From the MSNBC Citizens Journalists Report
Thanks to Dale Reynolds for alerting us to this one.

My son is an army reservist and he returned from Iraq last March. He was ordered to attend one of the inauguration parties.

I am prior service myself, so I felt very proud that he was chosen from all the people in his group.  This particular gathering was to honor many of the soldiers and their families who have been to Iraq.

A group of five drove down from Long Island to Washington last Monday morning, and they were to return Tuesday evening.

Around midnight ...   more »

By Charles Babington, Washington Post

The Senate confirmed President Bush's choice for secretary of state and advanced his nominee for attorney general yesterday, but in the process, Democrats registered discontent with Bush's Iraq war policies to a degree that surprised even some of their party's leaders.

The Senate voted 85 to 13 to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, providing the most negative votes cast against a nominee for that post in 180 years. Meanwhile, all eight Democrats on the Judiciary Committee voted against Bush's appointment of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general…

Full article

Christian Science Monitor

Smarting from defeat, Senate minority leaders talk about values and let colleague play 'bad cop.'

WASHINGTON – Still smarting from the loss of their party leader in November's vote, Senate Democrats are setting a deliberately lower and softer profile at the start of the 109th Congress - except for the ones tossing bombs.

The leading flamethrower would be Sen. Barbara Boxer, who rocked the opening days of the session by initially blocking the presidential electoral vote count and, more recently, by ripping into Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice during her Senate confirmation bid.

The contrast between Senator ...   more »

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be US attorney general in a vote that was sharply split along party lines.

Gonzales, currently the White House legal counsel, was approved after a series of contentious hearings in which the opposition Democrats accused him of shaping the policies which led to the torture of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The vote was 10 to eight, with all Republicans voting to approve Gonzales to succeed outgoing attorney general John Ashcroft, and all Democrats on the committee voting against.

"Judge Gonzales has championed ...   more »

Patrick Rucker | Chicago Tribune | January 20, 2005

As demonstrations took place around the country today to protest Bush Administration policy in Iraq, police arrested four people outside Boeing Co. in downtown Chicago, while hundreds of high school students walked out of classes in Evanston.

Three women and a man were taken into custody after they began praying and refused police orders to move off private property—the Boeing plaza facing the Chicago River, authorities said.

"We were protesting Boeing's contributions to Bush's (re-election) campaign and their manufacture of so-called smart-bombs that have killed Iraqi civilians," said the co-director of Christian ...   more »

I came across this article that seems to bring all of the disparate actions of the neo-cons together to form a coherent  reason for  the anxiety that we all feel about the future.   It's at once scary and enlightening.

I found it at www.globalpublicmedia.com (a wealth of energy and environmental information at that great site!)


Desperado Days by Zbignew Zingh

In Brief: Apart from pure avarice and ego, the actions of the Bush Administration have the appearance of incredible desperateness. It is that desperateness – their desperado-like, passionate, furious recklessness – which must cause us to ask, does the Bush ...   more »