We as a family have been raising Monarch Butterflies this summer, we raised a few last year but no near this year. The Monarch population is declining, so bringing the numbers back up is important. A few interesting things about the Monarch are: The don't have cocoons, they have a chrysalis. When the morph into the chrysalis stage there caterpillar skin actually splits at the base of their head and the green part is actually the inside of their body. They also hatch, live and eat only on the milkweed plant. Most people kill this plant in their yard because it is a WEED. Without this plant there are no butterflies. Survival rate is very slim in the outdoors, wasps and hornets love them in their vulnerable stage, right after they bloom. Their wings are exceptionally small at first and the fluid from their bodies actually fills their wings. The can't fly for a couple of hours after the chrysalis stage so this is a good time to look at their wings with a magnifying glass. It looks like feathers. If you decide to do this there are a few things I must warn you about. Caterpillar poo. They hatch and grow dramatically in about a week so there is alot and keeping fresh milkweed is important. I have a video but I don't know how to transfer the feed from camera to here. When I figure it out I will put it on. Very cool. I am going to add some pics to my gallery so check them out as well.

Baby Food:
I make my own baby food and I know this seems hard to some, but I want to shed light that it is very easy. I recommend this to mothers for several reasons. If you have a chance to visit a Farmers Market they have great produce and fairly inexpensive, you can buy there. You do need a couple of things. I use a blender instead of a food processor because I already owned one. Steaming the veggies and fruit and important because the water that comes off the food can be used in thinning your final product out. Peel, Cube, Steam, throw in a blender, consistency of yogurt, put in ice cube trays. The food can last for about a week or so like this. No salt or sugar of course. One sweet potato makes about half a tray. Very cost effective and the satisfaction is nice. Don't worry about slaving over the stove. In the time it takes to watch three commercials your product can be cubed and thrown in the steamer. Your show is over the veggies are done, now mash or blend and spoon into trays and stick in the freezer. Viola, homemade baby food. Pop out a couple of cubes and stick in the microwave (don't forget to check for hotspots) and look! little person has wonderful food. Also I like to throw a couple of cubes in tupperware when we go out and the unfreezing process takes care of itself. You can also put it in the fridge as is, this keeps it fresh and handy for roughly three to four days.

Well, I just thought I would share.

I went to the Post Office to send some pics to a grandparent and I had to register it as Media Mail. Lovely. The Postal Worker informed me that anything that they deem suspicious (too fat of an envelope) they can confiscate and open. It is marked with a special stamp and costs extra. My mother in law recently sent me some JC Penny catalog pages and LO! and behold the damn thing was open. Some threat. Here is the publication. You can request the flyer in the Post Office. It's blue.

MEDIA MAIL SERVICE
Media Mail® service has special eligibility requirements for permissible contents. Media Mail rates are limited to the items listed below:

• Books (at least 8 pages).

• Sound recordings (e.g., video recordings and DVDs).

• Playscripts and manuscripts for books, periodicals, and music.

• Printed music.

• Computer-readable media containing prerecorded information and guides or scripts prepared solely for use with such media (e.g., commercially available instruction videos/DVDs).

• Sixteen millimeter or narrower width films.

• Printed objective test materials and their accessories.

• Printed educational reference charts.

• Loose-leaf pages and their binders consisting of medical information for distribution to doctor, hospital, medical school, and student.

Media Mail may not contain advertising except that books may contain incidental announcements of other books and sound recordings may contain incidental announcements of other sound recordings and guides or scripts prepared solely for use with such recordings. In accordance with standards in the Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service, Domestic Mail Manual (DMM 300) 173.2.2, Media Mail is subject to inspection by the Postal Service™. Upon such inspection, matter not eligible for the Media Mail rate may be assessed at the proper rate and sent to the recipient postage due, or the sender may be contacted for additional postage (DMM 604.9.1.1).

For more information about Media Mail service, please visit www.usps.com or call 1-800-ASK-USPS (1-800-275-8777). Complete explanations of qualified items may be found in DMM 173.3.2.

Notice 121 (April 2005)
PSN 7610-07-000-4037

Hello. My name is George Bush and I'm running for President. Please consider my accomplishments as set forth in the following resume.
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EARLY RECORD
Please See Attached Page
POLITICAL RECORD (DOMESTIC)

I ran for President in 2000. My campaign was destined to be a miserable failure until I used a whispering campaign of lies in the South Carolina Presidential Primary organized by my chief political strategist, Karl Rove, to destroy genuine war hero and fellow Republican John McCain, claiming he had fathered an illegitimate negro child was emotionally unstable due to his torture as a POW in Vietnam and a possible brainwashed Manchurian Candidate.

