Said on the White House Contact Page - Taxes

Left on the White House Contact page, under policy issue - Taxes:

Extending the unfunded Bush tax cuts to the rich people who don't need it while talking about freezing middle class working people's wages is an OUTRAGE. We NEED the Middle Class. They did not cause the economic crisis.

Listen to Dr. Howard Dean -- hear what he said on Rachel Maddow Monday night. Listen to the POLLS. People don't want to extend tax cuts past the first $250,000 in income.

We need a strong White House who tells the truth and sticks up for WE the PEOPLE rather than seeking to please Republicans who only want to please the rich and powerful and make YOU a one term president. Please stand up for the other 98%. Be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We need FDR and stimulus to the REST of us.

Ralph Nader: Corporate takeover of America. Pt. 1

Thom Hartmann has been doing some good stuff for RT. Here he interviews Ralph Nader. RT is also something to watch/follow. On YouTube.com subscribe to TheBigPictureRT but you can also stream it live. Good stuff, indeed! (And you can also read descriptions and catch up with The Big Picture.)

BBC Reading List: Wow!

With thanks to Kyra who blogged this BBC book list. It is a good reading to-do. BBC thinks most people have only read 6. (I've read or partly read 39.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy  
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert  
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov  
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold Lame
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce 
76 The Inferno - Dante  
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White 
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams  
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

DFA: The Deficit Commission Doesn't Speak for Me

Democracy for America has a petition up protesting The Deficit Commission a/k/a Cat Food Commission's initial findings on deficit reduction. Sign it. I did, and added these comments:

America is for all of us, not just the top-earning 1%. Social Security just needs to be tweaked - raise the cap - the money is there in government bonds. People deserve to retire in dignity. We need our America to have the good stuff the other countries have, including single payer healthcare and affordable education. Forget the wars and cut down on all those crazy military bases. Forget the empire. Re-establish the United States of America.

Reinstate Keith Olbermann

[FYI -- Griffin's voice mail is currently full BUT his number is 212-664-2456]

To Mr. Phil Griffin - phil.griffin@nbcuni.com

Dear Sir -- Keith Olbermann is a treasure who should be prized not absurdly disciplined.

As I forwarded via an NBC comment page --

I am outraged that Keith Olbermann has been suspended because of his exercising his freedom of speech by making several relatively small political contributions. After all, corporations can spend millions, including FOREIGN corporations, in our elections, thanks to Citizens United vs FEC. And Pat Buchanan has made a number of political donations. Yet Olbermann cannot??

I am outraged. NBC and MSNBC will be on my “list” if this holds.

Most sincerely,

Kate Anne ______

And as Randi Rhodes said on her show the NBC contract (and isn't Keithreally MSNBC?) says a clause that such contributions “may jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist” should NOT apply to Keith as no one would likely call him an impartial journalist.

Again -- please reinstate Keith Olbermann or there will and must be consequences from those who love and respect him.

And for God's and our country's sake speak up against the outrageous political contributions made following the Citizens United vs the FEC disgusting Supreme Court decision.

Again, most sincerely,

Kate Anne

[Full name and my snail address, deleted here]