"Both the Burmese government restrictions and US economic sanctions make it very difficult to give money to local NGOs directly, but it is possible to support their work by donating to the international groups that have longstanding partnerships with local NGOs and community-based organizations (including churches and monasteries).
The following international organizations are already in the Delta and have launched fundraising campaigns to support broader efforts. All of them have proven track records in Burma, and especially in the Delta."
"Pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Roland Martin have suggested that the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton would use a "Southern strategy" to suggest that African-American support in South Carolina for rival Barack Obama was related to his race and not his individual appeal to voters.
Limbaugh said they will be "[g]iving nothing to Obama, blaming it all on racial identity politics, or crediting it for that. You watch. They'll do something." In [Limbaugh's] view, subsequent primaries would be affected by the introduction of race and follow the pattern of the Southern strategy."
"One of the reasons that Mrs. Clinton is resolved to keep fighting is, I think, a resentment that she and many of her followers feel over sexism in the campaign. On that issue, she has a point. One of the political lessons of this year — backed by psychological research and polling data — is that the bar is probably higher for a woman candidate for president than for a black candidate.
It’s interesting that two strong women — Katie Couric as well as Mrs. Clinton — have foundered this year in roles that are stereotypically male. Granted, the presidency is very different from the job of an evening news anchor, but some psychology experiments suggests that one factor in each case may be public resistance to a woman in a position in which we are accustomed to seeing a man. . . . . So Mrs. Clinton’s frustration is understandable." (Then he tells her to shut up and drop out so that The Man Who Would Be [Prom] King can get on with his important work.
" . . .Obama repeats the incorrect and politically irresponsible mantra that Sen. Hillary Clinton voted for the war and that therefore he is more qualified to be president. Unlike Obama, as the last acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq during the first Gulf War, I was deeply involved in that debate from the beginning.
President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear publicly and in their representations to Congress that the authorization was not to go to war but rather to give the president the leverage he needed to go to the United Nations to reinvigorate international will to contain and disarm Saddam Hussein, consistent with the resolutions passed at the time of the first Gulf War.
With passage of the resolution, the president did in fact achieve a U.N. consensus, and inspectors returned to Iraq. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, has said repeatedly that without American leadership there would have been no new inspection regime."
. . .The approach of tough diplomacy backed by the threat of military action was the correct one and it yielded exactly the desired results, a unanimously passed U.N. resolution and the capitulation of Saddam when he readmitted the inspectors.
The betrayal occurred not when the president was given the tools he needed to secure international support for inspections, but rather when Bush refused to allow the inspectors to complete their work and decided preemptively to invade, conquer and occupy Iraq.
That decision and power was his alone -- not the Congress' and certainly not Hillary Clinton's. Obama is wrong to turn Bush's war into Clinton's responsibility. And Obama is dangerously naive in failing to understand the need in international crises to blend tough diplomacy with the other foreign policy tools at our disposal to achieve a strong national security posture.
"Even the Kentucky Derby wasn't this close.
In the strangest of circumstances that could only bring about the closest of races, Hillary Rodham Clinton finished with 49.9% of the vote of the Guam Democratic Caucus, just 7 votes shy of Barack Obama's total of 50.1%.
While Obama led for the vast majority of the night's tallying, Clinton needed a strong finish in the municipality of Dededo, Guam's most populous village. And she did - gaining 61% of the 822 votes counted by the Democratic Party of Guam.
Note: these are unofficial, uncertified results as tabulated by the Democratic Party of Guam. The DPG also noted a high number of spoiled ballots in Dededo."
WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton has a better chance than Barack Obama of beating Republican John McCain, according to a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll that bolsters her argument that she is more electable in the fall than her rival for the Democratic nomination.
The survey released Monday gives Clinton a fresh talking point as she works to convince pivotal undecided superdelegates to side with her in the drawn-out Democratic primary fight.
