Gary Marchbank

Larry Craig’s return to the US Senate made me think of an unusual topic… public bathroom etiquette in the men’s room. OK, the ladies may be bored or amused by the topic but all human interactions carry some standards of behavior which are generally observed by the participants. Craig’s return made me wonder about the interaction in the men’s room among Senator Craig and his compatriots and how things might have changed.

In the pre-foot tapping era chances are good that there were some verbal interactions while standing at the urinals; they were likely pretty simple things like ‘did you see the Bears play last night? What a game!’ or perhaps a ribald story or two. Sometimes they probably do conduct some business pressing somebody to help out on a bill or with an issue. Some guys, of course, are pretty silent and just concentrate on their business.

At the urinal most men keep theirs eyes down or straight ahead not wanting to show any undue interest in somebody else’s ‘property’. Of course, there are the really gregarious guys who laugh and cut up all the time so they may be looking around but most guys are looking anywhere but to the side and down.

Now that Craig is there I’d like to know what happens when he strolls into the men’s room. Is there dead silence? If you’re in the middle of a joke do you quit telling it? If he winds up at the adjoining urinal do you say anything or just pee like heck and hope he doesn’t say something to you?

Does his presence change things a lot or are most guys intent on maintaining the Senate’s decorum and try to keep things just like they were? I’m betting on a lot of silence when he walks into the area. Few things seem to spook guys like sexuality. It is OK to humorous analogies about sex but not considered polite to really discuss it. Its one thing to say that you ‘really hit a home run’ last night but quite another to say you ‘starting playing for the other team’.

Anyway, just thinking about the activities (or lack thereof…) in the Senate men’s room makes me laugh. OK, color me weird but you gotta know that things have changed.

Olbermann: Go to Iraq and fight, Mr. President

Bush’s latest choice of scapegoat — Hillary Clinton — boggles the mind

By Keith Olbermann Countdown, July 19, 2007

It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.

A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.

But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.

The Bush administration has opened this Pandora’s Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.

The lies and terror tactics with which it deluded this country into war — they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place — the most disastrous geopolitical tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process — that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The criminal lack of planning for the war — the total “jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly” tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein — that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The utter, blinkered idiocy of “staying the course,” of sending Americans to Iraq and sending them a second time, and a third and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed — the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake — that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever. It isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault.

The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating or containing or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11, the total “Alice Through the Looking Glass” quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for al-Qaida — it isn’t Mr. Bush’s fault!

The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of… Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now-vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “Don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”

Sen. Clinton has been sent — and someone has leaked to The Associated Press — a letter, sent in reply to hers asking if there exists an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.

This extraordinary document was written by an undersecretary of defense named Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq,” Edelman writes, “reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”

Edelman adds: “Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman’s remarks are “at once both outrageous and dangerous.” Those terms are entirely appropriate and may, in fact, understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.

After the South was defeated in our Civil War, the scapegoat was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the ideas of the “Lost Cause” and “Jim Crow” were born.

After the French were beaten by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871, it was the imaginary “Jewish influence” in the French Army general staff, and there was born 30 years of self-destructive anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrific Dreyfus case.

After the Germans lost the First World War, it was the “back-stabbers and profiteers” at home, on whose lives the National Socialists rose to prominence in the succeeding decades and whose accused membership eventually wound up in torture chambers and death camps.

And after the generation before ours, and leaders of both political parties, escalated and re-escalated and carpet-bombed and re-carpet-bombed Vietnam, it was the protest movement
and Jane Fonda and — as late as just three years ago — Sen. John Kerry who were assigned the kind of blame with which no rational human being could concur, and yet which still, across vast sections of our political landscape, resonates unchallenged and accepted.

And now Mr. Bush, you have picked out your own Jefferson Davis, your own Dreyfus, your own “profiteer” — your own scapegoat.

Not for the sake of this country.

Not for the sake of Iraq.

Not even for the sake of your own political party.

But for the sake of your own personal place in history.

But in reaching for that place, you have guaranteed yourself tonight not honor, but infamy.

