Seeing red ribbons? Today’s World AIDS Day. Be a Valentine. Wear red. Be aware. Don’t discriminate. No one is immune. http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/ The President’s Address to the Nation on Afghanistan – Live at 8 PM tonight…and even FOX is carrying it. Busboys and Poets is hosting watch events for President Obama’s speech outlining the war strategy [...]
Right now Congress is debating on the floor about Health Care reform, and will vote on amendments to and on the Democratic House version of the health care reform bill. Votes are being cast now for the Stupak-Pitts amendment which limits private insurance from covering legal abortion procedures. The msnbc feed below is following the [...]
First, thoughts and prayers for all the families of Fort Hood Army base. The first whiff I got of yesterday’s tragic shooting in the deployment facility at Fort Hood Army base in Texas (reported 13 dead, 30 wounded) was on Huffington Post (I don’t have cable TV). By the end of the day, President Obama [...]
I’m not wealthy, but I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do, and I decided not to do anything that doesn’t meet two criteria: expand my understanding of the world, and allow me to apply whatever understanding I have in some productive way. Robert McNamara, former U.S. secretary of defense during the [...]
I couldn’t help but take notice yesterday of Ethelbert Miller’s comment on his E-Notes. African Americans and Islam is a topic threaded through E-Notes along with baseball stats, articles and books to read, shout outs from and to literary friends, poetic post-its etc. My head is spinning a bit on this one — the subject [...]
“You know, I wanna go to Texas and be a country boy,” he said, as he stood in the sweltering shade of Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts. “I wanna be a cowboy, and I wanna sing like one.” Yesterday, the Washington Post had an interesting front page article on the cultural footprint the U.S. occupation [...]
Last week, at the end of our Q&A for the Community Cinema screening of ASK NOT (a documentary by Johnny Symons that explores the effects of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy from 1993 to the present), I asked all the people in the room who’ve served in the U.S. military to stand so [...]
I’m looking forward to meeting Alex Nicholson next weekend. So far we’ve only conversed by email. Alex knows five languages. [I'm jealous.] And he is an Arabic linguist. Alex served in the U.S. Army during the height of 9-11 and its fall out wars in Iraq and Afgahanistan. But Alex was discharged in 2006 because…he [...]
I started drafting this post April 25th. Now that Washington is playing host to both Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan today, I guess, it’s time to pull this out. I’m swapping books with a friend – she sent me Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver [...]
I can’t help but be intrigued by what our leaders are reading. And let’s just say, I do believe our current President actually cracks open these books. Being heavily involved in our local Big Read I was a tad disappointed the President isn’t reading our city book THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson [...]
