Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, THE FIRST FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES, HAS STEPPED DOWN.

http://abcnews.go.com?CMP=EMC-1396

Here we go - into the abyss....

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced plans to step down today. O'Connor, who has held her seat for 23 years, was the first woman to serve on the high court.

Okay, I'm using up valuable diary space to post this - I haven't posted a diary in months...

Are there any Houston meet-ups being planned?  I could throw something together if I thought there was any interest?

I'm in the county, on the northwest side - but I'm willing to drive into town.  

you can reply here, or even email me at houstonia@ev1.net

A friend of mine is throwing a little "pity party" (complete with frownie-face muffins).  I plan on making either mournful cookies, or piles of donkey or elephant crap brownies. (It's all in the preparation!)

Anyway, I'd like to have a list of tangible things we can do to kick-off the next two years.  After we finish feeling sorry for ourselves, I'd like to be able to discuss some important considerations and ideas.  

So, any thoughts, advice, ideas floating around out there?

thankee kindlee...

Sorry guys - bear with me...  I am already thinking of 2006.  Then I started writing a little free verse.

Hang in there, y'all.  Let's look to 2006.  Change starts now:

It's like the old hotel finally fell - that old antique building that we really wanted to keep.  We loved it's baroque architecture, the musty smells in the quaint rooms, the faded velvet of the furniture. We remembered the parties that had been held in the ballroom.  The famous people that had stayed in its many rooms.

My sincere apologies to anyone who feels that I have posted something that has already been diaried.  I checked but found nothing that quoted or linked to these specific blogs.  I think it's important to post these items.

We need to be ready for it.  We don't know what it is, but we need to start scanning the news pages/tabloids to try and get an idea of it.

We need to be ready to fight.

Follow up to another diary, here, and here, but I think this needs to be spread around.  

Got these from Blogs for Bush, Red State Blog, and Powerline who says it has to do with a foreign policy issue...

October Surprise Monday?

A number of bloggers, including myself received a tip via e-mail that a big story will break on the front page of the Washington Times Monday morning that will be devastating to the Kerry campaign.

There is a high probability the story will appear online Sunday night.

I found this article in Beliefnet. And as a Texan and a Catholic, it gives me the creeps.

I can only imagine what kind of future is in store for us if we became a self-proclaimed "Christian Nation".  Can't these people see the parallels between their dream of a Christian Nation with no separation between church and state and nations like Iraq and Afghanistan?  

David Barton & the 'Myth' of Church-State Separation
The Bush campaign has hired a controversial activist who calls the U.S. a 'Christian nation'
By Deborah Caldwell
The Republican National Committee is employing the services of a Texas-based activist who believes the United States is a "Christian nation" and the separation of church and state is "a myth."

I did a search on David Barton.  I didn't know a man could be so purple.

I'm having an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine, and I need help with a response.  He's a fairly high level person in the Green Party.

I will past some excerpts from our emails.

It started when I sent him this article from CNS News:

Washington (CNSNews.com) - Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader plans to campaign heavily in 10 states over the next two weeks, including five battleground states that Democrat Al Gore narrowly won in 2000 and where Sen. John Kerry must prevail this year.

My friend's response was that even though he would be supporting and voting for David Cobb (We live in Texas - a "safe" state), he supported Nader's efforts and my friend said if he were running, he would do the same thing.  

Beliefnet has an article on what the astrologers are predicting for the election.

Silly stuff, no doubt - but I was actually chilled by a couple of the predictions.

Specifically:

"Bush will win, not by votes, but by means that are `outside democratic standards.' The USA's progressed Sun moves into self-sacrificial Pisces on election day, implying a climate of `martyrdom' for the nation. My concern is that under this influence, sedition laws will be enforced, criminalizing dissent of any kind."

--Jacob Schwartz Ph.D., the only astrologer to predict that Gore would win the popular vote in 2000, but Bush would go to the White House

Enjoy y'all.  :-D

I have a Google alert that sends me Jim Turner-Texas updates.  I got this article from BBC News.

Noteworthy in the article is that 5 of the 7 Texas Democrats who have been affected by the redistricting fiasco are going to run anyway (unfortunately, Jim Turner is not going to run, but I'm hoping he has better days ahead of him).

Map redrawing angers US Democrats

Some are standing down rather than running in a new district
The increasingly widespread - and perfectly legal - practice of gerrymandering is having a serious and lasting effect on American democracy, as the BBC's James Silver reports from Texas.

...

I found this article a little late - it came out on Sept. 3.  Excuse me for any cross-postings.

This article comes from the Baltimore Chronicle

MEDIA CRITICISM:
If Only They Had Invented the Internet: The Failure of Fact-Checking at the Republican Convention
Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Overlooking distortions was the norm in television's coverage of the Republican convention.

September 3, 2004--It is the function of journalism to separate fact from fiction. In covering the Republican National Convention of 2004, the media made isolated efforts to point out some of the convention speakers' more egregious distortions, but on the whole failed in their vital role of letting citizens know when they are being lied to.