In July 2001 I appointed Harvey Pitt to be the chairman of a "kinder, gentler SEC" to ease regulation of foreign businesses. The results have been the largest and most miserable failures of corporate accountability in modern corporate history: Enron, Worldcom, and now Fannie Mae.

I am the first President to unconstitutionally restrict my opponents' First Amendment rights by allowing my supporters to remain at the venue while restricting my detractors to "free speech zones," fenced-off areas up to half mile away from the media, the audience, and especially myself.

I've communicated less with the American people than any other president in the history of televised news, holding only one White House press conference every 3.25 months, compared to my father's 1.6 per month.

To prevent activist judges from rewriting the constitution to serve an agenda that Congress would never approve, I attempted to rewrite the constitution to serve an agenda they never came close to approving. My campaign for the Federal Marriage Amendment was a miserable failure: it failed to pass either house of congress. In the Senate the cloture call to end debate yielded only 48 votes, not the 67 required to pass the Senate, not the 60 votes required for cloture, not even the 50 votes of a simple majority.

My 2004 budget set the record for the largest deficit in history: either $477 billion or $521 billion (CBO and OMB numbers, respectively).

The value of the dollar has collapsed 30% during my term.

Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since I took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during my term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of my inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.

POLITICAL EXPERIENCE (FOREIGN)

As president I ignored Clinton's warnings about Al Qaeda, mentioning that organization only once in public statements on national security between January 20, 2001 and September 10, 2001. In the same time period I mentioned Saddam Hussein 104 times and missile defense 101 times.

On August 6, 2001 I received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" which warned that "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking." For one month I dealt with numerous other issues until the unfolding of the most successful terrorist attack in US history on September 11, 2001.

With broad international approval I temporarily disrupted the Taliban government, which has now re-emerged to control much of southern Afghanistan after I abandoned this campaign for Iraq.

I campaigned strongly for war in Iraq. I claimed that:

Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (none have been found).

Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda (Iraq opposed Al Qaeda and successfully kept their operatives out of the country before September 2001. The strongest claim to support a connection came from Czech intelligence services and is now retracted. The 9/11 commission "did not believe that such a meeting occurred".)

Iraq would give their weapons of mass destruction to terrorists (A secular Saddam would never give his "ace card" to religious elements he opposed throughout his life and could not control)

The war would be "self-financing" through oil sales ($200 billion total has been allocated, and $138 billion has already been spent with more to follow).

The war would end quickly, with troop deployments down to 30,000 troops by Autumn 2003 (March 2004 troop deployment: 114,000 US plus 23,000 Coalition troops in Iraq; 26,000 US and Coalition logistical support troops in Kuwait).

Americans would be greeted as liberators (Public perception of Americans as liberators dropped from 43% at the time of invasion to 2% after Abu Ghraib).

By invading I would make it more difficult for terrorists to obtain Weapons of Mass Destruction (The only WMD 'discovered' in Iraq was successfully obtained by terrorists and used against Americans. As a result of the invasion, nuclear equipment and materials in Iraq formerly monitored by the IAEA has disappeared and may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or rogue countries. The results have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests.)

I punished those who spoke unwelcome truth:

I sent Joseph Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium, where Wilson determined that those claims were based on forged documents. Despite his report I continued to make public Iraq/Nigeria statements as late as January 2003. When Wilson publicly contradicted me, one of my senior officials exposed the CIA cover of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in an article written by Robert Novak and printed in the New York Times on July 14 2003. No one is sure which senior White House official leaked the order or who was aware, but the fact that I hired James Sharp in June 2004 to represent me as a personal criminal defense attorney is significant when you consider that there is no attorney-client privilege between a president and a White House counsel that allows the counsel to withhold information from a Federal grand jury.

I fired Lawrence Lindsey as my economics advisor in early December 2002 for claiming that the Iraq War would cost between $100 and $200 billion. ($138 billion has been spent and $200 billion has been budgeted... so far)

I fired Jay Garner as US Administrator of Iraq in March 2004 for calling for immediate elections instead of allowing American companies to privatize government-owned assets. (American privatization and lack of a legitimate Iraqi government is one of the major reasons for unrest in Iraq.)

