BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

As a sufferer of chronic pain myself, I know that getting adequate pain relief is a huge problem. Abusers like Pumpkin-head Limbaugh have made it hard on all of us. I am going to my second pain clinic in 11 years and I have just about given up hope. In the last 5 years my pain issues have gotten so bad I can barely function some days. Chronic pain colors my thinking and causes profound depression and hopelessness in people like me. I refuse to take anything too strong or sedating. I am single mother and refuse to be drugged up around my children. I already take an SSRI for my PTSD and valium only when my PTSD is triggered. I take my Vicodin or Robaxin only on weekends when I can and must sleep.  4 years ago, after a traumatic incident, I was hospitalized twice with a tube down my throat to stop vomitting and esophageal spasms. The choice was - do we give her something for the PTSD or the spasms? Thank goodness that stopped though it was a long, hard road. Pain often ...

by David Warren President Barack Obama announced this week, in his latest glamour speech -- this one choreographed among cadets at West Point -- the substance of the new U.S. "Afghan strategy." I last wrote about this on Oct. 28, when we'd been waiting seven months for particulars to accompany the glamour-speech "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan," that was delivered last March. I suggested that Obama had shown himself to be a president unable to make hard decisions. He makes speeches instead -- vacuous speeches that sound very grand to a poorly-informed mass audience, but on reading we find only posturing narcissism. This is a serious flaw in the "leader of the free world." But even presidents who can't make decisions get cornered by "events," and eight months after his initial rhetorical offering, with much additional posturing, Obama finally gave the U.S. and allies a policy of sorts. It was designed to provide ...

Cheney creates his own reality: U.S. 'succeeded' in Iraq Former Vice President Dick Cheney said in his first television interview since leaving office that the Iraq invasion was "worth doing" and the U.S. succeeded with its goals - a view that is shared by few others. Comment: No doubt he refers to the minority of pathological individuals who consider success the over one million dead Iraqis, almost five thousand dead US troops and the complete destruction of an entire country. "I think it was absolutely the right thing to do and I think when history reviews this period 10 or 20 years hence, what will be significant was that we did, in fact, accomplish what we set out to do," he said. "The other things are interesting and important but, you know, they're secondary to the basic result." Cheney said on CNN's "State of the Union with John King": "We have succeeded in creating, in the heart of the Middle East, a democratic...

Don't get me wrong. I can't stand President Bush. But I think many Americans miss the point of what a massive insult shoes being thrown at him was in Iraqi culture. During a Sunday press conference in Baghdad, an angry Iraqi journa list hurled insults, and his shoes, at President Bush. According to the New York Times, "Hitting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq." Why is that? Because they're so dirty. The degree of insult seems to be an idiosyncratic cultural development, as opposed to one that derives from clear textual sources. There's no particular mention in the Quran or any of the Hadith of shoe-throwing or debasement of enemies by exposing them to feet. And historical origins for the tradition are not easily found. However it started, Arabs—and perhaps Iraqis in particular—throw their shoes to indicate that the target is no better than dirt. The foot has special meaning in many societies. Most cultures see the act of subjecti...

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While I am pro-ending the illegal war in Iraq... ( no George, it has ZERO to do with 9/11 - and why is Osama bin-Laden still alive in Pakistan? Stop invoking 9/11 and admit that your PNAC buddies used the 9/11 tragedy to push their own agenda! ) I am not for "cut and run." Despite being a progressive I understand we can't just leave. I make my children tidy up their messes too. (And why don't you guys at the White House tell the American public about the billion dollar PERMANENT BASES you are building in Iraq while you count your Exxon and Halliburton shares?) Now here's another mess - on our doorstep. Those returning from 3 and 4 deployments with serious mental health issues. PTSD is a not a crime and NO, you can't just get over i t or suck it up . Just because you can't see pain doesn't mean its not there. That includes mental pain. The brain is an organ and it gets sick, too. Why aren't we helping our soldiers that went over to Iraq and...

Obama is already backpedaling on that "soaring rhetoric" that has all his cult members in his thrall. The NLP is starting to crack when the reality of the state of affairs of this country is dropped near his neophyte lap. Excerpts from Michael Goodwin's column in today's "NY Daily News" After watching hours of the dreary Senate hearings on Iraq on Tuesday, I have only one remaining question: Why would anybody want to be the next President of the United States? There is no clear way forward or out of Iraq. Beyond changes on the margins - forcing the Iraqi government to pay more reconstruction costs, for example - the most likely prospect is more of the same slog in the hopes Iraqis eventually will build for themselves the country we are unable to build for them. I say that despite knowing that Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have promised to withdraw our troops within a year or so, no matter the ground conditions. I don't believe it...

