I am in the end state of last night's insomnia. I will listen to the music when I am really awake.

Love your DKos rundown. Last week I got the response: "stop spewing right-wing talking points" - a favourite DKos cliché.
Kos says commenting has decreased on the site, it's probably because of all those asinine cliché responses.

Thanks for the great OT, Shah!. Sorry I've been absent the last couple of days, work during the day and honing my coding skills for the upcoming site upgrade during the evening.

I don't know if this has been highlighted yet, but I'll post it anyway. Have a great one everybody!

Bush Military Official: US Citizens Must Stand Up to Stop the Empire

From ‘Empire Files‘: “Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security adviser to the Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations.”

A few of the points made by Wilkerson:

US’s foreign bases are “colonial, imperial” stations over the globe.

‘The empire… is run by about one percent of the people, if not fewer, in this country, constituting essentially a plutocracy.’

Military officers retire from the military, go to arms manufacturers and media jobs to make the media ‘want war’.

US is ‘oriented towards first what increases its power, and second what makes it rich.’

US military ‘isn’t an all volunteer force. It’s an all-recruited force, because we’re spending billions of dollars to entice these people, who feel that they don’t have many other prospects, into the armed forces.’

I came on and was reading and recc'ing and wondering why my recommendations were not taking. Duh! I forgot to login.

I enjoyed today' music. I was a big fan of the Everly Brothers and believe that time will show just how important they were in the history of music.

Col. Wilkerson has been outspoken for some time. I really wish more military men would speak out against empire too. The old school military men were reluctant to go to war and put their troops into harm's way. Now that we are not only putting them into harm's way more easily but we are also putting them into harm's way more and more often. And we are not even considering that these wars are both illegal and unwinnable. If only there was a strong and loudly vocal anti-war movement then perhaps we could take the first steps toward dismantling the war machine and the empire.

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, as a seduction technique. When she then refused his advances, he pronounced a curse upon her, in that her gift of prophecy would remain, but no one would believe her: they would think her mad. The fact that she told the truth, but people believed her mad, that actually did, in the end, drive her mad.

Apollo was pretty much an asshole.

Another version is she fell asleep in a temple, and snakes licked her ears, thereby conferring upon her the gift of prophecy. But one of the goddesses—I think Aphrodite—cursed her because she was jealous of Cassandra's beauty.

Aphrodite was known to cause trouble. When the king of Cyprus boasted that his daughter was more beautiful even than Aphrodite, Aphrodite went a-witching, till the two, father and daughter, proceeded to engage in sexual congress, that produced a child.

Some people also blame her for the Trojan War, in that she bribed Paris with the promise of Helen, if Paris chose Aphrodite over Hera and Athena in a "who's the fairest?" contest. When Paris went for the bribe, and picked Aphrodite, Aphrodite had to deliver. Helen was married to Menelaus—a.k.a. Mean Ol' Ass—at the time, who didn't much like that his wife ran off with some other guy. So he rounded up a bunch of Greeks to go have a git-my-woman-back war.

Some say Paris escaped death in the wars and went on out and founded the city of Paris, long renowned as the world capital of wife-poaching. But actually that city's name comes from the Latin Lutetia Parisiorum, "Lutetia of the Parisii"—the name of the resident Gallic tribe, when the Romans showed up.

We do know that the Trojan prince Aeneas escaped; from him come Romulus, who founded the city of Rome, on the corpse of his twin brother Remus, whom he killed. Not surprisingly, from this bloody beginning, Rome went on to ruin much of the world.

It's kind of hard to blame Aphrodite for the Trojan war because Hera and Athena offered bribes too. Paris just liked the Aphrodite bribe better. And the whole trouble-churning "who's the fairiest?" contest was the work of Eris, who was Mad that she didn't get invited to a wedding feast, and so decided to sow Discord, which was, and is, her alternate name.

Always invite Eris to your parties. It works out better that way.

According to Robert Graves, the name "Cassandra" means "she who entangles men."

On Daily Kos was a black woman with the nik callmecassandra who was wary of the Kenyan from the beginning because he reminded her too much and too vividly of slick slippery black men in real life who recurrently proved they could never be trusted.

Nick Lowe was also in Little Village with Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, and Jim Keltner.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPicSHLYpj8]

to the site code the last couple of days.

The text and other elements are now centered correctly within blockquotes.

When you wrap text around an image it automatically pads (adds spaces) for any image aligned to the right. I can't get it to pad automatically with images aligned to the left though, I think there is code somewhere that defaults with no padding that I have yet to find. You can still pad text from the images by using inline HTML code, by using attributes, ie: hspace="10" and vspace="10" inserted after the align="left" or align="right" attributes. Both of these attributes ("space" and "align") should be inserted after the image URL by adding a space between each attribute.

So a piece of code that wraps text around an image aligned to the right would look like this:

img src="IMAGE URL HERE" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" /

Of course you would need to add the tag brackets at the beginning and the end of this string of code. The hspace adds padding to the right and left side of the image and the vspace adds padding to the top and bottom of the image. To wrap the text you would need to start it immediately after the last ">" bracket of the code:

img src="IMAGE URL HERE" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" />START TEXT HERE

And of course don't forget to add the starting tag bracket at the beginning of the code string.

according to the article in Harper's, in France Muslims are 10% of the population but they are 60% of the population in jails.
Remember after 9/11, every young Muslim male was a suspect just like in the US. Many of them were picked up for their potential (according to a new French law) to think about maybe becoming a terrorist in the future. Sadly, most were subjected to gruesome torture and they turned to religion for survival, in other words they became extremists in jail. Charlie Hebdo and recent attacks were fomented in jail. Jobless + wrongly imprisoned + torture + long years in jail = Terrorist, fait accompli.