I made US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki a lame duck in June 2003, defying precedent and announcing his successor 14 months in advance of his retirement after he announced that "several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq".

I threatened to have Medicare analyst Richard Foster fired if he replied to Congressional requests and reported that the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill would cost $551 billion, $156 billion over the White House's favored estimate of $395 billion.

After the Iraq Health Ministry released figures showing that US and Coalition forces killed twice as many Iraqis as the Insurgents the Iraqis are supposedly being protected from, I acted decisively by ordering the Iraq Health Ministry to not release any more figures.

I rewarded those who spoke welcome lies, paying Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress $340,000 per month for their false intelligence gathered about Iraq. Although Chalabi and the INC had been dropped from the CIA payroll in 1996 for being an unreliable source and also dismissed by the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) for the same reason, I continued to use Chalabi and the INC to support claims of WMDs in Iraq. Even after their information proved false and no weapons were found I remained so close to Chalabi that he sat with Laura Bush as my "Special Guest" during my September 2003 State of the Union address. I continued to pay the INC regularly until May 2004, when allegations surfaced that Chalabi had passed classified American intelligence to Iran.

I put tremendous pressure on the CIA to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted (as determined by the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq). When the CIA and DIA refused to verify intelligence items I wanted to believe, Donald Rumsfeld and I created the Office of Special Plans. This independent department within the Pentagon was designed to bypass the CIA and feed the discredited and unreliable information I wanted to believe was true back into the intelligence stream in order to support conclusions that the CIA and DIA could not. The OSP took much of the discredited information from Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.

I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security for nine months, before turning around to take credit for its creation.

I opposed the creation of an independent 9/11 panel. After being forced to accept the commission, I gave it only $12 million in funding to do its work (compared to $50 million combined for Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky investigation) before turning around to take credit for its creation.

My war against Al Qaeda has been a miserable failure:

The International Institute for Strategic Studies' most conservative estimate (May 25, 2004) is that the occupation of Iraq has helped Al Qaeda recruit 18,000 operatives in more than 60 countries.

The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University has found that The war in Iraq did not damage international terror groups, but instead distracted the United States from confronting other hotbeds of Islamic militancy and actually "created momentum" for many terrorists. On a strategic level as well as an operational level, the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism.

By my State Department's own estimates, world terror attacks are now at their highest level in 20 years, up 36% since 2001.

I have held 660 prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba for over two years without trial or formal charge. My prisoners, several of whom were between the ages of 13 and 16, have never been formally charged. They are kept in steel cages, subjected to ongoing torture, and denied access to legal counsel in opposition to Supreme Court rulings (Rasul v. Bush). These prisoners are "the worst of the worst", "hard core, well trained terrorists" and their guilt is beyond doubt, which is why I've set 87 of them free without explanation or apology.

In the past year I claim to have trained 100,000 Iraqi police forces, but only 8,169 of those have passed the required 8-week training course. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained".

My Secretary of Defense is the first in US history to have acknowledged ordering an intentional violation of the Geneva Conventions, in which Abu Ghraib prisoners were held "off the books" and hidden from the Red Cross. When this order was made public I refused to discipline him in any way, instead complimenting him on his job performance.

After being informed of abuses at Abu Ghraib on January 16 (first reported on January 13) which included "Threatening male detainees with rape" and "Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick" I made "freedom from torture chambers and rape rooms" a centerpiece in my speeches until April 29 when the story finally broke on 60 Minutes II.

My administration is the first since the Civil War to imprison US Citizens (Jose Padilla) as "enemy combatants" without charges, trial, or access to legal counsel. In a 5-4 decision (Rumsfeld v. Padilla) the Supreme Court dodged the opportunity to rule on the legality, ruling that the case had been improperly filed.

My administration broke new legal ground by using material witness warrants to give effective life sentences to US citizens without charge, trial, access to legal counsel, or even plans to prosecute.

My justice department was the first in US history to attempt to enforce federal regulations while refusing to disclose what those regulations are.

My legal war against terror has been a miserable failure: I have detained more than 5,000 people on suspicion of terrorist ties, some of whom have been held without charge or without access to a lawyer. I have successfully convicted zero.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
It can be freely published commercially or noncommercially as long as the content is attributed.

US Drops Baghdad Electricity Reports
By Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis
The Los Angeles Times

Friday 27 July 2007

The daily length of time that residents have power has dropped. The figure is considered a key indicator of quality of life.

