The Republican tent shrank until there was no room for me.

On Thursday, the White House announced that Bush will resubmit divisive federal appeals court nominations that had been held up by Congress.

Bush renominated William Haynes II, the Defense Department's chief lawyer and author of detainee policies, including policies that justify torture; William Myers III, an Idaho lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries and a critic of environmental regulation; Terrence Boyle, a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms and district judge in North Carolina who has an abysmal record on civil rights and has had decisions reversed or vacated more than 100 times; and Michael Wallace, a Mississippi lawyer who has opposed enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and is the first federal court of appeals nominee in nearly 25 years to be rated unanimously "not qualified" by the American Bar Association.

So much for the pledge to compromise and de-emphasize partisanship. After the election thumpin', Bush seems more interested in picking fights with the Senate on judicial nominations than in filling vacancies.

[Can you say, "layin' the paper trail for the next round of distortion on the campaign trail"???]

I assure you nothing that has happened in the last two weeks will change his [President Bush's] commitment to nominating first-rate talent like John Roberts and Sam Alito.

[Added to Senator Mitch McConnell's assertion that Republican cooperation with Democrats in the next Congress os predicated on giving "the president's judicial nominees an up-or-down vote" in this lame duck congress, this pretty much amounts to a declared strategy of demonizing the Democrats for the next presidential election]

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.  Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.  They use every opportunity to impugn democracy....They claim to be super-patriots but would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Unnecessary and excessive packaging and waste contribute to dangerous climate change. It also adds to the cost to local authorities and the public managing waste. Until supermarkets demonstrate clearly that they are willing to lead by example we cannot expect consumers to get fully engaged with reducing their own waste.