In fact, you have condemned yourself to a place among that remarkably small group of Americans whom Americans cannot forgive: those who have sold this country out and who have willingly declared their enmity to the people at whose pleasure they supposedly serve.

A scapegoat, sir, might be forgivable, if you hadn’t just happened to choose a prospective presidential nominee of the opposition party.

And the accusation of spreading “enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia” might be some day atoned for, if we all didn’t know — you included, and your generals and the Iraqis — that we are leaving Iraq, and sooner rather than later, and we are doing it even if to do so requires, first, that you must be impeached and removed as president of the United States, sooner rather than later.

You have set this government at war against its own people and then blamed those very people when they say, “Enough.”

And thus it crystallizes, Mr. Bush.

When Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered a disastrous attack on Fredericksburg in which 12,000 of his men were killed, he had to be physically restrained from leading the next charge himself.

After the First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, authored and enabled the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that saw a quarter-million Allied soldiers cut down in the First World War, Churchill resigned his office and took a commission as a front-line officer in the trenches of France.

Those are your new role models, Mr. Bush.

Let your minions try to spread the blame to the real patriots here, who have sought only to undo the horrors you have wrought since 2002.

Let them try it, until the end of time.

Though the words might be erased from a million books and a billion memories, though the world be covered knee-deep in your lies, the truth shall prevail.

This, sir, is your war.

Sen. Clinton has reinforced enemy propaganda? Made it impossible for you to get your ego-driven, blood-steeped win in Iraq?

Then take it into your own hands, Mr. Bush.

Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations.

Go there and fight, your war. Yourself.

George W. Bush and James Stewart…

One of my favorite movie quotes is from the 1965 movie, The Flight of the Phoenix.

The Phoenix is an old airplane owned by an oil company which crashes at the hands of a crusty old pilot, Mr. Towne (James Stewart) whose bitterness and fatalism are brought out when he’s forced to admit the crash was due to pilot error. The hodge-podge group of passengers includes a young blonde haired German who was taking the flight to visit his brother in the oil fields.

Stranded in the desert with no hope of rescue, they debate various schemes for salvation, all of which fail, until Kruger reveals that he is an airplane designer and he has discovered a way to build a new plane from the spare parts of the old one. All it needs for a handful of unskilled men, living on a little water and no food but pressed dates, coping with unbearable heat during the day and unbearable cold at night, to transform themselves into aircraft manufacturers before they all succumb.

After days of arduous work on the plane Stewart finds out that Kruger designs model airplanes rather than traditional full-sized airplanes and he angrily accuses the young German designer of misleading them. The German carefully and skillfully defends himself and Stewart is still angry at himself for putting them in this precarious situation. The young German is logical and describes in detail how airplane design isn’t about the size of the plane but about aerodynamics and the physics of design. Stewart ignorantly ignores the information provided by the young German and continues to berate him. The German finally says to him:

“Mr. Townes, you behave as though stupidity were a virtue…”

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions and comparisons to our current president…

(portions of the movie description was lifted from IMDB.com)

American Grit

We can’t fire the president right now, so we’re waiting it out.

By Peggy Noonan

It’s been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush’s news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might disagree with him.

I’m not referring to what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. That phrase suggested that to passionately dislike the president was to be somewhat unhinged. No one thinks that anymore. I received an email before the news conference from as rock-ribbed a Republican as you can find, a Georgia woman (middle-aged, entrepreneurial) who’d previously supported him. She said she’d had it. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.” I was startled by her vehemence only because she is, as I said, rock-ribbed. Her email reminded me of another, one a friend received some months ago: “I took the W off my car today,” it said on the subject line. It sounded like a country western song, like a great lament.

As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president’s seemingly effortless high spirits. He’s in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn’t seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn’t Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president’s since polling began. He’s in a good mood. Discuss.

Is it defiance? Denial? Is it that he’s right and you’re wrong, which is your problem? Is he faking a certain steely good cheer to show his foes from Washington to Baghdad that the American president is neither beaten nor bowed? Fair enough: Presidents can’t sit around and moan. But it doesn’t look like an act. People would feel better to know his lack of success sometimes gets to him. It gets to them.

