I hope you have all read Al Franken's incredible book: Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot where he shows in great detail the hypocrisy that is Rush Limbaugh.  I guess this is why the Republican Party and Norm Coleman are so intent on keeping Al Franken out of the Senate.

I know it has been a while since you have heard from me, but I just couldn't pass this up.  This post at my favorite political blog CrooksAndLiars.com led me to several thoughts that I must share with you here.

Limbaugh Hypocrisy

While the post is very focused on the feud between the Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele and the Right Wing Radio Talk Show Host, Rush Limbaugh, I picked up on a couple of things.  I could probably pick up on a LOT of things, if I had the stomache to listen to the fat blowhard on a daily basis.

In his rant, defending his stance for wishing Obama and Dems and Liberals all fail, he rants that Obama is doing nothing about the economy as the unemployment numbers get bigger and bigger.  Let's not even talk about the fact that Obama and Dems passed the America Recovery Act in the first 30 days of the Obama Administration.  Let's move on to what he rants about later in the radio cast, on how government can't do anything for you.  Seriously, his hypocrisy is just amazing!  Within a 5 minute time frame he complains that government is doing nothing, then he says that government can't do anything.  Which is it, Rush?  Seriously?

In addition, it seems that Rush has become the defacto leader of the Republican Party.  Neocons are fond of their authoritarian style leadership and it is glaringly apparent that Rush is the voice and sole leader of the party given the way some bow and scrape at his feet.  As Digby writes:

"But he is, as some of us have been pointing for years, the true leader of the Republican Party and we were told that he was a harmless, mainstream entertainer and we should all just lighten up, even as luminaries of the Republican party and the luminaries of the conservative movement bowed and scraped like abused streetwalkers at the feet of their violent pimp."

You have no idea how elated this makes me feel as a Democrat and a Liberal.  It is just so easy to blow his arguments out of the water and expose his hypocrisy.  Having a single bloviated intellectually vacuuous target makes our job all the more easier.  You're doing a heckuva job Rushie!!!

ROFLMFAO!!!!!

UPDATE:

And here it is...I bring you the beginning of the implosion of the Republican Party.  They turn on Michael Steele.

It is a sad and pathetic day when the party of Lincoln turns on its first black Chairman.

UPDATE AGAIN:

The Rushbo Strategy

It turns out that the high paid consultants of the Democratic Party finally earn their keep and Rushbo's narcissism takes the bait and Republican congressional leaders fall right into the trap.

Well, I just found a bunch of my LJ friends on Twitter. Cool. If you want to follow, my Twitter user name is sitara68.

Just opened a twitter account at twitter.com/sitara68

I don't have it set up to send to my LJ and I probably won't but if you want to follow me by text message, feel free.

"Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" byLibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline theones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn'tfinish."


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (I bogged down with "Call me Ishmael.")
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace (I have tried to read this 3 or 4 times but everytime the Prince leaves her, I get sad and don't want to read it anymore)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers 

I resemble all of these, yet they forgot to add Colbert Report fanatic along with The Daily Show. I am a member of Moveon.org since 2003 and I consider myself a Netroots activist. There you go. Looks like a pretty accurate survey.

And I just donated to his campaign the other day.

99% Dennis Kucinich
96% Mike Gravel
81% John Edwards
79% Joe Biden
78% Chris Dodd
77% Barack Obama
74% Hillary Clinton
71% Bill Richardson
27% Rudy Giuliani
25% Ron Paul
18% John McCain
13% Mike Huckabee
12% Mitt Romney
9% Tom Tancredo
4% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

If Edwards wins, I will be ecstatic.
If Obama wins, I will be very happy and supportive.
If Hillary wins, I will very disappointed but begrudgingly supportive.

I know where to get live Mistletoe.  There is a tree at the Park & Ride that has actual Mistletoe growing in it.  This is an astounding fact, because Mistletoe is becoming more and more rare these years with deforestation.  I would very much like to have some of this mistletoe for to bless my household and if possible, put some in the live trees I have in my yard.  Does anyone know how to transplant Mistletoe from one tree to another? 

UPDATE: Okay, maybe I don't want to infect my trees with mistletoe as it might kill them according to this article:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/yardandgarden/YGLNews/YGLNewsJan12007.html

Nevermind...

