There are aid workers on the ground in Burma right now and they need your help! Please rec the linked diary, and donate if you can - to the site linked there or to other organizations that have been able to get in.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies could not say how much of the cargo has been lost, but it said the food supplies were contaminated by river water.
Other aid was increasingly getting through, the group said, but on "nowhere near the scale required."
link That's because we're not getting it to them. Let's go, DKos!
UPDATE: Hypatica points out that Sen. Clinton does plan to expand Medicaid to cover poor adults without children, which allays many of the concerns I've voiced in this diary.
I grew up when your husband was President. He visited my high school one day 12 years ago when I was a freshman, and here's one of the things he said to us:
Our nation has a lot of challenges that we have to meet together if we're going to make sure the American Dream is available for all young people without regard to their background, if we're going to see that our country remains the strongest country in the world, if we're going to see this country come together instead of being divided by race, by region, by income.
Senator, you and your husband were my hero and heroine. I believed what he told us that day, and I believed him when he shook my hand and looked me in the eye and told me I was the future of this country. I believe that you believe it too.
In a recent diary about Obama's pamphlet reminding out-of-state Iowa students they may vote in Iowa, one of my comments received the following response:
Get some ethics.
It's not my intent to call out this commenter, but he or she was the inspiration for this diary. It's important to note that the comment in question was not questioning the legality of college students voting where they go to school.
"Republican presidential candidate Fred D. Thompson said yesterday that he wishes [Philip J. Martin,] one of his key fundraisers had told him earlier about past drug trafficking and bookmaking arrests because, even though they occurred more than two decades ago, 'nothing is ever over and done with and forgotten about in this business'... 'I know him to be a good man. I know him to be a man who has rehabilitated himself and has led a productive life,' Thompson" told Fox 'News'."
For those who don't know the story, Martin pleaded guilty to selling 11 pounds of marijuana in 1979, received probation, and then in 1983 was charged with violating probation and with multiple counts of felony bookmaking, cocaine trafficking and conspiracy. He pleaded no contest to the cocaine-trafficking and conspiracy charges, which stemmed from a plan to sell $30,000 worth of the drug, and was continued on probation. This guy clearly had a fairly large-scale drug dealing business. But he had the good fortune to get caught at a time when there were no mandatory minimum sentences.
My husband was evicted today. There was no warning, no notice. Just a phone call from his landlord giving him and his roommates 48 hours to move out of the house they had been renting. They're now homeless, their lease worthless, their deposit lost. They'll be staying with me for the next month, if they can get here; they'll all be losing their jobs, and probably their furniture too. If we can't find somewhere to live and jobs to pay for it we're all screwed; I was planning to move in with him.
How did this happen? Apparently, their landlord had bought the house on an interest-only 2/28 mortgage expecting to flip it quickly. Instead, it sat on the market of over six months; he didn't have the money to keep it. So he rented it out. Fast forward a year and a half: his payment ballooned, the property value had depreciated, he was "upside-down" on his mortgage, and the rent Mr. kyril and roommates were paying was not sufficient to cover the new higher payment. So he stopped paying the mortgage. Two months later, property values still stagnant, no refinancing in sight, the bank foreclosed on his loan. The landlord will suffer financial consequences, to be sure; the tenants, however, are now homeless.
In the timbers to fennario, the wolves are running round,
The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet neath the ground.
Dont murder me, I beg of you, dont murder me. please, dont murder me.
I sat down to my supper, twas a bottle of red whisky,
I said my prayers and went to bed, thats the last they saw of me.
Dont murder me, I beg of you, dont murder me. please, dont murder me.
In his latest front-page diary, Markos exposes his shocking ignorance about DKos.
There has lately been an alarming rise in diaries and comments that seek to impugn (without evidence) the motives of those they disagree with on various issues.
...
And no, Bush won't cancel the next round of elections to remain in power. That's about the most ridiculous conspiracy theory I've seen in a long time. Some people on our side can be just as "out there" as the "black helicopter" crowd.
Really? Well I think you're out there, Kos.
You are with us or against us. We must impeach right now. I mean now. Yesterday would have been preferable. It is absolutely critical to our liberty, our health, even our very lives that every single person reading this, regardless of financial, family or employment status, fly, drive, hitchike or walk to DC immediately if not sooner and stand in the halls of Congress dressed up like a giant orange demanding impeachment. But be sure to wrop yourself in tinfoil in case you get hit with the evil Ray-gun of pain.
This is a diary about drugs. You may or may not find it interesting. I take no offense to the latter. But I promised the heroin diary, so here it is (I don't discriminate though, all psychoactive substance discussion welcome)
I've had it. I won't take it anymore. Three Sailors died today in Iraq. Sailors. First Class Petty Officers. I knew one of them. His name is Jason Dale Lewis. He's an EOD guy, for those who know what that means. He was in my best friend from high school's unit until last year. He was the guy who took my friend under his wing. He was like a big brother to him. He was a good man, a good father, a good friend, a good husband. He was a Navy SEAL, an elite, one of our nation's very finest. He sweated and suffered through more than most of us, even in the military, could imagine enduring. He was special. Now he's dead. That's not ok. I'm not going to get over it. I'm not going to be ok. Their team won't be ok. And their families, like all the other families whose husbands and fathers and sons have been murdered, won't be ok.
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air
There could be no more fitting introduction to this diary than Robert Hunter's words.
I used to read the news with a sort of dispassionate feeling of detachment. I was a high school student, then a college student, then a low-wage worker, an exotic dancer, a volunteer firefighter. I paid attention to politics, but I never felt involved - I'm a Canadian citizen, so I can't vote, and nothing really affected me much anyway. I didn't honestly expect the government to fix the problems I saw every day, the poverty and homelessness and hopelessness, the domestic violence and the medical bills and the hungry kids. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I assumed they were doing their best.
I joined the Navy in March of 2004 to escape domestic violence. I hadn't thought much about the war in Iraq, but I remembered Saddam Hussein being a bad guy. I figured that I owed it to this country, which had educated me, fed me when I was hungry, provided medical care when I was pregnant - I owed some sort of debt of service. I swore my oath to defend the Constitution, and I meant it.
In light of the many pro-choice-oriented diaries that have been coming out lately, I thought it would be fitting for me to share my story; this debate is often seen in such impersonal terms, but for many women here it's a very personal issue. I've seen three sides of it myself: adoption, legal abortion, and illegal self-induced abortion.
It is my hope to start a dialogue with the fence-sitters, the "safe, legal and rare" advocates, and those who would argue that federal money should not be used to fund abortion.
