and when will the common man finally get a break on the wayside? Or is that even in the works?

Silo Bakery, Kingston, Canberra

I'm not a morning person, but if there's one thing that I will wake up early for, it's food. Work took me Canberra a couple of months ago (hello backlog), and if there was one place I was determined to visit it was Silo Bakery. It was surprisingly easy to convince my office colleagues to join me on post-work eating adventures - 'so where are we eating tonight, Helen?' they'd ask.It was even

How I wish he was a first baseman.

If you're going to field a team that sucks for the next couple of years (at least until the Wilpons come clean on just how badly they were burned by Bernie Madoff and sell the team), at least there should be jokes. The Mets have already acquired a guy named Boof Bonser, a name that hearkens back to the Golden Age of Funny Names that gave Mets fans Choo Choo Coleman, Pumpsie Green, Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Ed Kranepool. Now they've acquired Hu -- but he's not on first, he's a shortstop:

Adding to their stockpile of middle infielders, the Mets on Monday acquired shortstop Chin-lung Hu from the Dodgers for left-handed pitcher Michael Antonini and placed Hu on the 40-man roster.

Hu, 26, hit .317 with four homers in two separate stints with Triple-A Albuquerque last season, also batting .130 in 23 at-bats for the Dodgers. Hu is a .299 career hitter over eight Minor League seasons and a .191 lifetime big league hitter in 173 at-bats spread amongst four seasons.

Can't they move him to first? At least that .191 big league average would be compensated for by obvious, if feeble, attempts at humor.

Maybe the Mets can trade Carlos Beltran and a couple of minor leaguers for Coco Crisp. After all, if you're going to be the funny names team, might as well go for the gusto.

Something tells me it's not gay soldiers who are the ones looking at their compatriots in the shower

You really have to wonder about this wingnut obsession with same-sex showering:

Since 1993, the Center for Military Readiness has been fighting to keep gay men and lesbians from infiltrating the United States military. So now that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been repealed, what's next for the group that fought so hard to prevent the open service of gay and lesbian members of the armed forces?

They have no big plans yet, Elaine Donnelly, founder and President of the Center for Military Readiness, told TPM in an interview Monday.

"I'm not prepared to say yet, it's too soon to say because the new Congress has not yet come in," Donnelly told me. "The options before the Congress have yet to be sorted out. One thing I will say -- CMR will continue to support the troops, and our mission has always been to advocate high standards on a variety of issues, and that will not change."

But she's not ready to give up on the DADT battle either.

[snip]

Showers are "huge issue," Donnelly said. "To pretend that throwing up a few shower curtains solves the problem is tantamount, again, to saying, well women should share close quarters with men, we'll throw up a few shower curtains and that will take care of it."

"I don't know about the gyms where you go or most people go, but the gyms that I've seen have a sign inside the door, and the door says inside the women's locker room 'no boys of any age are allowed.' Now there's a reason for that," Donnelley said. "It in no way is a negative reflection on anybody, it is just a sign of respect for modesty in sexual manners."

"Knowingly, you don't expose yourself to somebody who might be sexually attracted to you. Does it happen unknowingly? Sure," Donnelly said. "It's something that again, when you introduce an element of sexuality in an environment that previously did not have that, that is problematic. There will be consequences from that, because people are normal, they're humans, they're sensitive to that."

Somehow I don't think "modesty" is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "soldier" or "marine" or "officer". I can't help but think that anyone claiming "modesty" would be laughed out of the military before ever seeing any kind of action.

It's interesting that except for the Junior Christofascist Zombie Brigades and wingnut chaplains, the people actually out there in the trenches really don't care what someone's sexual orientation is. It's the straight, white, evangelical women and men who have never seen military service (and John McCain, of course, but he has his own axes to grind) who obsess about naked young people in showers and call it "concern about military readiness." As with most hue and cry among homophobes, I suspect that this is telling us a lot more about them than it does about the dedicated men and women who just want to be able to serve their country and flag -- the same flag that the wingnuts are wrapping themselves in to try to deny them that right.

More TSA follies

I can't help but wonder how long it's going to be before we have to be groped and scanned to get into department stores, shopping malls, sports events, movie theatres....

After all, who said that planes were the only terrorist targets? Maybe soon we'll have to be scanned before leaving the house.