Since 

spinthemoon is doing it, I suppose I should, too.  Not really, but it looks like a fun thing to do.  After going over my year, I realize, I haven't writting much but here is it nonetheless:

 

Wounded Soldiers from Iraq asked to pay back signing bonuses???

Can someone please tell me WTF is wrong with this picture?!?!?!?!?

This day was known to the colonists who first celebrated with the Natives in the New World as Harvest Home!!

Blessed Harvest Home to you all!!!


We have a tradition in this house where I bake whatever dessert item those who live in the household want.  The requests this year are an Apple Crumb Pie and a Pecan Pie.  I baked both last night.  I am baking a blueberry pie for myself today and a cherry for weekend guests tomorrow.  In addition to baking pies, I baked the cornbread last night and boiled the giblets for the gravy and stuffing and made the Cranberry Compote from a Barefoot Contessa recipe.  It is chilling in the refrigerator now.

This holiday we are having a simple meal with good wine.  Since there are only three of us, I am roasting Cornish Hens with cornbread stuffing, turkey and chicken giblet gravy and I haven't decided whether I'm going to roast or sautee the brussel sprouts.  Of course there will be fresh bread, as well.  For appetizers, I have a good cheese wine with crackers topped with some homemade preserves and/or some Laughing Cow cheese and pretzels.  There is a choice between a Pinot Gris or a Beaujelais for dinner and a nice white wine for dessert. 

I hope your Harvest Meal is full of wonderful foods, smells and most especially friendship and abundance for the winter months.

 Something I have been pondering today.  Found some articles on a Yoga website called "The Art of Silence" Parts V, VI, and VII.  Click on the link in the left frame titled "Soul Culture Journal" and scroll down through the various volumes.  The links for the articles are under the author and guru named Paramahamsa Prajnanananda.

Namaste!

The United Nations overwhelmingly approves Bill of Rights for Indigenous People around the world.  Four Nations voted against it;  U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.  Four nations who have consistently shown hostility towards indigenous peoples for centuries.

I think about the strength of people like Aung San Suu Kyi and the Buddhist Monks protesting in Burma, then I look at my little problems and my little life and I am in awe of them.  They face overwhelming hostility from a military junta that took over the country in 1962.  And when I think of all the other people in the world who face oppression from war, dictatorships, corporatism, and just plain hatred, I feel so small and insignificant in my comfortable middle class life.  There are people in the world who put their lives on the line for justice and freedom and peace.

These individuals do not consider who they struggle with "the enemy".  They see that the enemy is ignorance, hatred, hostility, and greed.  It is the actions people take and their misunderstanding of the world around them that is the enemy.

So, the thought to ponder for today is to try a paradigm shift.  If you have someone in your life that you consider "enemy", for a moment, shift that perspective and do not think of the individual as the enemy.  What is the actual source for the hostility?  Compare that with the great injustices in this world.  How does it rate in comparison to our comfortable lives?  Do we even truly know what it means to struggle against hostility and oppression?

Today, I feel small. 


UPDATE:  I forgot to add that I heard a part of an interview last night with Studs Terkel and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!  She played a clip of Studs interviewing Mahalia Jackson who said, "I don't want to hate, I want to love."  That is what has inspired today's post.  Can we learn to love our enemies? 

UPDATE 2:  Just ran across this article:  Who is our enemy in Iraq?

I have been reflecting on the concept of fear.  I have always thought on this subject from time to time, because I learned early on that fear can create some really nasty  blockages in your life.  Fear to the extreme can create delusions and paranoia.  There are the basic standard fears.  Fear of someone who is different which leads to sociological terms like xenophobia and racism.  Then, there is fear of the unknown which can lead to dogma and fundamentalism.  The most interesting fear is fear of the self.  I find people to be so afraid of themselves inside that they will invent enemies outside themselves in order to avoid dealing with what is inside. 

I think that we as a civilization decided a long time ago, at least those enlightened ones, that the only enemy we have is fear.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  --Franklin Roosevelt

Today, we have a President using fear of terrorism in order to avoid looking at ourselves internally as a nation.  We practice the death penalty, but most of the civilized world does not.  In Italy, the Colosseum is lit up brightly whenever and wherever in the world someone on some country's death row is given a commuted sentence or a nation abolishes the death penalty.  How can we as a nation find the time to truly discuss this when there are terrorists out there and we need to be afraid? What about murderers who want to kill us?  Every time I hear a story about someone being executed in this country, I hear family members of the victims talking about forgiveness of the accused.  How great the heart it is who can forgive?  How fearless it is that they do not call the accused the enemy?  What a truly gentle heart and path they must walk.

