the washington post article this morning on the united airlines pension default is a long-overdue acknowledgement of the horrors united airlines has visited on its hard-working employees for as long as most of them can remember... i'm also delighted to see ellen saracini featured... you may remember that i posted her letter two weeks ago saturday both here on booman and on my own blog... i'd like to think that posting and the great group of kossacks had a little something to do with the washington post's decision to write the article... i'm also most grateful for the compassion mrs. saracini obviously has for all the others in the same boat...

(more on the flip)

denial and delusion are never pretty in the best of circumstances but when they involve the need to maintain feelings of invincibility and absolute control, the ever more complex web of lies and deceit necessary to maintain them becomes increasingly arrogant, hubristic, and, yes, bizarre...

several years ago, i heard bush described as a "dry drunk..." as a veteran of 12-step programs, that term conjures up a very specific image - someone who, even though he or she has given up the substance of choice, still exhibits all of the behaviors of the addiction... i thought at the time it was an apt description... little did i know how it would continue to manifest down the road... the current scenarios playing out on our national stage are pages taken directly from the "diary of a dry drunk..."

welcome to bushworld... this is the kind of corporate behavior we can expect a lot more of now that cox is at the sec... this says it all... read it and weep...

(this letter was originally posted on a privately-run, united airlines employee group site and has been cross posted at And, yes, I DO take it personally)

yeah, there are some pretty dangerous characters running around these days - frist, delay, cheney, dobson, perkins, santorum, cornyn, bolton, to name a few - but none of them scares me quite like karl rove... given the obvious critical juncture we seem to be at in this country with dobson attempting to take over the senate and the courts now that he's already occupied the executive branch, it would be well to remember the "invisible hand" that's keeping all the pieces in play...

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golly, gee... evidently, the u.s. has sold considerably MORE military hardware to pakistan than i reported the other day... instead of what we first thought (a mere 40 air-launched and 20 ground-launched Harpoon Block II anti-ship missiles and related materials valued at a trifling $180 million), WE NOW HAVE (TAA-DAAAA!)...

(more)

The A.T. Kearney/FOREIGN POLICY Globalization Index (free, registration required) ranks political, economic, personal, and technological globalization in 62 countries across 4 categories and 12 sub-items. Despite coming in as #4 on the overall list behind #1 Singapore, #2 Ireland, and #3 Switzerland, it's very interesting to note the areas where the U.S. very nearly bottoms out.

(cross-posted at daily kos)

a verdict was to have been rendered on april 27 but...

Charged with tax evasion and fraud, [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky faces eight to 10 years in prison if convicted, as his attorneys predict he will be. In their view and the view of many Russians, the prosecution was a successful warning from President Vladimir Putin that political challenges from the super-rich will not be tolerated.

A notice posted at a Moscow courthouse Wednesday said the verdict, which had been expected on Wednesday [April 27], had been postponed until May 16, the Associated Press reported. No reason was given and there was no signature on the printed notice, which was posted inside the glass door of the courthouse.

While we sit around wringing our hands over the already horrific domestic situation, the rest of the world moves on. One of the interesting stories-in-progress comes from Argentina.

The Minuteman Project
  Americans doing the jobs Congress won't do.

is a grassroots effort to bring Americans to the defense of their homeland, similar to the way the original Minutemen from Massachusetts (and other U. S. colonies) did in the late 1700s.  Like them, we want to bring to this effort only what few personal possessions we can carry...plus our heart, mind and spirit.

This call for volunteers is not a call to arms, but a call to voices seeking a peaceful and respectable resolve to the chaotic neglect by members of our local, state and federal governments charged with applying U.S. immigration law.

It is a call to peacefully assemble at the Arizona-Mexico border to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement.  It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the "rule of law", not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders.

Accordingly, the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more "toys" to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.

Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious "melting pot."

The result:  political, economic and social mayhem.

Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the various sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.