His stock answer is that of course he feels the sadness of the families who’ve lost someone in Iraq. And of course he must. Beyond that his good humor seems to me disorienting, and strange.

In arguing for the right path as he sees it, the president more and more claims for himself virtues that the other side, by inference, lacks. He is “idealistic”; those who oppose him are, apparently, lacking in ideals. He makes his decisions “based on principle,” unlike his critics, who are ever watchful of the polls. He is steadfast, brave, he believes “freedom isn’t just for Americans” but has “universal . . . applications,” unlike those selfish, isolationist types who oppose him.

This is ungracious as a rhetorical approach, but not unprecedented. There’s something in the White House water system. Presidents all wind up being gallant in their own eyes. Thursday I was reminded of President Nixon, who often noted he was resisting those who were always advising him to “take the easy way.” Bill Safire used to joke that when he was a Nixon speechwriter, part of his job was to walk by the Oval Office and yell in, “Mr. President, take the easy way!”

I suspect people pick up with Mr. Bush the sense that part of his drama, part of the story of his presidency, is that he gets to be the romantic about history, and the American people get to be the realists. Of the two, the latter is not the more enjoyable role.

Americans have always been somewhat romantic about the meaning of our country, and the beacon it can be for the world, and what the Founders did. But they like the president to be the cool-eyed realist, the tough customer who understands harsh realities.

With Mr. Bush it is the people who are forced to be cool-eyed and realistic. He’s the one who goes off on the toots. This is extremely irritating, and also unnatural. Actually it’s weird.

Americans hire presidents and fire them. They’re not as sweet about it as they used to be. This is not because they have grown cynical, but because they are disappointed, by both teams and both sides. Some part of them thinks no matter who is president he will not protect them from forces at work in the world. Some part of them fears that when history looks back on this moment, on the past few presidents and the next few, it will say: Those men were not big enough for the era.

But this is a democracy. You vote, you do the best you can with the choices presented, and you show the appropriate opposition to the guy who seems most likely to bring trouble. (I think that is one reason for the polarity and division of politics now. No one knows in his gut that the guy he supports will do any good. But at least you can oppose with enthusiasm and passion the guy you feel in your gut will cause more trouble than is needed! This is what happens when the pickings are slim: The greatest passion gets funneled into opposition.)

We hire them and fire them. President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.

That’s the deal. It’s the real “grand bargain.” If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can’t take care of–the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part. You meet your part of the bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things–the boy’s ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can handle within your ken, and give the big things to the president.

And if he can’t do it, or if he can’t do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.

Americans can’t fire the president right now, so they’re waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.

We’ve gone Hollywood and bought a gazebo. It’s really pretty cool… 12 sided with screens and two doors. Yesterday I added a ceiling fan to so distribute the air. Here are some pictures of it:

100_10951.jpg

He’s arguing he didn’t decide to go to war; Saddam did. He’s saying he agrees with his Republican critics. He’s blaming the generals for all the combat decisions that have made this war a failure. His blaming Tommy Franks specifically for the troop levels was particularly piquant. So he gave him a Medal of Freedom anyway? Worse, the president conflated every single radical element in the Middle East into one amorphous anti-American entity. It appears that he sees Shiite militias, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Sunni insurgents as indistinguishable. He has even said baldly that the people bombing and murdering in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. The Shiite militias? The Baathist dead-enders? Is he serious? He seems to be still operating under the premise that the fundamental dynamic is one between democracy and radicalism. At some very broad and general level, that’s not wrong. But in terms of forming policy, it’s close to useless. Actually, it’s worse than useless. We have a president who seems unable to understand the critical dynamics of the war he is allegedly waging. Is he capable of understanding the complexity? Does he really think we need another lecture on the evil of al Qaeda? Does he really think that’s what we’re arguing about at this point?

Here’s the bottom line for me:

“I don’t think Congress should be running the war; it should be funding the troops.”