Clinton, who won the Pennsylvania primary last week, has gained ground this month in a hypothetical head-to-head match up with the GOP nominee-in-waiting; she now leads McCain, 50 percent to 41 percent, while Obama remains virtually tied with McCain, 46 percent to 44 percent.
Souvenirs
Anyway we are always waking
in bedrooms of the dead, smelling
musk of their winter jackets, tracking
prints of their heels across our blurred carpets.
So why hang onto a particular postcard?
If a child's lock of hair brings back
the look of that child, shall I
nevertheless not let it blow away?
Houses, houses, we lodge in such husks!
inhabit such promises, seeking the unborn
in a worn-out photograph, hoping to break free
even of our violent and faithful lives.
By the time Hillary Clinton's campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle finally packed up her lovely corner office with its fresh blue carpet and mini-fridge full of Diet Coke, her exit must have come as a relief--even to many of her friends on Team Hillary. Since Iowa, colleagues had been conducting an uneasy deathwatch for her."Lovely corner office" -- "fresh blue carpet" -- "mini-fridge full of Diet Coke" -- hmm. Interesting word choices.
And so the jockeying and layering and squabbling grinds on, even as Hillary's chances of capturing the nomination grow ever more remote. [Translation: shut up and die, bitch]. From the outside, the struggle for control of a campaign that likely won't be around much longer [Translation: jeez, bitch, why won't you just shut up and die??] may appear absurd.Not as absurd as this article -- not to mention its inflammatory headlines.
Hillary Sexism Watch: Cancel Your Subscription to The New Republic
Why does the lefty New Republic look just like the righty Free Republic?
If you don't already have a subscription to The New Republic, why would you ever want one?
Hillary Rodham Clinton is a woman who has inspired mothers, daughters and sisters all over the nation with the hope that women and girls will one day be treated fairly.
Portraying the first woman to have a chance at the presidency as a raving lunatic is what we have come to expect from progressives and conservatives alike.
Anyone who has graduated from feminist studies 101 knows that the portrayal of uppity women as raving lunatics is as old as the patriarchy itself. And hasn't it worked out really well for the chauvinists?
I should be used to it by now. But if this is what it means to be Democrat, I am not one.
On Tuesday, December 2 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed a piece of paper that changed the course of history. That same day, President Bush signed a bill to put the Pentagon in funds for the next year. The US faced unprecedented challenges, Bush told a large and enthusiastic audience, and terror was one of them. The US would respond to these challenges, and it would do so in the "finest traditions of valour". And then he signed a large increase in the defence budget.
Elsewhere in the Pentagon, an event took place for which there was no comment, no fanfare. With a signature and a few scrawled words, Rumsfeld reneged on the tradition of valour to which Bush had referred. Principles for the conduct of interrogation, dating back more than a century to President Lincoln's famous instruction of 1863 that "military necessity does not admit of cruelty", were discarded. He approved new and aggressive interrogation [torture] techniques that would produce devastating consequences.
[Staff Judge Advocate Lt. Col. Diane] Beaver recalled that smothering was thought to be particularly effective, and that [Major General Michael E.] Dunlavey, who'd been in Vietnam, was in favour because he knew it worked.
The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A wan smile crossed Beaver's face. "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached."
Beaver confirmed what Dunlavey had told me, that a delegation of senior lawyers came down to Guantánamo well before the list of techniques was sent up to Washington. They talked to the intelligence people, they even watched some interrogations. The message from the visitors was that they should do "whatever needed to be done", meaning a green light from the very top - from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.
"While women have been elected to the highest offices in countries such as England, Germany, and India, [oh, and not to mention Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Israel, and Ireland -- who have I forgotten?] the idea that a woman could be president of the United States provokes scoffs and ridicule.
The press portrays female candidates as unviable, unnatural, and incompetent, and often ignores or belittles women instead of reporting their ideas and intent. [What? They DO??]
Since voters learn most details about presidential candidates through media outlets, Falk asserts that this prevailing bias calls into question the modern democratic assumption that men and women have comparable access to positions of power." -- Women for President, Media Bias in Eight Campaigns
