Tar Heel Tavern #83

Tar Heel Tavern #83

Erin has a great new edition of the Tar Heel Tavern up for your reading pleasure at Poetic Acceptance. It's the 83rd edition - isn't that amazing? The THT has to be one of the most successful blog carnivals out there. Great job, Erin and all Tar Heel Tavern participants!

I wanted to re-post one of our Tar Heeler's feature writings. It's from the Blogging Poet Billy Jones, and it is wonderful food for thought.

The Nature Of Things
by Billy Jones


The nature of things
is I just don't know
why the Earth, it spins around
or where west winds blow.

The nature of things,
I really can't say
why children grow up
and birds fly away.

The nature of things
is too big for me;
wider than oceans,
taller than trees.

The nature of things;
why things are this way?
I don't know why
but I hope they stay

the nature.



And so it is, for one man the experience that is nature, the reason we all exist, the questions mankind has struggled to answer for millennia, the desire to explain the universe and all that is within it, for that one man the nature of things is reason enough for their being, and reason enough to keep them as they've always been. No questions, no answers, no pain.

I have my own story about the way that life has educated me about the immovable force of nature vs. the illusions we harbor about nurture. If I haven't written about it before mid-October, I'll have to tell Billy about it when I see him at Converge South.

-- Jude

Clinton Global Initiative: Rochester's Tom Golisano Invests in Hope

Clinton Global Initiative:
Rochester's Tom Golisano Invests in Hope

Investing for the long term by Jerry Zremski, News National Correspondent, Buffalo News

Not content with saving the Buffalo Sabres, Tom Golisano now wants to help save the world. And the Rochester billionaire and longtime political rebel is working with a former Democratic president to do it. [..]

[..] Golisano echoed the themes that had been expressed all through the conference by the ex-president, former Vice President Al Gore and others. "I know today in this forum, great hope is being offered and extended," Golisano said. "Hope for freedom from hunger. Hope for better health and longer lives. And hope for less conflict through better understanding of each other. I want to thank President Clinton for this initiative and what it can mean to mankind for centuries, and I want to thank him for letting me be a part of it."

Fox Misleads President Clinton

Fox Misleads President Clinton

They tell him they want an interview about CGI, and then go on a right wing attack. But what's new? They mislead all of us!

Mara Liasson gave a pretty lame excuse on the Fox News Sunday panel today that, basically, the attack on Iraq was predicated, and at the time justified by a wide belief among the most powerful American leaders (past and present) that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD.

Well, that's just horseshit, plain and simple.

Scott Ritter and other UN inspectors had information to the contrary and they weren't being silent about it in 2002, either. The CIA's former chief George Tenet got a friggen medal of Freedom - and for what? He refused to certify that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and that limited then-President Clinton's ability to justify an all-out military attack on al Qeada. In 2003, when our country depended upon Tenet to keep us from making the biggest strategic mistake our nation has EVER made - going to an unjust and immoral (now disastrous) war in Iraq, the key was in his hands and he refused to certify in an NIE that the WMD intel was shaky as hell. If Tenet was trying, in 2003, to make up for what he failed to do in 2000, he did so under a President - not a worldly man at all - who listened to all the wrong advisors.

The rightwing-tinged marble-mouthing in Chris Wallace's slimy right wing attack-interview on Fox News this morning (that was supposed to be about the Clinton Global Initiative) was sad - and it's only getting worse by the day.

The health of America's democracy weighs heavily on good information and fair journalism.

Fox has been a cancer on the democratic body by their little hit jobs on Democrats and their false advertising about being fair and balanced. Their playing like butter directly into the fear-mongering campaign plans of Karl Rove, even though predictable, has a real effect on voters.

I was proud to see President Clinton standing up for himself and against the disinformation presented ad nauseum on Fox News.

I wonder how many people would agree with my opinion that Chris Wallace, who comes from good journalistic stock, ought to high tail it off of that underhanded network and save his reputation before it's too late?

David has the transcript and video, in part, at Crooks and Liars.

Keith Olbermann says, "It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired—but a propagandist, promoted.."