The results of the 22nd congressional district in Texas:
Democratic Lampson 76,743 52% 100% of precincts reporting
Republican Sekula Gibbs 61,813 42%
Libertarian Smither 9,008 6%
In case you don’t recall that’s the district formerly occupied by Tom Delay! Who would’ve thought a year ago that a democrat would win it today!
Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who the Reagan administration tried to hard to covertly overthrow, also got elected president of Nicaragua yesterday.
The democrats have taken back the house in both Washington and Lansing and in Arizona, Barry Goldwater would have been proud. Arizona became the first state in the union to vote to reject a ban on single sex marriage. Up in North Dakota, voters told their legislature to butt out of decisions on abortion and Missouri voters want stem cell research. Now if Jon Tester and Jim Webb can hold on to the senate seats in North Dakota and Virgina, we can get the impeachment hearings started.
This video clip speaks for itself. Here is a link to the actual video on the White House website. If you’ve never read 1984, this page has a relevant passage give a good example of the workings of the Ministry of Truth.
I just stumbled across a very interesting site called Maps of War that features a variety of animated maps of the middle east. The Imperial History map is particularly fascinating if you’re unfamiliar with the history of region. Over the last five millenia there have been a succession empires that rose and fell and these are shown in conjunction with an animated time line. In general, empires have lasted about three centuries, including their rise, peak and eventual decline with periods of chaos in between. The United States is well into it’s third century and the downward spiral has accelerated in the past five years as the chaos has accelerated.
A lot of people know of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the United States just before leaving office in January 1961. That’s the one where he warned people about the dangers of letting the military-industrial complex have too much power. If you’ve never seen it, it definitely worth watching especially in this time when the military-industrial complex is so explicitly personified by the likes of Dick Cheney. The whole speech is available on Google Video and is definitely worth watching. The relevant portions of the speech are also shown in the film Why We Fight which is also on Google video. It’s definitely worth watching to see how the military industrial complex has corrupted American democracy.
The audio of the downtown Ypsi business forum is now up on the feed where I had the recording of the mayoral debate. I’m still working on the video part. I’m going to split the video into smaller chunks and put on the feed over the coming days. You can listen or watch directly from this page, or if you have iTunes or some other podcatcher or feed reader you can just subscribe with the link in the sidebar and it will automatically get downloaded to you computer when it’s available.
The military is so desperate to get new recruits, that recruiters are telling outright lies to students to get them to sign up. They’re going so far as to tell them that the war in Iraq is over and troops are being brought home. They’re also telling them that if they don’t like it that they can just quit, which is definitely not the case. The New York city ABC news affiliate did an investigation, sending students into 10 different recruiting stations in the city with hidden cameras. The results were startling, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t want recruiters coming into our schools trying to sign up our kids. Fortunately, the Ypsi school district has a policy and it will now be enforced to stop giving recruiters free run of the cafeteria. That’s especially important after hearing that two more local kids died this week in this senseless, unnecessary war.
We stopped in to eat at TK WU on Liberty Street in A2 this afternoon and left wishing we hadn’t. About the only thing we had that was halfway decent was the salt and pepper calamari for an appetizer. After that it went downhill. Sofie had the almond chicken which came smothered in a rather unpleasant tasting gravy and that was probably the least unpleasant dish. Max tried the mu shu shrimp and in spite of loving shrimp he was unimpressed. Jules had some hot and sour soup that a really funky flavor and shrimp lettuce wrap that consisted largely of frozen peas and carrots and wet iceberg lettuce. My szechwan beef was the last to arrive and was practically inedible. The black pepper was totally over-powering, but even with that the other spices just tasted all wrong. I’ve had lots of szechwan before and never tasted anything like quite like this, and hopefully never will again. Sometimes when you try a new restaurant you find a pleasant surprise like Taqueria La Loma, other times you find one you never want to see again like Tk Wu.
Sacha Baron Cohen appeared on the Daily Show in his guise as Borat the Kazakh journalist and always he was absolutely brilliant.