OPEN THREAD – Post your political news, opinions, & comments.
Hi everyone…I’m not feeling very well today. So I’m giving the blog up to the readers today (and maybe tomorrow too).
I am putting up the RSS Feed to the Blog Posts at our Political Voices of Women Community.
*The first comment on this post is the rolling RSS Feed Widget.
Any member of the community can post here (if you are not already a member, it’s very easy to become one).
Consider this an OPEN THREAD DAY. Feel free to put posts, news, and opinions in comments too.
Comments
Comment from Cynthia Samuels
Time: March 12, 2008, 6:06 pm
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m just so depressed about Spitzer. He has a lot of young people working w/him who just got a pretty ugly kick in the teeth*, he has daughters who will have to live with this for the rest of their lives and that doesn’t even take his wife into account. AND he was doing really good work. Once again we lose a powerful leader to personal stupidity (or cupidity? whatever)
I was a pretty free spirit before I got married; I’m not a prig. But I just don’t get what happens to these guys (maybe women too, do you know?) when they become powerful. It seems to make them crazy. Anyway, the worst part is that there are people in New York who really needed the things his leadership was taking them toward. And now they won’t get them. Those personal self-indulgences by politicians hurt the helpless more than anyone else when it’s a progressive who goes down. Damn.
*I know a young man who left his job here in DC, went to New York, worked the whole campaign and then went into the administration.
Comment from slim
Time: March 12, 2008, 8:10 pm
From McClatchy today:
BAGHDAD — U.S. authorities in Baghdad have received five severed fingers belonging to four Americans and an Austrian who were taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq, officials here said today.
The FBI is investigating the grisly development, and the families of the five kidnapped contractors have been notified, American officials said on condition of anonymity because only Washington officials are permitted to publicly discuss the matter.
Authorities have confirmed that the fingers belonged to hostages Jonathan Cote, of Gainesville, Fla., Joshua Munns, of Redding, Calif., Paul Reuben, of Buffalo, Minn., Bert Nussbaumer of Vienna, Austria, and Ronald J. Withrow, of Lubbock, Texas.
Munns’ mother lives in Ridgefield, Washington (about 10 miles north of where I live). This is from out local paper, The Columbian last month:
RIDGEFIELD – After 14 months of waiting for the rescue of her son, a civilian who was kidnapped in Iraq, Jackie Stewart feels like a hostage too.
She and several other hostage families are about to break free of the government and try to find their sons themselves, she said. They are frustrated that the government won’t tell them where their missing men are or what is being done to free them.
“I wish there was a breakthrough that we could report,” a State Department spokesman told The Columbian on condition that he not be named in print. “There is no new information on the case. The person in Overseas Citizen Services continues to maintain weekly contact with the families for moral support, but there is no new information to report.”
The government spokesman would not say whether the government has been in touch with the kidnappers or whether any ransom was demanded.
My thoughts are with Ms. Stewart and her family. This news has to be wrenching, even if it is proof that her son still lives.
This will not stop until we stop it.
And how can we condemn torture when we do it, too?
Comment from Catherine Morgan
Time: March 12, 2008, 1:06 pm