One thing lost in the hoo-ha over Obama's proposals for Afghanistan is that they aren't what some people think they are.  

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy's Margaret Talev, he said the following:

I'm not here to lay out a comprehensive military strategy. That's the job of our commanders on the ground. I can tell you what our strategic goals should be. They should be relatively modest. We shouldn't want to take over the country. We should want to get out of there as quickly as we can and help the Afghans govern themselves and provide for their own security.

More past the jump.

Lookee what Forbes is reporting:

PARIS (Thomson Financial) - Leaders of the Colombian FARC rebel movement were paid millions of dollars to free Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, Swiss radio said on Friday, quoting 'a reliable source'.

The 15 hostages released on Wednesday by the Colombian army 'were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up,' the radio's French-language channel said.

Saying the United States, which had three of its citizens among those freed, was behind the deal, it put the price of the ransom at some $20 million.

The UK's Daily Mail also mentions this.  

UPDATE: Per Davefromqueens -- the London Times sez BushCo paid the ransom!

Don't worry, it's for a good cause -- to alert you to this -- a company in Massachusetts, Aeronautica Windpower, is refurbishing old 50kw to 500kw wind turbines and selling them at affordable prices to farms and schools and businesses:

The company is betting that a large variety of new locations can be found for these 50-500 kilowatt recycled, green-power generators across the rest of the country as they get replaced with larger machines.

According to the company's industry research, over 10,000 machines that were installed during the mid ‘80s and ‘90s may soon be replaced by larger, more modern turbines. That's a lot of generation capacity that would otherwise be scrapped.

"While big machines make sense on a wind farm, these ‘mid-scale' machines are perfect for agriculture, schools, villages and other commercial and industrial applications," said Brian Kuhn, VP of Marketing for Aeronautica Windpower.

More after the jump.

I do hope not everyone's gone into Lord of the Flies mode over the non-issue of Obama's undoing a bit of Bush policy.

That's right:  undoing.   Government and religious charities have always worked together -- the  difference under Bush is that he removed the heavy-duty safeguards that existed on the use of taxpayer money by these groups.  As Steve Benen notes but almost nobody heard, Obama's main theme in the speech was that he was going to restore the safeguards.

Another thing:  There's no way that the tax rates that obtained under Eisenhower are coming back anytime soon.  Without them, and with a staggering debt to be inherited from Bush, how does Obama even start to repair the shredded safety net?  By the judicious, pre-Bush methods used by the pre-Bush Feds to work with religious groups, that's how.  (And not just Christian ones, but Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and other groups as well -- just as Obama did back in Chicago.)

No body, none needed.  The thing speaks for itself.

Well, besides kill a whole bunch of people, that is.

From the Washington Independent:

Whenever Bush administration or Sen. John McCain campaign officials open their mouths about Iraq, they portray the country as on a continuous path of Surge-based stabilization. "As security has improved, the environment has changed for the better," Amb. Ryan C. Crocker told Wolf Blitzer on Sunday. "I, of course, am encouraged... The progress has been significant but the progress is also fragile," said a more-intellectually-honest-but-not-by-much Sen. John McCain. And the latest Pentagon Iraq security report (PDF) to Congress reported that improvements in the security environment have been substantial over the past nine months but significant challenges remain."

But rather than security improvements being "substantial over the past nine months," an assessment today from a leading private security and intelligence contractor in Iraq shows that the security picture hasn't changed significantly since October 1, 2007.

According to some folk, as "party leader" Barack Obama supposedly controls every move of every Democratic elected official — which means that he allegedly has the power to stop the FISA bill all by himself, without a filibuster, by leaning on the Senate versions of the swing-district Blue Dog House members that voted for the FISA bill, telco immunity and all — and that he even could have ordered House members around to stop the bill. If he’s so all-powerful, how come several conservative Democrats like Florida’s Tim Mahoney still won’t endorse him even after Hillary quit the race?  

I surmise that most of the people who are doing the woe-is-us diaries are very likely white people of a certain educational and/or social standing that most other Americans would see as in some way privileged.

Black people -- and Asian people -- and women -- and gays -- and people not of a certain educational level -- and a whole swath of other groups -- haven't been able to enjoy the same constitution that the white males have enjoyed.  Deoliver47, Steve Gilliard, and Langston Hughes -- from whose poetry comes the title of this diary -- understand and understood this all too well, from deep personal experience.  The freedom most of the woe-is-us folk have been talking up as having been taken from them is a freedom that to this day many people in America have never really had.

Follow me over the jump for more.

Ah, the rabid McCain backers and Hillary "supporters" (thanks to Angry Mouse, one of the Sane Majority of the HRC supporters, for that term) over at No Quarter and similar places:

The Hate Obama /Vote McCain

crowd was gloating over at:
Noquarter
NoConfluence
and some new I Hate Bambi Obama soooo much I could cwy blog Alegre started.

They copied and pasted some of the "oh eff me" posts from here over there, and then then the strike officially ended as they all decided to come back as one big cancerous blog to spew their hate.