UPDATE: And then there's this:

The pilot, whose name has not been released, uploaded a series of clips taken at San Francisco International Airport. His intent was to expose the insane double standard of TSA's airport employee screening policies: Although pilots and flight attendants are required to pass through the same concourse checkpoints as passengers, many ground workers, including baggage handlers, caterers and cabin cleaners, are exempt from these checks. The YouTube segments, which have since been taken down, showed ground employees passing through a simple turnstile on their way to work. You can see some highlights from the videos in this television news report by News10 in Sacramento, Calif., where the pilot lives.

This has been TSA policy from the beginning. It is also something I've been writing about in my columns, on and off, for the past eight years. Finally the issue is getting some attention -- if not entirely for the right reasons. This should be a story about farcical security practices; instead, as the media has been playing it, it's the story of a renegade pilot.

TSA says the pilot's actions are "under review," citing the possible release of what the agency calls, "sensitive security information."

That's a head-spinner if you ask me. The screening rules are public knowledge. It's not the pilot's fault that the rest of the country has been ignoring them.

What the pilot really did, of course, is throw a ring of well-deserved embarrassment around TSA's neck. And in typical fashion, the agency's response is not to review, revise or even acknowledge its foolish rules, but to harass and bully and threaten the person who drew attention to them.

[snip]

The pilot in question is also a participant in the Federal Flight Deck Officer program -- a voluntary anti-hijacking scheme that allows specially trained airline pilots to carry handguns in the cockpit. Strangely and perhaps most disturbing of all, agents from the TSA and Department of Homeland Security reportedly came to the pilot's home and confiscated his weapon.

I am hardly a firearms aficionado, and I have mixed feelings about the FFDO program in general. But this disturbs me. What grounds, exactly, did any federal agency have to visit the man's home for any reason, let alone to suspend or revoke this man's FFDO accreditation?

Yet somehow I'm not surprised. This is what happens when, in the throes of fear, you bestow a bureaucracy with lots of power and little accountability. TSA has scant respect for reason or rational policy; point out its foibles, meanwhile, and apparently you risk having agents being sent to your residence. Is this really the United States of America?

Anstahl hassan VoL 2 gratuit en ligne

Regarder et voir Film E9and Anstahl hassan VoL 2 gratuit en ligne
le Film E9and Anstahl hassan VoL 2 et un film amazighe tachlhite
2010 en berber a regarder en video direct hd
Film complet E9and Anstahl hassan VoL2 en langue tachl7ite ici

Anstahl hassan VoL 1

Regarder et voir Film E9and Anstahl hassan VoL 1 gratuit en ligne
le Film E9and Anstahl hassan VoL 1 et un film amazighe tachlhite
2010 en berber a regarder en video direct hd
Film complet E9and Anstahl hassan VoL 1 en langue tachl7ite ici

fatima tihihit avec Raiss A3rab Atigui amargue 2010 2011

Voir amargue entre fatima tihihit et Raiss A3rab Atigui
gratuitement sur net en ligne free en video hd
regarder le clip en direct ici :

Tislatin Ounzar gratuit sur net 2010 2011

amargue tislatin ounzar gratuit sur net
voir et regarder le clip de tislatin ounzar sur se site
en video hd sur chaine tamazighte
video tachlhite de tislatin ouwnzar ici :

Hugos Bar Pizza, Kings Cross

"Pizza?" Peter Evans asks, as he wends his way through the crowd at the launch of the Hugos Bar Pizza new private dining room."It's potato and lardo," he says, gesturing toward the thin crust pizza in his hand. "Basically it's potato and fat," he explains to those with blank expressions on their faces.Potato and fat? Potato and fat? I would have called it potato and deliciousness. Potato and

Note to all parents: Please don't let your kids lose this

Matthew Morison (with Paolo Szot), "You've Got to be Carefully Taught", from South Pacific

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

It's easy to forget, when you see teabaggers foaming at the mouth on cable news about birth certificates and lazy unemployed people and immigrant drug dealers and treasonous liberals, that even these most vile of people were once children.

