Feline Warrior

Yippee! Woohoo! Tonight I took my last final. My final final. Now I just wait for Sunday for the big graduation event.

I am too tired to write much more than this about it - but what a feat. Exhaustion and I have become chums… like Batman and Robin, old chums.

YAY!

Pioneering Comedian Richard Pryor Dies - Yahoo! News

Favorite quotes: “He was the Charlie Parker of comedy, a master of telling the truth that influenced every comedian that came after him,” [Quincy] Jones said in a statement. “The legacy that he leaves will forever be with us.”

and

Pryor once marveled “that I live in racist America and I’m uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can’t do much better than that.”

Ah, Richard Pryor, you made an enormous difference in American culture. Inroads, changed attitudes, opened doors for those who have followed you. Thanks for all the laughter.

You are the Christmas Ball.

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BBC NEWS | England | Merseyside | Youth guilty of racist axe murder

Most potent quote, from Gee Walker, Anthony Walker’s mother: “I’ve got to forgive them [the murderers], my family and I still stand by what we believe - forgiveness.”

Most hideous quotes: Anthony, 18, was killed with an ice axe at McGoldrick Park in Huyton, Merseyside [England], on 29 July.

The judge, Mr Justice Leveson, said the murder was racially-motivated and the pair would be sentenced on Thursday.

and: Home Office pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers told the court the axe had smashed a 5.5cm-wide (2.1 in.) hole into Anthony’s skull, penetrating his brain.

How humbling this is, Gee Walker, who can and does forgive the two miscreants who murdered her son. I’m tempted to hang onto the bitterness and anger for her -a sort of human depository for such stuff- but perhaps it is better to follow Mrs. Walker’s lead and practice forgiveness. And mind you, I do not know any of these people - my outrage comes from reading that one of my relatives in the brother/sisterhood of people was brutally murdered for no damn reason. I’m aghast that people can do such stuff to others.

So then, the theme for the rest of this week: Forgiveness. It’s gonna be hard, but I’m going to give it a try.

Video shows Western hostages in Iraq - Yahoo! News

Favorite quote: Despite the surge in kidnappings of foreigners and Iraqis and political and sectarian violence before parliamentary elections on December 15, U.S. troops may soon start to withdraw as overall security improves.

Iraq’s national security adviser said up to 30,000 of the 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could leave in early 2006.

This makes me think -out loud, very loudly- about this situation in terms of chicken and egg. If US troops left, would this kidnapping end?

(And add this to the Feline Warrior lexicon: TOL is to “thinking out loud” as LOL is to “laughing out loud”)

Appleton Post-Crescent - John Edmondson column: Fitzgerald is no Starr

Excerpt:

Conservative political pundits (”Bush lovers”) have recently compared the work of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to that of Ken Starr, noting that “Bush haters” who applaud Fitzgerald’s work vilified Starr for the same task performed 10 years earlier. Well, that’s not quite so.

On the other hand, Fitzgerald has spent two years working to discover who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to the press and whether such a leak constituted a crime (which entails such issues as motivation).

According to the Washington Monthly, Fitzgerald has spent approximately $723,000 on his investigation. Compare that with Starr’s $10 million on the Clinton/Lewinsky business.

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You can read the article here

“… and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party.”

World News Article, Reuters.co.uk

Exerpt:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Democratic congressional leader on defense called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, as he rejected on Thursday Bush administration attacks on war critics and raised bipartisan pressure for a new policy.

“The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home,” said Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees defense spending and one of his party’s top voices on military issues.

(here’s the full article.)

Favorite quotes:

The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists. After seeing his [Murtha’s] statement, we remain baffled — nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer,” [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said.

(This one’s a doozy:) Rep. Geoff Davis, a Kentucky Republican, said Democratic leaders have “cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies.”

Okay. Before discussing little Scott McClellan’s statement suggesting that Murtha ought explain “how retreating from Iraq makes America safer,” let us ponder a few questions: (a) Did the US invade Iraq to free the Iraqi people from a horrible dictator? (b) Did the US invade Iraq because of a threat to the US?

(a) I’ll have to do some research -or maybe someone will do it for me- but the story about freeing the Iraqi people from a horrible dictator came around the time that it was becoming clear that there weren’t weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) in Iraq. It could have happened when they tore down the giant statue of Saddam, I forget. This was not the original reason we were given, though.