Important news for Catholics feeling torn between who to vote for.  

Catholics allowed pro-choice vote
BY PATRICIA MONTEMURRI
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
September 7, 2004

Anti-abortion Catholics can support pro-choice candidates, as long as they
agree with the candidate on a range of other issues.

That pronouncement in an Italian magazine from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's top spokesman on Catholic teachings, went unnoticed in the din of presidential election-year politics.

This article comes from the Detroit Free Press

My HUGE apologies if the following has already been posted.  I can't find the search engine to search the site!!

I found the following via beliefnet and then from someplace called Bellacio.org.

Go to either website to make comments on it if you wish.

Bellacio.org seems to be a pretty interesting website that I will have to take a more indepth look at later...

Tuesday 31st August 2004 :
LETTER FROM RET. MARINE CSM AND RET. MARINE MAJOR
23 comment(s).

As a military family with a combined total of 57 years of active service in the U. S. Army, myself, son, and daughter-in-law have accumulated over 80 combat medals, one or more of us have served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Kosovo, Bosnia, and three of us served together during Desert Storm. My son recently returned from the Iraq War, his third war, and, being fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments, applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status.

... of the week ahead?

It's 2:30 my time and should be asleep in bed, not sitting in front of the computer.  

But I thought I'd take one last look at the news before going to sleep.

Two articles really worry me about the upcoming convention and its effect on the polls, Bush's so-called strength as a leader "during wartime", and the election ahead.

The first one has Bush encouraging his fellow Republicans to court the Democratic vote.  

Bush even managed to find a Democratic steel-worker to introduce him.

...and all these portents of negativeness on our beloved John Kerry...

Take a look at the headlines via Yahoo right now (5:08 central time).

Who's having a bad day?

My point is, that there is nothing about the SBVs or the L.A. Polls.  And there is nothing that makes Bush look very good right now either.

We have poverty in the U.S.
We have McCain telling Bush to act right
We have the Judge stopping the partial-birth abortion ban
We have the Russian probers saying no sign of terrorist attacks.

Nothing too good for Bush in any of THOSE stories.

[update]

I suspect that the general population doesn't go to just the Washington Post or the NYTimes to read their news. They go somewhere like Yahoo! or Excite, or MyWay to get their news. I think that these are the important sites to look at to see what the general public is exposed to in terms of information.

Even in local Houston news - there isn't anything about Bush's upswing in the L.A. poll.

I'd link this, but it's my login, see... so I cut and pasted it.  

Top Stories from Reuters  Aug 26 4:48pm CT  
-Sistani Secures Iraq Peace Deal After Bloody Day
-Judge Strikes Down Partial Birth Abortion Ban
-Nearly 36 Million Americans Live in Poverty
-The U.S. Gives Mia Hamm a Golden Farewell

I went to this site today.  It's similar to the electoral vote predictor website, but it's run by a Republican as opposed to Democrat.

The Electoral Vote Predictor (Democrat-run) is right now showing Kerry with 280 EVs and Bush with 238 EVs.

The Election Projection (Republican-run) is showing Kerry with 311 EVs and Bush with 227 EVs.

But anyway - also on the Election Projection website is a list of 21 reasons why Bush will win.  I think it must have been written several months ago.  Please take a look at it.  Are events happening as it predicts?

Twenty-one Reasons Why Bush Will Win   by Scott Elliott, aka The Blogging Caesar, February 7, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.  No more drunk driving lightning bolts

Just four days before the election, muckrakers uncovered a dirty little secret on their GOP rival.  Twenty-four years earlier, George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving.  To make matters worse, he answered no when a reporter asked if he'd ever been arrested.  It was the kind of bombshell that would have ruined his shot at the White House, except for the lead in the polls he had at the time.  The effect of the report was evident later in exit polls.  They indicated that a majority of people who made up their minds within three days of the election voted for Al Gore.  Normally, undecideds break overwhelmingly to the candidate from the party out of the White House.  In addition, an unknown number of voters who had been attracted to Bush's image of integrity were motivated to stay home.  Without this perfectly-timed political hand grenade, Bush would have won the election with room to spare, and the blatant partisanship of the Supreme Court (of Florida, that is) would have remained local news.  In all likelihood, Bush won't face a similar devastating revelation this year.

As always, my apologies if this has already been posted.  I do always look, but these diaries are like popcorn.

Tonight's Nightline:

Nightline Daily E-Mail
August 19, 2004

TONIGHT'S FOCUS: It sounds like John Kerry has decided that the pushing and criticism have just gone too far. Today he sounded angry as he took President Bush on. He was referring to the campaign ad funded by a Republican group that attacks the veracity of John Kerry's war record. Kerry accused the President of letting others do "his dirty work" and invoked the President's own words "bring it on" to challenge him to a one on one debate on their respective war records. The President has not responded. So what happened to make Kerry so mad? And why did he do it now?