Santa Says is a blog by a guy who seems to do seasonal work as a mall Santa, who posts his experiences dealing with children at Christmas time. What may surprise you is that for all that Christmas is the season of unbridled avarice (cf: Jean Shepherd), children really do get what's going on the world around them:

Today a boy gave me a small baggie of coins that were his own funds and when asked he said he wanted me to use them to buy toys for kids that might not get any. In fact I have received such gifts before from children But this year I have gotten 2 to 3 times as many and I believe that even young children can be aware of hard times for others and respond with compassion and touching gestures especially involving other kids.

A 5 year old girl ends her letter to me, “Don’t forget about the poor people. Take one ting you would give to me and give it to a poor child!” Alexander gives me a few buttons and says, “These came off of my Buzz Lightyear. I thought you could use them to make another boy a new Buzz.”

Morgan writes, ” Pleas bring all the sick kids a toy or a book and something to eat.” Breanne, “I now there are lots of kids out there that do not have iney toy’s so if you Do not have unaf of toy’s pleys giv those ones that Do not hav toy’s”

After 9-11 one youngster asked me to “take toys to the children of the terrorists so they won’t hate us so much”.

There's a journey from being children like these to being the kind of willfully ignorant, hate-filled lunatic that just elected what will be perhaps the most loathsome House of Representatives in this nation's history. Your children don't have to take that journey. You can set them on a different path. The raw material is already there.

Easy entertaining: Holiday wreath bread

How was your Christmas? Mine was filled with ham, turkey, gravlax, pavlova, fruit cake and more. It was a weekend of feasting, but as Master Six intoned to me solemnly on Christmas morning, "Christmas is not about presents. It's about spending time with your family."And so there was eating and drinking, and then jumping on the trampoline and playing Snap with the kids. Everyone brought a dish for

Just because a song has the word "Christmas" in it doesn't make it a Christmas song

I know that the holiday season is one of sad memories and loss for many people. It seems that a disproportionate number of people lose loved ones during the holidays -- parents, spouses, even children. I think of Elizabeth Edwards' young children, still raw from the loss of their mother, trying to find a way to observe Christmas in some way that doesn't make it worse. I have a friend who lost her husband in the fall and her father last week -- a double 4th quarter whammy. Colored lights and TV commercials showing large, loving families sometimes just serve to rub salt in the wounds.

Still, the fact that between 2 PM yesterday and 10 AM this morning I heard Joni Mitchell's "River" not once but THREE SEPARATE TIMES on the radio makes me wonder. I know we all feel that if we have to hear "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" one more time a well-placed icepick embedded squarely in one's own frontal lobe sounds like an appealing prospect, but I'm not sure that "River" is the answer.

It's one thing to be a brooding, depressive adolescent, writing sad poetry in a blank book while sitting alone at lunchtime at school and coming home to listen to the Blue album and crying. It's quite another for the very same people who perpetrate Burl Ives on us every Christmas to decide that the presence of the word "Christmas" in the first line makes "River" something to which even the loneliest, most depressive adult in the world should be listening on Christmas.

If you've got the blues on Christmas, there are far better choices. Like Sonny Boy Williamson's Christmas Blues:

Or Charley Jordan's Christmas Christmas Blues:

Or Eric Clapton, Crying Christmas Tears:

Or Blind Lemon Jefferson, Christmas Eve Blues

Or if your mood leans more to rage and cynicism than tears and depression, there's Maxine of the Hallmark Cards, Crabby Christmas Blues:

Or Ray Davis, in a solo performance of the Kinks, Father Christmas:

Maybe it's time to stop hating "It's a Wonderful Life" and watch it again

It seems suddenly timely:

And just to seal the deal

Christmas may now proceed:

Because it's not Christmas until and unless Darlene Love sings.