(b) Iraq was not a threat to the US. We already know that there weren’t WMD’s in Iraq. We already know that Iraq wasn’t involved in the attacks of 9/11. What is the connection between threats to the US and Iraq? Is it that insurgents in Iraq have captured and killed non-Iraqi’s?

As you well know, I don’t condone any of that -it sickens me- yet it’s not so unusual a concept that I can’t imagine it. If Country-X invaded the US… kicked in doors, bombed major cities thus killing thousands of innocent citizens, allowed our historic national treasures to be stolen and/or destroyed… would no Americans come forward with their Second Amendment guns ablaze? You mean to tell me that some of those people who live all isolated in the woods, living off the land and such, wouldn’t be capturing the soldiers and workers from Country-X, using technology to show their captives, and even kill them to make a point? Or some gangs wouldn’t use their drive-by skills to off some invaders?

See, I’m not saying that I agree with the insurgents who have murdered journalists, workers, and soldiers from a bunch of countries (ie, not just Americans) - I don’t agree. But I think that invading a country just invites that sort of behavior. This wasn’t a war, it was an invasion. Is an invasion.

Okay, now I’m steamin’ mad… What’s that crap from Geoff Davis? Democrats have “cooperated with our enemies and are emboldening our enemies”? How? When? WHOM? Who has done that? Have you? If we are referring to insurgents in Iraq, I am really not sure that any American could get in there and have a conversation, much less cooperate and embolden. Look what happened to Daniel Pearl. (And he wasn’t even dealing with the same “enemy.”)

I have been diggin’ this Harry Truman quote for a while now, and will share it with you: Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

So is this where we’re headed? Or, god forbid, where we are? First it’s us-against-them, then it’s Red and Blue states, and now anyone who doesn’t agree with Dubya & Co. is cooperating and emboldening the enemy. Is the idea to start a civil war in this country? Maybe that would take our minds and eyes off Iraq, huh?

Cheney says war critics ‘dishonest, reprehensible’ - Yahoo! News

Favorite quote: Cheney called Democrats “opportunists” who were peddling “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage.

C’mon! That’s not good enough! Why not just say, “And another thing: Their mothers wear army boots!”? Hmm… army boot reference might not work. Maybe something like, “Your momma’s butt is so big…”

My response to Bush, Cheney and the Gang?

“I am rubber and you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”

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Here’s the article.

Texas court agrees to reverse Yates murder verdict - Yahoo! News

Favorite quote: The murder convictions were originally overturned by a lower appeals court in January because of errors in the testimony of an expert witness.

However, defense lawyers later discovered the episode never existed.

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Read the full story here

Texas voters add gay marriage ban to constitution - Yahoo! News

Favorite quote: The opposition, largely Democratic, argued the amendment was unnecessary and worded so broadly that it could infringe on existing rights of homosexuals, like their ability to visit a gravely ill partner in the hospital.

Read the whole article here

Bush to Unveil Super-Flu Strategy - Yahoo! News

Favorite quote:

America has this tough-it-out strategy when you get sick,” [White House spokesman Trent] Duffy said. “You aren’t helping yourself or the country going to work when you get ill. You are potentially threatening a greater health issue if you send children to school when they are sick.

Does America have “this tough-it-out strategy” because we’ve got a wacky gene leftover from the days of the westward-bound pioneers? Or do we know that we’re merely numbers, replaceable worker bees who believe we will suffer consequences worse than illness if we miss work a few days? Has downsizing -due to jobs going overseas- given fewer people more work to do, creating a sense of urgency for every worker bee? Hmm?

I’ve mentioned that my father is in a nursing home. When I join my spouse in our new house in our new state, I will also be taking my father along with me, and he’ll be in a nursing home very near to the house. We visited the new nursing home last weekend and it makes the current one (in WV) look like a dump.

In any case, I was thinking back to the summer of 2004… the summer before my father had the debilitating stroke. He’d just had a corneal transplant and I was visiting for the weekend. One evening, as he sat in his chair and I sat on the floor trying to organize his files, I asked if we could talk about “what if’s.” A discussion about what he wanted me to do if he had another stroke and was unable to care for himself (and at that time, he was getting closer & closer to not being able to care for himself, simply because of his diminishing health). He sat up stiffly and suddenly and cried, “You want to put me in a nursing home!” -and of course nothing could be further from the truth.

And yet… there he is: in a nursing home. And it’s likely that he’ll end his days in one, whether it’s in West Virginia or in Ohio. Broke in many ways - financially, physically, and certainly spiritually.

This is something that I cannot fix.