Obama is teaching me to be a glass half (or even three quarters) full kind of gal.  So I would like to share with you some reasons for my celebrating.

Positive thinking:

The war:

Micheal Ware reported that the agreement mandated by the UN for the US and other parties of the "willing" expires this year.  And an agreement talks with the Iraqis sought by Bushco have, at the present borken down!!!!  We may be FORCED to withdraw from Iraq!  

The election:

(over the hump)

Let's see now - most folks are looking at the long drawn out primary fight but in dc what do we see?  We see Hoyer talking about a deal on FISA with Bush, the most disliked president in history.  So why is Steny so intent on dragging out a FISA bill that so many of us have fought against?  BAU Steny?  Getting your campaign funds ready?

Then there is a bill that will limit network neutrality.  Again, BAU?  Getting your campaign funds ready folks?

And they wonder about voter apathy!  But not this year, not this time!  We WILL get more and better democrats!

One quick thing you can do is to get a letter going to congress for an independent counsel to look into the torture issue.  Go to:
ACLU petition to congress

Another is to do calling for Barack Obama.  He needs immediate help and you can get 20 names to call quickly.

Another is to ask MSNBC why only KO has talked about the torture issue.  Ask CNN why they are silent on the issue.  

The news is stunning.  Rice, Cheney and even Colin Powell (who of all people should have known better) choreographed the torture of "high value" detainees.  And we will no doubt get push back of "well it worked dammit!"  But we do not really have the smoking gun of that statement while we do have the smoking gun of having our nations leaders detailing torture techniques.

Regardless of how "successful" they were, torture is a war crime.  When are these folks going to stand trial?  When is Cheney going to be impeached and then the chimp after him?

This is much too much to just decide to sit on our thumbs and wait for the election IMO.
Update:  I missed the recced diary on this topic so please go to itHistory will judge

I got my notice about the National Conference for Media reform.

6/7-8 in Minneapolis this year.  Check it out at NCMR

Attendees and presenters:
Bill Moyers
Naomi Klein
Dan Rather

along with:

One of the things I kept hearing regarding the spying into Obama's passport info, was that they fired the CONTRACTOR the first time and then they fired the CONTRACTOR the second time.  The third time the person was reprimanded.  I can't remember hearing if the third person was a contractor.  But I have thought and keep on thinking that we are stupid to allow our essential data pass through the hands of a contractor.

This passport business was the problem of the state department and they got behind in processing passports and rather than hire people they put contractors into the jobs.  Now some reports have said that some contract relations go back 20 years.  I am not sure if those relations were in actual passport processing.

But you add this to the IRS (see below)

We've wanted to know how to derail Bushco, we've wanted to know how to slap Reid and Pelosi aside the head when they kowtow to Bush and we've wanted to know how to break the corporate ownership of OUR representatives.

The Dodd filibuster has given us a clue, by gummit!

It makes a difference when we watch, when they know we are watching.

Over:

At some point or other we got impatient with the process of getting countries to give up "wanted" suspects to us for trial.  And, perhaps the CIA was not actively employed in overthrowing and assassinating heads of state so they had the spare time.  And we decided that kidnapping them and hauling their butts out on a what? C30 transport? was well worth the taxpayers' money.

Now we have told a court in UK that US has that right!
See link and quote below:

What we would do to stave off a coup?  I have worried about this more than ever, especially after seeing the repub pres. contenders.  All of them are lightweights.  All of them would stand aside for a Cheney or a Bush.

Firedoglake has an essay A "Presidential Coup," The Continuity Of Government, And Blackwater Watching Midtown Manhattan from which they take a number of sources that are beginning to understand a coup is possible.  Would you be willing to get out of your comfort zone to do something about this?