And of course there's always this:

A Very Maron Christmas To You

Abdelkader Way Way 2011

Abdelkader WayWay 2011 en ligne gratuit sur se site
voir et regarder le chab Abdelkader WayWay Dancer Dancer 2011 en direct sur votre pc
Abdelkader Way Way 2011 en video hd ici :

Said Outajajt 2011 Exclusive outajajet Music Souss tachlhite

musique Said Outajajt 2011
Said Outajajet en ligne gratuit sur se site
en video hd
noveau raisse Said Outajajet 2011 ici :

Groupe Archache 2010 mp 3

Groupe Archache en mp 3 gratuit en ligne
archache free musique tachlhite amazighe
archache musique tachl7it sur votre pc en direct

3owad ait baamran 2011

Voir et regarder 3owad ait baamran en ligne gratuit
3owad ait baamran ou l3ouad naitba3mrane en video hd
a regarder en direct ici :

Rachid.Aslal comedie tachlhit

Voir en direct Rachid Aslal gratuit sur net
voir comedie amazighe de Rachid Aslal en hd Video
vcd et dvd ici prochainement :

Clip Video Tarragt en ligne ou taragte

Voir Clip Video Tarragt sur net gratuitement
regarder et telecharger le Clip Video Tarragt ici sur se site
Clip Video Tarragt musique tachlhite tamazighte ici :

Film Day3in f Agadir film amazighe

voir et telecharger le Film Day3in f Agadir
regarder gratuitement le film de Day3in f Agadir
Film Day3in f Agadir en ligne en video hd vcd dvd ici :

Film Raissa FaTima film amazighe

Voir et regarder le film de Raissa FaTima en direct gratuit sur net
regarder le film de Raissa FaTima sur votre pc live en video hd vcd dvd
a voir ici :

Because it never WAS about fighting terrorism -- and it still isn't

It's about monitoring every American:

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

[snip]

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

The TSA ritual at airports is just the tip of the iceberg. Our government no longer serves us, it serves the interests of corporations whose interests might be affected by terrorism -- or even by anyone who might expose what they do. Our government regards us all as potential enemies.

It no longer matters who is in the White House, or who is in the Senate. We already live in a corporate oligarchy. The only step remaining is to make it a totalitarian one.

You can't BUY this kind of publicity

I don't know if Marc Maron should be thrilled or call his lawyer about this:

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.

"Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF," the Washington Post reported.

WTF is more commonly associated with the Facebook and Twitter profiles of teenagers than secret agency committees. Given that its expanded version is usually an expression of extreme disbelief, perhaps the term is apt for the CIA's investigation.

Desperately Seeking Susan

Meet the real-life Lisbeth Salander.

We live on a planet where it's a perpetual truism that truth, as Lord Byron famously observed, is stranger than fiction. Fiction, especially the kind that depends upon Coleridge's suspension of disbelief, needs to catch up with real life if it is to be taken seriously. Bestselling author James Patterson sagely observed recently that if someone penned a novel about an ex NFL player who murdered his wife and one other man then led the LAPD on a nationally-televised, slow motion chase down a California freeway and had done so before 1994, that person would've been laughed out of the publishing business. As a working novelist myself, I concur.

Therefore, it only follows that Susan Lindauer had to come around years before Lisbeth Salander, the waspish heroine of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. And, as it so often happens, the real life case has been virtually ignored while the fictional Salander's fictional travails have been, justly, celebrated in both print and film.

I'm shamelessly stealing from journalist Michael Collins' "The Hornet's Nest Kicked Back", his review of Susan Lindauer's new tell-all autobiography, Extreme Prejudice. I've yet to read the book. But then again, this isn't a book review nor does it pretend to be. Let's call this, instead, a review of the Kafkaesque/Orwellian/Larssonian persecution undergone by Lindauer during much of the illegitimate Bush administration.

To anyone who's read Larsson's excellent book, the reasons for paralleling Lindauer's experience with Salander's are obvious. Both women are of Swedish extraction who were then charged with crimes they didn't commit, had their sanity questioned by the Powers That Be and were even illegally incarcerated. Both women had information that could take down their respective governments, which necessitated their disappearance a la Pinochet.

Here's the difference. Salander has celebrity journalist Michael Blomqvist on her side, as well as, eventually, several members of law enforcement.

Aside from her Protean legal team, Lindauer had no one but Michael Collins, a freelancer who hardly has the celebrity of Millennium's publisher and crusading financial journalist. Blomqvist, in Larsson's books, always found himself playing private detective and either insinuating himself into the official investigation into Salander or running his own parallel investigation with the laissez-faire freedom that only a crusading, nationally-known, therefore dangerous journalist of Blomqvist's stature can muster. Collins was virtually the only accredited journalist who consistently took up Lindauer's cause and still is and the mainstream media had hardly touched Lindauer. Salander, at least, was the source of tabloid fodder in Sweden and had ridiculous stories about being part of a "lesbian Satanic gang" circulated about her.

