"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Friday, September 30, 2005

Reversal of Fortune? Reversal of Something.
Posted by The One True Tami | 8:42 AM
Well, Judith Miller's out of jail. I'm inspired to repeat myself about how I feel regarding this whole thing.

After being locked up in jail for nearly three months, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released on Thursday after agreeing to testify before a grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration leaked a covert
CIA operative's name.

...

According to her attorneys, Miller, an investigative reporter who covers national security and foreign policy issues, has been in a U.S. jail longer than any other newspaper journalist to protect a source.


Excuse me? "Protect a source"? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that whole "protect a source" thing is supposed to keep a source safe if they're revealing an illegal activity so that it can be exposed to the public, and lawmakers. It is not, as far as I know, intended to keep a reporter from having to testify about a crime he or she has taken part in that didn't even result in a newspaper article.

The Plame expose wasn't for the public good, it was for the private detriment of two US citizens - citizens who work for the greater good of the country. Miller went to jail, all right, but claiming the nobility of protecting a journalitsic source? Not hers to claim, my friends, not hers to claim.
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Thursday, September 29, 2005

Margaret Cho's Blog
Posted by The One True Tami | 8:56 AM
Now, I'm not normally the type to read blogs of famous people, but this morning I was playing the "blogroll hopping" game. I went to the blog of someone who's been visiting me, and that blog had Margaret Cho blogrolled. So, I started reading. It's oddly like reading Shakepeare's Sister, but with a pink color scheme and a bunch of ads for Margaret Cho stuff on the sides. I was reading along happily when I came across a paragraph that I thought I'd like to share with those of you who I assume aren't reading Margaret's blog regularly, either:

I never had any soft feelings for Barbara Bush. She looks like a Grandma and a Grandpa at the same time, which would normally make me like her, but for some reason, her politics make her Quaker Oats appearance unappealing. She'’s like hot breakfast cereal sprinkled with broken glass and fake compassion. She is like a multigrain muffin with cranberries and thumbtacks. She is the former first lady and the current worst lady. And she is not working well for me.


It's a piece about Mrs. Bush's comments about how Hurricane Katrina was "working out well" for the poor. (Ugh.) Nice Summary!
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Solving the Democrat Problem
Posted by The One True Tami | 9:22 AM
Remember last year when Jill was just damn tired of the Democrats never getting it together? Well, so is Tata.

I'm still sitting on the left, in the same place I always have, the place where education bills aren't boobie-trapped and workers matter and women matter and the poor matter and the minority opinion matters and equality matters and the environment matters and the common good matters. Hopefully someday we'll sit together again as friends.


Jazz, over at Running Scared, also sees problems, and has some suggestions.

These elections need to see Democrats (and their progressive supporters, grassroots workers and bloggers) focusing on state specific issues more than national touch-points.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Redefining Donation
Posted by The One True Tami | 10:23 AM
All right, my first response to this headline was anger:
FEMA plans to reimburse faith groups for aid
FEMA officials said it would mark the first time that the government has made large-scale payments to religious groups for helping to cope with a domestic natural disaster.

Civil liberties groups called the decision a violation of the traditional boundary between church and state, accusing FEMA of trying to restore its battered reputation by playing to religious conservatives.
Charity is "a gift for public benevolent purposes", right? It's given freely without the expectation of remuneration. Charity is not work for pay, it's donations - things you've given away. Your time, your money, your goods, when you give them to charity, the most you expect in return is a tax break, and I'm thinking that during a national disaster that most people aren't taking the time for the formality of a receipt. I'm not the only one of this opinion:
"Volunteer labor is just that: volunteer," said the Rev. Robert E. Reccord, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board. "We would never ask the government to pay for it."
But if you read further into the article, which of course I did, you find that the reality of this situation is a little more reasonable than the first thoughts that sprang to mind.

The government's talking about reimbursing churches and synagogues that set up shop at the request of the state, or FEMA:
FEMA officials said religious organizations would be eligible for payments only if they operated emergency shelters, food distribution centers or medical facilities at the request of state or local governments in the three states that have declared emergencies -- Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In those cases, "a wide range of costs would be available for reimbursement, including labor costs incurred in excess of normal operations, rent for the facility and delivery of essential needs like food and water," FEMA spokesman Eugene Kinerney said in an e-mail.

...

For some individual churches, however, reimbursement is very appealing. At Christus Victor Lutheran Church in Ocean Springs, Miss., as many as 200 evacuees and volunteer workers have been sleeping each night in the sanctuary and Sunday school classrooms. The church's entrance hall is a Red Cross reception area and medical clinic. As many as 400 people a day are eating in the fellowship hall.

Suzie Harvey, the parish administrator, said the church was asked by the Red Cross and local officials to serve as a shelter. The church's leadership agreed immediately, without anticipating that nearly a quarter of its 650 members would be rendered homeless and in no position to contribute funds. "This was just something we had to do," she said. "Later we realized we have no income coming in."

Harvey said the electric bill has skyrocketed, water is being used around the clock and there's been "20 years of wear on the carpet in one month." If FEMA makes money available, she said, the church definitely will apply.
Now that's a bit of a different story, isn't it? The government is proposing to pay back organizations that serve as emergency shelters at their request. It's kind of like paying for buildings that have been commandeered. That, to my way of thinking, isn't so bad.

Still, I don't trust this government. The administration gives me no reason to do so. This article's headline grabbed my attention because the government giving money to churches means one of two things:

1) There's a plan to channel government money to churches that support the insane bleeding of American funds even further (how much is the deficit now?)

or

2) They just knew that it would piss civil rights groups off and they can't resist the baiting.
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Monday, September 26, 2005

Reasonable Priced Reason
Posted by The One True Tami | 9:09 AM
Hello, Brilliant readers, I'm Tami, or Tami, or Tami, whichever you prefer. I live in central New Jersey (the part that's actually kind of north, but the people who are actually in north Jersey won't claim us), a liberal, a democrat, and generally the kind of person that agrees with Jill.

Now that we got that out of the way, time to talk about me and my fascinating life some more. Last week I went to the NJ gubernatorial debate in Trenton. This week, for the amazingly low price of ten dollars, American, I got to go see the Dalai Lama. No, really.

As world leaders go, he was by far the neatest one I've ever seen. OK, I've seen exactly 2, having been at some giant speech where President Bush (Sr.) was when I was in college. Still, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no way was Daddy Bush as cool as this guy.

He started his speech with self-effacing remarks. He told us that since the concepts of peace, war and reconciliation haven't changed, he really didn't have anything new to say. So, he said, if you're bored during the time that I'm speaking, I'm sorry. At least the weather is very pleasant, today, he said.

And then, he said the simple things that we were all there to hear him say. He said that all acts that come from compassion, those acts are peace. All acts that come from hatred, anger, jealousy - those are violence. And I understood what he meant.

He said that sometimes he thinks that Christians are better than Buddhists, because a Buddhist can choose to isolate himself from the world, rather than try to change it for the better, and still be a good Buddhist. He said that it did not offend him when someone referred to him as a good Christian.

At the end, he reminded us that if we had found his speech boring, well, it was over now, and we could go home. I now hope to one day be as cool as Tenzin Gyatzo, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
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