There's one thing I hate. Just one. I don't hate anyone outright... it takes too much energy (unless it's Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. et al) but this covers that. I HATE LIARS. People who lie. People who twist history, time, the truth and manipulate the good hearts & minds of others. Liars. Liars who lie to cover up their misdeeds, lie to smear others and just lie for the hell of it. I HATE LIARS. REMEMBER, THEY ARE LIARS by William Rivers Pitt "No one is such a liar as the indignant man." - Friedrich Nietzsche George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now. They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, "enough to kill several million people," according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein....

SUPPORT OUR HEROES - THE ONES WITH PTSD WHO ARE SUICIDE RISKS! Little Relief on Ward 53 At Walter Reed, Care for Soldiers Struggling With War's Mental Trauma Is Undermined by Doctor Shortages and Unfocused Methods By Anne Hull and Dana Priest On the military plane that crossed the ocean at night, the wounded lay in stretchers stacked three high. The drone of engines was broken by the occasional sound of moaning. Sedated and sleeping, Pfc. Joshua Calloway was at the top of one stack last September. Unlike the others around him, Calloway was handcuffed to his stretcher. When the 20-year-old infantry soldier woke up, he was on the locked-down psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A nurse handed him pajamas and a robe, but they reminded him of the flowing clothes worn by Iraqi men. He told the nurse, "I don't want to look like a freakin' Haj." He wanted his uniform. Request denied. Shoelaces and belts were prohibited. Calloway felt naked without his M-...

SEND YOUR USED TOYS TO CHILDREN IN IRAQ PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! The holidays are on us. Our christian friends and others are going to get loaded with toys. But what to do with the old ones? Clean, useable ones can go to daycare centers. preschools, church or temple childcare or here: Send your used stuffed animals and toys to children in Iraq Send your donations to: Michael Fellenz or Natalie Sudman USACE-GRS APO-AE 09331 To read more about this effort: CLICK HERE

ONCE A LIAR... (Some Listening While You Read) WOULD I LIE TO YOU? Click Here Lied into one war, this Chump sat at Annapolis and lied to Israel and treated Israel like toilet paper. And now he's determined to lie us into another mess before he leaves office. Former CIA Officials: Bush Iran Claims "Preposterous" Thomas B. Edsall and Max Follmer Four former CIA officials who provided intelligence information to past presidents described as preposterous President Bush's claim that he was unaware until very recently that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. "It's unbelievable," said Melvin Goodman, who worked for the CIA from 1966 to 1990 and now is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Goodman's assessment of Bush's assertions were very similar to those of Larry C. Johnson, who worked at the CIA from 1985 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1993 served as Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department's Office of Counter ...

Two Years after I Called for a Redeployment of U.S. Forces from Iraq, Bush Refuses to Provide the American People with a Responsible Exit Strategy (one comment - when did EXIT STRATEGY = SURRENDER? It doesn't. And no right wing nutjob's semantics is going to make me believe getting our troops out in an orderly and sane manner is the same as surrender. No matter how many times they say it.) "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." - Pres. Bush, at the Athena Performing Arts Center at Greece Athena Middle and High School Tuesday, May 24, 2005 in Rochester, NY - SOURCE by Rep. John Murtha [November 17, 2007] marks the two year anniversary of my public call for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq. Two years ago, I was convinced that the President's lack of strategy in Iraq was harming our military, our international credibility, and the strength of our...

THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE HIM AWAY! Since 2000, I have been telling people something is seriously wrong with George W. Bush. At first he just seemed stupid. A man running the country who can't string a coherent sentence together or conjugate a verb. Then he seemed narcissistic. Well, he still does. Dr. Justin Frank in BUSH ON THE COUCH would agree with me. My choice would be something on the Cluster B spectrum. Dr. Frank even goes so far as to say that Bush suffers from ADHD. I have an ADD child so frankly, I question that. While I am not a doctor, I think Bush suffers from carte blanche-itis, getting away with it and too much overgrown frat-boy who put a heck of a lot of liquor down his throat and probably white stuff up his nose. Can't you just see the guy leaning out of a pick-up truck with steer horn on the hood screaming "yeeeee haaaaawwww"? Even Laura's gone batty, though I can't see how she was supposed to hold it together married to The Shrub...