Salander, in the last two books, was essentially held prisoner from the age of 12 on and victimized by the evil Dr. Peter Teleborian. Lindauer's own Teleborian goes by the name of Sanford L. Drob, PhD.

Drob's diagnosis, if one were to honor his findings with such a dignified word, was to treat Lindauer, literally and figuratively, as if she was too incompetent to defend herself. In fact, Drob's contention was that the more Lindauer called for witnesses who could exonerate her of espionage charges, the more "proof" it was of her delusional structure and persecution complex. In other words, the more she demanded the trial that was forever denied her, the more they kept denying it to her. It was the first time that I'd ever heard of the prosecution claiming the defendant was too incompetent to stand trial.

For those of you just tuning in, the basic reason Lindauer was arrested, detained and accused of espionage was her opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq. She'd written at least 11 letters, some of them to her second cousin, then WH Chief of Staff Andy Card, vehemently advising against such a rash policy of regime change. Lindauer had prophesied, among other things, that invading Iraq would be used as a great recruiting tool for al Qaeda, a fact borne out a few years later when the Flypaper Effect became apparent and our troops found themselves fighting a new enemy called "Al Qaida in Iraq."

What happened to Lindauer, not a covert agent but a supervised intelligence asset, went in some ways even further than the much more publicized Valerie Plame outing. Plame, because of a now-infamous NY Times op-ed written by her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, had her career destroyed and her life put in jeopardy when the late Robert Novak, at the behest of senior Bush administration officials, outed her.

Lindauer was the Nexus phase of the paranoid Bush junta's persecution, losing almost everything in the process yet somehow falling between the cracks. It's impossible to fathom why she'd suffered the same fate as Sibel Edmonds, former translator for the FBI who'd also been vigorously shunned by the MSM.

2002 was not a good year for the Bush administration. That same year, Edmonds had been fired from her translation job at the FBI Washington, DC field office after threatening to make public revelations of federal impropriety that could've endangered national security. This was the exact same rationale used by that same government to persecute Lindauer.

Without going into details (read Lindauer's 466 page book for them. I trust it will make for riveting reading), the federal government:

Incarcerated Lindauer at Carswell Federal prison for women beyond the legally permissible time.

The prosecution, incredibly, tried to have Lindauer declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, a legal tactic exclusively used by defense attorneys, often in capital crimes cases.

Both the prosecution and the psychiatric "experts" who'd had, at best, middling contact with Lindauer, lobbied to have her forcibly drugged with Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic medication.

Valuable information, analysis and testimony that could've exonerated Lindauer or at least shed some doubt on her condition and even guilt was deliberately withheld from the court of Michael B. Mukasey, who would later become the Attorney General of the United States.

The case was later transferred to Loretta Preska, someone who'd been elevated to a federal court by none other than George W. Bush.

The case against Lindauer abruptly lost steam within days of Bush and Cheney, after a massive, self-satisfied burp, waddling out of the White House on January 20th 2009.

What's happened to Lindauer, who'd been denied her freedom and credibility and justice for years, her career ruined and sanity questioned, is, if anything, an even more egregious blow to her civil liberties than that endured by Valerie Plame. Yet, the mainstream media, except for followup filler blurbs on Lindauer's court dates, hardly touched it.

Lindauer's book promises to set the record straight, revealing much more detail about her experience and evidence of the coverup. However, it's telling that the book was published by the obscure CreateSpace and that Extreme Prejudice couldn't get the backing of a literary agent (who are as a whole, on top of being career-driven and greedy, also literarily moronic and cowardly).

That means we have to get the word out. Because Lindauer is not like Lisbeth Salander in the respect that her own persecution and false imprisonment does not have the massive, money-making PR machine as enjoyed by the estate of Stieg Larsson.

Stomachs Eleven: Christmas dinner

Christmas? It's about the three F's - food, family and friends. What's even better is when you are able to combine all three.Over the past two years, our dinner party group Stomachs Eleven has taken turns to host a homemade meal, and these days our circle of friends has become more like a family. Someone's usually running late, the early birds will pitch in with last minute prep, and there's