More on flip:

I began having a great deal of spare time after being laid off at Sprint.  I was over 55, widowed and not really expecting to find gainful employment at  anywhere near my previous salary.  I had already encountered age discrimination much earlier - in my forties.  A head hunter told me point blank that companies didn't want her to present people much over the age of 30!

more below the fold:

Sean Hannity made this point over and over: we are the "Nut Roots".  I thought as an epithet that it really lacked the slicing and dicing these folks normally do.  As a matter of fact, I thought "Nut Roots"  sounded nourishing and comforting, something that is sorely needed these days.

And the admission that we are "roots" was telling, I thought.  We are grounded and we are supporting and we everything that wingnuts are not.  The very name tells you that they are aery fairy, not grounded and not even centered as you can imagine them trying to lift all those nuts and keep them in the air!

continued

My daughter visited China this past week.  Pollution was so bad, one woman told her that a day there took 3 months off of your LIFE!

We assume somehow that things over there do not impact us over here.  And a lot of people don't understand the law of connectedness - i.e.  "In as much as you do it unto the least of these you do it unto me"  or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or other words to that affect.  The loss of bees, the loss of rain forest, the impact of global warming affect us all, even if we try to avoid looking at those connections.

But we are not immune to what happens over there - see below:

What a week - the justice department laid an egg and boy did it smell rotten when it cracked open!

Al Gore was on the hill telling them how the cow ate the cabbage (although he didn't say much about land based methane, just methane in the ice at sea.)

Bush is going back to stonewalling and we find that they either do not use government email servers, preferring to use RNC servers instead, or just do NOT use emails because they anticipate suits!

The dems seemed to have found some cartilige and are calling for subpoenas from both houses.  Now we will see whether packing the courts and DOJ has paid off for the Bushites.

This is the third of a series of Diaries concerning life changes.  I have enjoyed hearing about your changes.  For some reason they have helped me deal with my changes.  

My first change is a new grand daughter Annika Rose who was born in Goa, assisted by a midwife even though she insisted on coming into the world butt first!  Her mom did good!  I enjoyed watching her grow through the first month of her life, growing not just physically but becoming more and more a person in her own right.  She is a noisy little thing, humming even in her sleep!

This is the second of two diaries concerning big changes in our lives.  In my last I reported that it was mostly my children going though big stuff causing me some big time worries.  

What about yourselves?  Are you moving, finding other jobs, finding new mates, having more children, getting a dog?  And how are you planning to cope during the election night news?

Would you say your life is better today than 6 years ago?
2 years ago?  Are you an optimist or a pessimist at this moment in time?  How are you dealing with insurance companies?

More on the flip.

It is only a few months until November.  Some primaries have come and gone but there is work to do.  Canvassing needs to be done to update the basic information - where our voters live, what their phone number is etc.  Phone banking needs to be done to keep up with the trend lines and pull in those interested voters and find volunteers.  

Only a few people are actually paid in a campaign.  The rest come from us political junkies.  If you want change you have to work for it.  You have to put yourself out there so people realize that at least one person thinks that voting is important, that at least one person thinks that our values are important.  And if more than one person comes out to canvass then people really begin to get the message that the election is important and that people's votes do count.  

More on the flip:

Carnacki has his famous series of feeling good stories and there is the WYFP series, but there is another category in the mix of human experience called "major life changes".  These can include marriage, divorce, pregnancy, birth of children (you note those latter two are really two separate big life changes), moving, new job, deaths.

In my family I have one daughter facing divorce, another dealing with a problematic pregnancy, and another whose husband has a new job in a new city.  The latter impacts me big time in a way not listed above.  This daughter lives just two blocks from me and we work together.  So the loss of her support really hits me big time.  I guess it is way past time for me to let her and her family go and fly on my own since I am definitely grown and so-called mature.  What say you.  How did you or how are you developing new resources to deal with these big changes?

Wapo reports:
Wisconsin Voters Prepare to Weigh In On the War in Iraq

Even though Watertown is described as conservative the report says that the war opposition group had little problem gathering close to 1000 signatures out of the 23,000 residents.  The city council didn't want to put the measure on the ballot, but the courts said they had to.

There are two issues here that we have found coming up over and over.
(Continued on the flip)