Washington - As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.

Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.

The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad who are scaling back efforts to estimate electricity consumption as they wind down U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iraq's power grid.

Department officials said the new approach was more accurate than the previous estimates, which they said had been very rough and had failed to reflect wide variations across Baghdad and the country.

"Nothing is being hidden. There is no ulterior motive," said David Foley, the department's Middle East spokesman. "We are continuing to provide detailed information and have been completely transparent."

The State Department's new method shows that the national electricity supply is 4% lower than a year ago, according to the July 11 report.

The reporting change has triggered criticism that the administration is disclosing less information at the same time President Bush is facing off against Congress over how much progress is being made in Iraq. Bush has been working for months to show that the troop buildup he announced in January is stabilizing the country.

"It's unfortunate," said Jason H. Campbell, a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution who has been tracking quality-of-life measurements in Iraq since 2003. "What makes this metric even worth tracking is you want to see what's happening to the average Iraqi."

Campbell said the new reporting method made it impossible to know what the power situation was in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

Col. Mike Moon, who oversees the Army Corps of Engineers' electricity reconstruction efforts in Iraq, said he thought the change was a mistake. The total amount of electricity being generated in Iraq makes no difference to the individual who has no electricity for his air conditioner, Moon said.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who sharply questioned Crocker about electricity during a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, sent a letter to the State Department last week complaining about the new measurement. She said she was concerned the White House was trying to obscure the deteriorating situation in Baghdad, the focus of Bush's "surge" of 30,000 additional troops.

"The president continues to keep information away from the American people and the Congress," said Boxer, who advocates withdrawing troops. "It's obvious that he wants to paint a rosy picture."

State Department officials in Baghdad and Washington said the new method was not an attempt to hide information. They noted that Crocker was candid about the electricity situation when he testified to lawmakers last week.

Iraq's electricity supply has received less attention than other national indicators as debate over the president's surge has intensified in Washington.

The administration's July progress report focused on 18 benchmarks of Iraqi government progress toward political reconciliation among ethnic and religious communities.

However, the reliability of the electricity supply has long been seen by Iraqis as a key indicator of the success of the U.S. enterprise.

Crocker told CBS News this month that electricity was "more important to the average Iraqi than all 18 benchmarks rolled up into one."

In the spring, the State Department reported that Baghdad residents were typically receiving up to six hours of electricity a day. In the rest of the country, Iraqis could count on 10 or 11 hours.

But the situation has deteriorated substantially as stifling heat has set in. Temperatures in Baghdad are now reaching above 110.

U.S. officials say that they have made progress and that the persistent electricity shortages partly reflect growing demand as Iraqis buy more air conditioners, refrigerators and other appliances.

Continuing instability is also a factor, U.S. officials acknowledge.

"The main reasons have to do with continued attacks by insurgents against electrical transmission lines and against fuel pipelines that provide the energy source that you need to generate electricity," Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Those problems have been compounded by the slow pace of rebuilding a power system that had been deteriorating for years before the U.S. invasion, said Moon of the Army Corps of Engineers.

For many on Capitol Hill, the pace of progress is increasingly frustrating. "Here we are in the fifth year, and we simply have not greatly improved the quality of life," said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), who has called on the president to draw up a plan for a withdrawal. "It's very troubling."

Truthout.com



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I really don't know how this works too well, but tonight I feel like writing. I spoke with my college roomate, she and I try to remain close, life gets in the way. She is having a rough time and I wished she lived closer. My kid is teaching the neighborhood about board games. Since there is no TV watching in my house we have a closet deicated to just board games. I think I found my cousins blog tonight. I wish I had an easier time communicating with my family. The older I get the more important it is to me to know these people. I have a sister that doesn't speak to me because of my past life decisions. I can't really say I blame her. There have been times when my whiskey breath would drive away the best. My brain has been so jumbled lately. There really isn't time for much sorting out. I was reading an article on creationism and evolution. It is hard for the logical part of my brain to wrap around God and then I see rainbows over the Lake and I think, yeah yeah, it can be explained that prisms and light and moisture come together to make unique colors, but what if they were more, I think with all the stuff that life brings, good and bad, rainbows are good and smiling is good. Laughing is good, having people over for dinner is good. Cousins are good. I miss my family like something awful. I feel like I stepped out of something important. Or maybe they stepped out on me, or both. Who knows. I still miss them, I miss the loud good looking bunch.