Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
This diary series is produced by the Team DFH group but anyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome.
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Good Morning!
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Drop in any time of day or night to say hello. |
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A Few Quotes for This Morning
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. ~Herm Albright, quoted in Reader's Digest, June 1995
Attitudes are contagious. Are yours worth catching? ~Dennis and Wendy Mannering
Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same. ~Francesca Reigler
If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it. ~Mary Engelbreit
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893
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News
There's that drumbeat, still banging...
Obama tells Iran time running out to end standoff
SEOUL (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Monday that time was running out to resolve Iran's nuclear standoff with the West.
Tehran says its nuclear program is purely peaceful, but Israel and Western nations believe it is moving towards a nuclear bomb that could change the regional balance of power.
From the Obviously Files...
U.S. negotiation efforts with Taliban have failed: group
KABUL (Reuters) - U.S. negotiation efforts with the Taliban have failed and the United Nations should take the lead to optimize the chances of ending almost 11 years of war, a think tank said on Monday.
In a blow to hopes of a negotiated end to the war, the Taliban suspended talks with the United States two weeks ago after the alleged massacre of 17 Afghan civilians by a lone U.S. soldier and the burning of Korans at a NATO base last month.
"U.S. efforts to negotiate with the Taliban to date have failed and risk further destabilizing the country and the region, and as a result we call for the U.N. Secretary General to intervene and appoint a team of negotiators," said Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG).
I don't often agree with Tom Friedman, and I don't agree with every sentence here, but he's got some very good points in this oped...
A Festival of Lies
THE historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet.
“Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East over the last few decades,” Hanson wrote. “Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid is both odious and counterproductive. Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan. What have we learned? Tribalism, oil, and Islamic fundamentalism are a bad mix that leaves Americans sick and tired of the Middle East — both when they get in it and when they try to stay out of it.”
And that is why it’s time to rethink everything we’re doing out there. What the Middle East needs most from America today are modern schools and hard truths, and we haven’t found a way to offer either. Because Hanson is right: What ails the Middle East today truly is a toxic mix of tribalism, Shiite-Sunni sectarianism, fundamentalism and oil — oil that constantly tempts us to intervene or to prop up dictators.
Of course, things are not looking all that well in North Korea, in case we want to change our focus from the Middle East... And check out the president's quote at the end. Part of me wants to say: "Mirror anyone?"...
Obama's disbelief after staring into N. Korea
After squinting through binoculars into a nation frozen in time, US President Barack Obama reeled off a contempt-laden and startlingly frank indictment of North Korea.
(snip)
"If a country can't feed its people effectively, if it can't make anything of any use to anybody, if it has no exports other than weapons and even those aren't ones that in any way would be considered state of the art.
"If it can't deliver on any indicators of well-being... for its people... then you'd think you'd want to try something different," Obama said in a highly undiplomatic and unusually frank public appearance.
"There are certain things that just don't work and what they are doing doesn't work."
Kind of like a big movie opening...
Waiting (and Sleeping) in Line, for View of Health Care History
WASHINGTON — Time becomes an abstract concept after you have spent 47 hours sitting on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court.
Searching her memory, Kathie McClure, a 57-year-old trial lawyer from Atlanta, struggled to recall when the fight broke out over the fourth and fifth spots in line to attend this week’s arguments in a constitutional challenge to the health care law. It was sometime on Saturday, she remembered. But was it before or after the “Road to Repeal” Tea Party rally, which started at noon? And when was it that she ducked into a Starbucks to warm up after being out in the rain?
Heading into the first of three days of Supreme Court arguments on Monday, the pavement occupied by the approximately 15 people in line Sunday morning was among the most coveted real estate in Washington. Tickets are scarce even for those connected to the case. And for everyone else, there’s the line.
Well whaddya know? Facebook's got our backs...
ACLU Applauds Facebook For Threatening to Sue Employers
Following the announcement from Facebook’s privacy chief on Friday that the social network is willing to sue to protect user accounts from the prying eyes of employers, the American Civil Liberties Union weighed in, applauding Facebook for the move, but also saying it wouldn’t be enough and that Congress needs to pass a law to prevent the practice.
Agreat innovative use of social media...
"Cash Mobs" gather to splurge in locally owned stores
CLEVELAND, Ohio (Reuters) - Flash mobs have been blamed as a factor in looting during urban riots. But now a group of online activists is harnessing social media like Twitter and Facebook to get consumers to spend at locally owned stores in cities around the world in so-called Cash Mobs.
At the first International Cash Mob day on Saturday, wallet- toting activists gathered in as many as 200 mobs in the United States and Europe, with the aim of spending at least $20 a piece in locally owned businesses, according to the concept's founder, Cleveland lawyer Andrew Samtoy.
"It's my baby but I'm not a helicopter parent," Samtoy told a crowd of more than 100 people gathered Saturday at Nature's Bin, a grocery store that specializes in local and organic food, in Lakewood, an inner ring suburb of Cleveland.