Have you shuffled the t**s off the queen yet

Who is winning more money and what are you playing?

I can't wait for more of these scintillating travelogues from Choo Choo Charlie and Casey Jones

I cna't tell who is more bored - the two circus run aways on the train or those unexplicably drawn to read their exploits on this blog. Enjoy the microwaved food - only 2 more days to go - or maybe it's four - who knows with Amtrak!

Time to get back on the horse

Well, it has been a month since anyone has posted here, so I guess I may as well start the ball rollong again. It is nice to see so many Republicans come to their senses and distance themselves from the Bushies. Too bad it's taken low poll numbers and not common sense to figure this out - blindly supporting a President solely because he is of the same Party takes partisan politics too far.
Time and time again this Administration has demonstrated a complete isolation from the real world. I am reminded of when George H. was campaigning in a grocery store and had no idea what a price scanner was.
How could the so called only deterrent from terrorism (remember Cheney threatening America with the Specter of Terrorist attacks if Kerry won) could possibly sign off on a Middle Eastern owneed company running Port Security. Just keep making it up as you go along - there are no rules for the Bush Cheney cabal - life is like that when you are a despotic givernment - just ask Saddam.

Time to get back on the horse

Well, it has been a month since anyone has posted here, so I guess I may as well start the ball rollong again. It is nice to see so many Republicans come to their senses and distance themselves from the Bushies. Too bad it's taken low poll numbers and not common sense to figure this out - blindly supporting a President solely because he is of the same Party takes partisan politics too far.
Time and time again this Administration has demonstrated a complete isolation from the real world. I am reminded of when George H. was campaigning in a grocery store and had no idea what a price scanner was.
How could the so called only deterrent from terrorism (remember Cheney threatening America with the Specter of Terrorist attacks if Kerry won) could possibly sign off on a Middle Eastern owneed company running Port Security. Just keep making it up as you go along - there are no rules for the Bush Cheney cabal - life is like that when you are a despotic givernment - just ask Saddam.

From The Brazilian Side

 

From Inside the Devil's Throat

 

La Gargant del Diablo (The Devil's Throat)

 

Just a few photos from Iguazu

 

Politics, etcetera from South of the Equator

It has been a very interesting time so far. I have had the opportunity to learn a little more about Argentinian Politics. It is a very active populace, that loves to protest - I have sen numerous demonstartions on the street and on the news. I asked a cabbie if this was normal, and he said there are usually more, but everyone was on summer vacation. I think they just love being in the street yelling. It does not seem to be effective. It was also very interesting to see a huge police presence in the area of the presidential palace with a large supply of portable barriers - I asked a local what was going on, and he said that they were here on a daily basis - always ready ro move in if a demonstartion breaks out that gets too disruptive - very chiling.
That said, the majotiry of Portenos (the residents of Buenos Aires) just seem to go about their lives regardless of who is in power or how screwed up the govenment is. It seems that they have all been screwed up from the Spanish, through the Peronistas, and the current governmwent right now - but they are a really friendly, resilient people, with a great sense of humor. Just a quick example - there are more cabs here than in NYC, and they are very vey cheap. But a wierd thing is that when you get in a cab, the meter starts at 1.98 pesos - not 1.90 or 1.95, but 1.98. When I asked the cabbie why it was like this, it said "Ah, you know, it´s Argebtina"
Later!
PS - What has become of righty??????

Greetings from the Southern Hemisphere

Buenos Aires is a bustling city that looks like a European City. The people have been very friendly, and I have spoken some politics with the locals. They all seem to like Americcans, but no their goveernment - hey what a surprise. More postings later.

Greetings from the Southern Hemisphere

Buenos Aires is a bustling city that looks like a European City. The people have been very friendly, and I have spoken some politics with the locals. They all seem to like Americcans, but no their goveernment - hey what a surprise. More postings later.

Off to check on the nascent populist/socialist movement

Well, my next entry wil be coming live from South America. I will not only be sight seeing, but also checking the pulse of the new left leanings of a couple of governments. While Venezuela's Chavez has lots of oil money to back him up, the governments of Bolivia and Argentina have no such revenue source. Evo Morales will have to find some revenue sources besides coca prodcution to be able to be as succesful as Chavez. In Argentina, Nestor Kirschner has just paid off the IMF, but at what cost?

Perhaps a more friendly attitude from their Big Brother to the North will help economic development in Latin America. Instead of spending billions on eradicating drug trafficking, economic aid that will directly affect the peasant class that farms the coca leaves, would be better money spent. A little less military aid, and a lot more aid directly aimed at helping, as opposed to exploiting the people would be money better spent. The animosity felt towards th US in South America runs a close second to those feelings in the Muslim world. It is time for the US to brandish the carrot now as opposed to the stick. What happened to our image around the world? The Bushies have repeatedly alienated countries and peoples who would be valuable allies if we weren't such arrogant bullies.
Got to go - see you in Buenos Aires.

PS - Where is righty? Just one brief I told you so this week - as LT once said to Ken O'Brien after a vicious sack - " Son, you're gonna have to do better than that!"

Don't let the Roe v. Wade controversy fog your vision of the real problem with Alito

While I am firmly in favor of a woman's right to choose, I cannot blindly use this as the only test for the confirmation odf a Supreme Court Justice. What really scares me about Alito is his lap dog loyalty to the Executive branch of government - be wary of a man who is constantly claiming that he was just acting as an advocate for a client (by the way, the government, especially the executive branch, seems to be his only client of note before he was elevated to the bench). It sounds a a little bit like the Nuremberg defense of I was just following orders . (yeah, that's right righty -another Nazi reference - they're just so handy). We must immediately stem the tode of the Imperial Bush Presidency - it becomes more and more clear every day, that the true model for this Administation is not don't do anything Daddy did. It is more like do do everything that Nixon did. The assumption that he was above the law is eerily being replicated by the current administation, and it certainly does not need any more support from the body thast helped him heist the electionin 2000. William Safire, that ever popular pundit of liberal thought (yeah, right!) said on Meet the Press earlier this year -
MR. SAFIRE: I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?" And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.
So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.
MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA.
MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows them down and makes them think for a minute. It doesn't slow them down as much as the president has made out to believe, because there's a wrinkle in it saying that if it's a real emergency and you have to get this information, then you can get it and get the approval within 72 hours afterwards. So there's always this struggle in a war between liberty and security. Doris, you go into that in your book, and Lincoln did, indeed, suspend habeas corpus, but there it is in the Constitution, "It shall not be suspended except in invasion or a rebellion," so he had the right to. He didn't have the right, I think, to close the Brooklyn Eagle or see the arrest of the leading dissident, Vanlandingham, and he made some mistakes.
But just as FDR later made a mistake with the eight saboteurs and hanged them all, and just as we made a terrible mistake with the Japanese-Americans in World War II and have apologized for that. During wartime, we have this excess of security and afterwards we apologize. And that's why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can't seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I'm with the critics on that.

Just remember that all journeys start with one step, and I, for one do not want to go on a journey towards tyranny or dictatorship.