The inverse, of course, is that Congress can also defund the troops. But apparently that’s not an option. Bush’s position is that Congress can make one decision - to go to war - and then their role is to pay for it indefinitely, regardless. He’ll listen, but he won’t hear. He’s the decider.

I don’t know whether this performance is going to persuade anyone. It seems to me that the report only offers one real sign of success: that the Iraqi government came up with its pledged troops for Baghdad. That’s it. It also seems to me, alas, that when the president speaks spontaneously about the war, he reveals vast amounts of ignorance, denial and deception, self and otherwise. The patronizing soundbites stick in the craw at this point. His formulation that we do not know whether the war can succeed but that it nonetheless must succeed is about as disorienting a leadership call as I have heard. The rank condescension toward the American people is also staggering. Look, Mr President, most Americans aren’t as dim as you seem to be. Maybe it’s time you realized that.

He’s just out of his depth, I’m afraid. And others are sinking - and dying - as a consequence.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

~ Marianne Williamson, 21st century spiritual teacher, from her book, A Return to Love (page 191)
(This is often, and mistakenly, believed to be from Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech.)

Good Riddance Attention Whore
by Cindy Sheehan
I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too…which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.

A president transformed

It is so moving to see how a willing executioner can soften into a man of compassion - for cronies

Terry Jones, Saturday July 7, 2007 The Guardian

It has been a truly moving experience to witness the concern and compassion the president of the United States can show towards a convicted felon. Particularly someone accused of such grave offences as Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. On March 6 2007 Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements to the FBI, and twice committing perjury before a grand jury. According to the charge sheet, Libby “did knowingly and corruptly endeavour to influence, obstruct and impede the due administration of justice by misleading and deceiving the grand jury”. So it wasn’t a case of absent-mindedness, then.

That is why George Bush’s act of mercy is so inspiring, especially when one considers that compassion is not something generally associated with him. When he was governor of Texas, for instance, there were quite a number of convicted felons towards whom he didn’t show much compassion at all. In fact he insisted they receive the full penalty of the law, which in their case was somewhat more severe than in Libby’s. They were executed. When Bush became governor in 1995, the average number of executions in the state was 7.6 a year. During his time in office, he managed to put down a further 24 humans a year, bringing the annual number of executions up to 31.6; it is heartwarming to see how his attitude to convicted criminals has softened.

The president said the sentence imposed on Libby was “excessive”, and that he had suffered enough punishment without it. “The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is for ever damaged,” said Bush. “His wife and young children have also suffered immensely.”

Now this will be good news for critics of the current system of justice. For some time, defence lawyers have been complaining that sentences are too harsh, that defendants’ positive contributions to society are ignored, and that collateral damage caused to defendants’ families is disregarded. Only last month the US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, announced that the justice department would push for legislation to make federal sentences even tougher and less flexible. How delighted the critics of such harsh attitudes must be to see that the president has now come around to their way of thinking.

Mind you, Bush’s softening of heart can only have happened in very recent days. A couple of weeks ago, in an eerily similar case, Victor Rita was, like Libby, convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal agents, and obstruction of justice. Like Scooter, Rita has an unblemished record of public service - 25 years in the armed forces with 35 commendations, awards and medals - and yet he was handed a 33-month jail sentence without even a message of condolence from the president.

In another recent case, the justice department tried to have Jamie Olis put away for more than 24 years for accounting fraud. In the end he got six years inside. But then I suppose fiddling the accounts isn’t on a par with trying to obstruct an investigation into a breach of national security.

So I thoroughly approve of the president’s change of heart towards convicted criminals, and hope it will continue until his term of office expires - and that in the future we shall witness increasing moderation in the justice department’s insatiable urge to punish, imprison and execute.

And I sincerely hope that the commutation of Libby’s prison sentence will usher in a new era of clemency, compassion and human forgiveness, under a president who otherwise has so much blood on his hands.

Terry Jones is a film director, actor and former member of Monte Python

I got this quote from Connie… it’s a great one!

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Dr. Seuss