grist for the mill

Small Step

Lost in Space at the Promised Planet

Piano Tuners Michigan

The Beehive Health - Medicaid

Internal affairs? (Metro Times Detroit)

HoustonChronicle.com - Pitts: Cosby controversy requires honesty: "So let me say something for the record. Much as some white folk pretend otherwise, racism didn't vanish one fine day long ago. It lives, here, now, still. And it isn't something black people can cure through self-improvement. Racism doesn't care how educated, wealthy or decent you are. It will still call you ignorant, deny you a loan and throw you in jail. It will still give white people unearned advantages on the basis of their whiteness.
And yet this also is true: For all the woe it brings, racism is not the proximate source of all the ills that beset the black underclass. We do not need white people's approval or even their involvement to correct much of what ails us ? to require that our children spend less time with BET and more with BOOK, to reconnect our fathers with their families, to abandon the misbegotten mind-set that equates ignorance and thuggery with authentic blackness."

Project For The New American Centruy: Statement of Principles: "American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.
We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership."

gq plus @ gq.com - GQ Colin Powell Interview: "But for an old grunt who's been on the front lines, who tromped through the elephant grass in Vietnam, who took a punji stake through the foot and saw ears cut off as trophies, who had slept beneath the aching odor of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum stuffed with burning human feces, for a man like Colin Powell, the path of diplomacy had a battle-born allure that no draft-dodging neocon could possibly comprehend, and he meant for them to know it."

Stupid Is As Stupid Does: Parents' Empowerment Act

The Gay Witchhunt - Christopher Priest

"The concern that gays are a threat to the family structure misses the point that gay people have been getting married for only a few years while straight people have been getting married for millennia. If the institution of  marriage is screwed up, straights are the ones who screwed it up, not gays. The real threat to the family is our new fast-food, Persian bazaar morality. People get married and treat it like they're "going steady" in high school, divorcing when the sex is no longer good or when their spouse is no longer appealing to them; when the rigors of actual married life kick in, obfuscating the dazzle of falling in love. Our lack of commitment is the bigger threat to the family. Our immorality. Our infidelity. Our impatience and, yes, our immaturity— these are all far greater threats to the family and to the institution of marriage than gays with an unenforceable (but hugely symbolic) marriage certificate.

But I never see any uproar about our lack of commitment. I never see any marches about our infidelity. A constitutional amendment banning divorce would be laughed out of Congress. Things that would actually shore up the family unit, things that actually would protect our values and our future, we do nothing about. Things we actually should be upset about, that we actually should be speaking out about, we remain silent on. But here we show our cowardice and hypocrisy by criminalizing people who want only what we ourselves have not only taken for granted, but have diminished and devalued: family.

The hypocrisy of it all is just wholly offensive, and the fact that so many of us, black white or green, have jumped on this particular bandwagon distresses me to no end because it proves how easily our emotions are manipulated, and how immature we are as Christians. Our job is to proclaim truth. Not force truth. Not point guns at people and make them follow Christ."

fabprefab - modernist prefab dwellings

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > A Mobile Link for 90 Mutual Friends

USATODAY.com - 'Net sleuth' tells court of hunt that snared Guardsman: " A Montana city judge who doubles as an Internet sleuth helped catch a National Guard member accused of trying to help al-Qaeda, according to testimony given Wednesday at a military hearing for the guardsman. "

The Atlantic | May 2004 | My Times | Raines: "A year after the Jayson Blair scandal, the deposed executive editor of The New York Times answers his critics, acknowledges his mistakes, deconstructs the events that ended his tumultuous tenure, and provides a no-holds-barred assessment of what he sees as a great newspaper in crisis"

chicklit: paper jam: "Just Do Whatever You Have To Do: Author Elizabeth Ruth Discusses the Path to Publishing Her First Novel (Part 1 of 2) "

Poverty's Palette: "In our mind's eye, much of the past exists in black and white. This is particularly true of Depression-era America, in large part because of the unforgettable monochrome images created by the New Deal-sponsored photographers who traversed the country in the 1930's and early 1940's, chronicling the lives of its citizens. About 160,000 of their pictures are collected in the archives of the Library of Congress. Less well known are the roughly 1,600 of these photographs that were shot in color -- most notably by the photographers Russell Lee and Jack Delano -- using Kodachrome film, which Kodak introduced in 1936. This month, the Library of Congress and Harry N. Abrams are making a substantial collection of these images available for the first time in a book called ''Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43.'' As the writer Paul Hendrickson notes in his introduction to the volume, these photos give us more than just blues and yellows and reds -- they offer ''a new and complementary way of comprehending our national identity.'' "

Serenity Now!

Tissue Culture & Art at a glance: The Tissue Culture & Art Project (initiated in 1996), is an on-going research and development project into the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression

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Online Books, Poems, Short Stories - Read Print

The Daily Telegraph | Good ol' girl who enjoyed cruelty: "'We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn't kill 'em, she didn't cut 'em up. She should have shot some of the suckers.' "

CBC News: Disclosure - PROGRAM ARCHIVES - 2003: There’s only one war on our television screens now – that other war, the one from just a year ago, has been forgotten – but not by everyone. In Afghanistan, filmmaker Jamie Doran has uncovered evidence of a massacre: Taliban prisoners of war suffocated in containers, shot in the desert under the watch of American troops.

It's not race, it's equality, Connerly says: "'Whites say, 'Thank you for helping us,' ' said Connerly. 'They mean, thank you for helping us whites. They miss the larger picture when they see it that way.'

The group isn't ready for Connerly yet and he wants to talk more about this idea.

He recalled a man attempting small talk at a reception honoring people who help to create a color-blind society.

'Do you know Tom Sowell?' asked the guest, referring to the conservative black columnist and author. Another man chimed in: 'Have you ever met Justice Thomas?'

So much for color-blind, Connerly thought.

'It becomes clear to you that all they see is race,' he said"

News From The Associated Press: "Bush to Go on Arab TV Over Prisoner Abuse

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer"

A stripper's mystery: "Her family, who knew little about her life, wants to know more about why she died

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