So lame.

I put on my gas mask, and sure enough: They are so happy to see us fighting each other and attacking Obama on FISA, but they forget to mention that Hillary's FISA record is worse.

Surprise, surprise:  Naomi Klein writes a piece for The Nation complaining that Obama has spoken in support of capitalism.  Hillary backer Paul Krugman, who didn't originally dislike Obama but has been attacking Obama's campaign since they dared to backtalk him on health care (and who has been rumored for months now to have been promised a plum post if Hillary became president), is still nursing his grudge and shows it in a gloating nyahh-nyahh-told-ya-so reply to Klein.

The funny thing is that neither Klein nor Krugman are exactly 100% in the right on this.  Follow me across the jump for (cue Paul Harvey voice) The Rest Of The Story.

Atrios noted this morning that the right-wingers who control our media's puppet strings have been pushing the meme that Michelle is icky (but not because she's black, honest!) and Cindy is the perfect goddess being.

Guess what?  America's not buying it.

More after the jump.

I've avoided all of the Russert diaries, pro, con, and in between, this weekend -- until this morning, when I read the two diaries currently on the Rec List asking Kossacks to cool it on criticizing Russert for a while.

I can see the diarists' point.  I can also see the point of those who would like to engage in a clear-eyed discussion of the man before the hagiography (or the vitriol) becomes the accepted biography.  Unfortunately, those people mainly seem to be talking past each other, rather than to each other -- probably because to truly engage each other would risk having to admit not being 100% in the right (oh noes!).

There are a few people who are thinking that all this foofaraw will hurt, perhaps even destroy, Daily Kos.  I doubt this:  DKos has had eruptions like this all the time.  Follow me past the jump for more.

I've bounced back and forth between whether impeaching Cheney and Bush (and remember folks, for impeachment and removal to work, we have to do Cheney first) would be a good idea.  

On the one hand, there is the burning desire to Make Them Pay, Period.  On the other hand, there is the danger that impeaching Bush may do for the GOP what it did for the Democrats in 1998.  

Up until Election Night that year, all the pundits predicted that Clinton's troubles and the impeachment drumbeat -- a drumbeat accelerated in September by Joe Lieberman's leading a handful of "Blue Dogs" to join the GOP in attacking Clinton -- would give the GOP 60 House seats and at least ten Senate seats.  Instead, the Senate was a wash -- the Dems lost a couple, but the Republicans lost impeachment backers Al D'Amato and Lauch Faircloth -- and the Dems gained five House seats.

Al Giordano of The Field has similar thoughts.  (More after the jump.)

It's already happening.  Poblano's documenting the first signs. Kubla's spotted it, too.   (This has all been registered even before Hillary's official endorsement of Obama, so it's just the start, I'm guessing, of things to come.)

More over the jump.

Attend, yes; protest, no.  

A first-hand report from someone who was there shows the wisdom of that decision.  Follow me past the jump for more.

That's what her e-mail says:

As you know, our efforts to present a unified front this weekend on Sat, May 31 at the DNC meeting has proven to be quite successful...in fact, we have now an approximate 10,000 marchers. The marchers will be coming from across the country and they aren't just Clinton supporters. For a unified showing will be Obama, McCain, Clinton and even a few Huckabee supporters who will rally together in Washington DC.

If people being disenfranchised really upsets them, why did they try to unseat Texas delegates?  (They failed.)  I'm sure that the McCain and Huckabee people are along out of the goodness of their hearts -- NOT.

Calling somebody by an innocuous term of endearment you'd use for your wife or daughter or other beloved female relative, or voting for the authorization to use military force to invade Iraq, thereby creating chaos that led to undoing the progress made by Iraqi women in what was up to 2003 an increasingly secularized society?  (That's right, kiddies:  Iraqi women were much better off under Saddam than they are now.)

When people say "oh but we had no idea that things would be this bad", know that this is bull-loney.  As Brent Scowcroft pointed out back in 2002, Bush's dad knew enough not to topple Saddam in the first Gulf War -- not because he was a feminist, but because he didn't want to see a major buffer against the Iranians descend into bloody chaos.

In the first two parts of this series, I examined how places like Youngstown, Ohio and several Eastern German cities, as well as Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania cities, were deciding to revive themselves through going and growing green:  Taking the abandoned parts of their cityscapes and turning them into parks, biofuel gardens (which also serve to clean toxins from the soil) and organic food gardens, as well as repurposing old industries to new and greener functions.

Part Three will examine how urban agrarianism is working in the United Kingdom.  Follow me across the jump!

Earlier I did a diary on how the former steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, chose to take the old, vacated parts of town and turn them into parks and CSA-supported community gardens -- and how cities both in the US and elsewhere (such as in Eastern Germany) are doing similar things with their abandoned areas and brownfields.

This evening, PBS' News Hour (mp3 download here) did a segment on how Pittsburgh and the nearby city of Braddock are doing similar renewal strategies -- and reviving their industrial bases in a new, green-friendly format.  Follow me past the jump for more on this.