Then, there is fear used to distract from the gross inequalities in income and education in this country.  Can't talk about it, not enough time.  How about the way our military is being abused in foreign countries by our leaders in D.C.?  Can't talk about that, either.  You support the terrorists if you do.

People who use fear or who fear a thing call that the enemy and as Roosevelt said, I call fear the enemy.

The thought to ponder for the day is, if there is someone or something that you fear, if you face it/them, do they cease to be your enemy?  Were they ever your enemy to begin with?

 BLESSED SAMHAIN!!!

(See the new User Pic.  That's my new kitten, Kirara!)

For our Full Moon Rite earlier this week, we lit the first fires of the winter in our hearth and a blessing for our home!  May that Blessing extend to your hearth and home, as well, on this holy day!

Blessed Be!

This is a totally cool meme from initiatezathras

1. Open your mp3 library
2. Put it on shuffle.
3. Press Play.
4. For every question, type the song that's playing.
5. When you go to a new question, press the Next button.
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool.
7. Don't skip songs.

Okay, I don't have access to my ITunes library, but does it count if I shuffle songs on my IPod instead? I have my entire ITunes library on it anyway.

Question: Song ~ Artist ~ Album

1. Opening Credits: Mystery ~ Anita Baker ~ Rapture
2. Waking up: Ordinary Morning ~ Sheryl Crow ~ Sheryl Crow
3. First Day of School: Believe ~ Wyrd ~ WasIsWill
4. Fight Song: They Won't Have Me ~ Indigo Girls ~ Despite Our Differences
5. Breaking Up: Follow Me Down ~ S.J. Tucker ~ haphazard
6. Happiness: Run ~ Collective Soul ~ Dosage
7. Life's Okay: Helicopters ~ Barenaked Ladies ~ Maroon
8. Mental Breakdown: Migra ~ Santana ~ Supernatural
9. Driving: Someone That You're With ~ Nickelback ~ All the Right Reasons
10. Flashback: The One That Got Away ~ P!nk ~ I'm Not Dead
11. Getting back together: Everybody Knows ~ Dixie Chicks ~ Taking the Long Way
12. Wedding Song: Maybe That's Something ~ Sheryl Crow ~ Globe Sessions
13. Birth of first child: Supersoulfighter ~ Lenny Kravitz ~ 5
14. Final battle scene: Darker State Of Grace ~ S.J. Tucker ~ Tangles
15. Death scene: Lenny ~ Stevie Ray Vaughan ~ The Real Deal: Greatest Hits
16. Funeral Song: Same Ole Love ~ Anita Baker ~ Rapture
17. End Credits: Sweet Rosalyn ~ Sheryl Crow ~ Sheryl Crow

This felt like I just watched the movie of my life. *shakes head*

Well, I have done some calculations, and my fellow writers may already know this, but in MS Word, single spaced, a page contains roughly 450 - 500 words. So, to achieve 50,000 words in 30 days, I have worked out the following:

50,000 words / 30 days = 1,666.67 words per day

1,666.67 words at 450 words per page = 3.7 pages

and

1,666.67 words at 500 words per page = 3.33 pages

Which comes to 3.33 to 3.7 pages per day. Rounding this out, I need to write 3-4 pages per day to accomplish the task.

I have this Friday off already, plus I took a vacation day for Thursday so that I could kick off the NaNoWriMo challenge "write" (pun intended). *snarf*

When I'm done with this, next item on list of To Do:

2. Conquer the World!!!

bwaahahahaha!!!

Thanks to Bran for this one. I couldn't pass this quiz up.

Sitara

Highly Dangerous

Extremely Insane

Not Fit for Society

Extremely Insane

Click Here to Find Out YOUR Psychiatric Evaluation at QuizGalaxy.com

I looks like I'm going to give this a try this year. If you are interested, you can visit my page at: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/224530

If you are participating then feel free to add me as your writing buddy.

To the man behind the curtain. I have stumbled upon this incredible article via www.crooksandliars.com on Vice President Cheney. Here are the first two parts of a four part series in the Washington Post. I truly recommend that you read these articles if you are a patriot and love your country:

Part 1

Part 2