This will be one of those short little diaries that don't say much and takes heat from the frontpagers for not being up to standards here at Daily Kos. But in my own defense, there is little I can add to the oratory skills of this wonderful author who visited Cambridge this afternoon and had the audience spellbound with her wonderful address. So enjoy and again I apologize to those offended by the lack of serious content presented here.

Certain truths we can all agree on-

1. Bill Clinton has been the single most powerful Democrat in the US in the past 16 years.

2. Hillary Clinton is running on a number of the accomplishments achieved during Bill's presidency.

3. Hillary Clinton has surrounded herself with a large number of Bill's advisors and inner circle.

4. Under Bill Clinton's leadership, the GOP took over both houses of Congress.

5. Under Bill Clinton's leadership/stewardship there were little to no down-ticket coat tails, if anything the opposite was true.

6. Under Bill Clinton's stewardship, Bush, arguably the worst president in history, was elected twice.

7. It wasn't until after Bill's Clinton's advisors left party leadership roles the Democrats took back both houses of Congress.

In the past year there have been four bank failures. The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and banking industry experts foresee many bank failures down the road. "Regulators are bracing for 100-200 bank failures over the next 12-24 months," says Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with the financial services firm, the Stanford Group.

Expected loan losses, deteriorating housing markets and the credit squeeze are responsible for the drop in bank profits. The problem areas will likely be concentrated in the Rust Belt, California, Florida and Georgia. The number of institutions categorized as "problem" institutions by the FDIC has also grown from 50 at the end of 2006 to 76 at the end of last year.

With our economy sliding into recession/stagflation and the price of everything climbing through the roof due to trickle up/down energy costs, Senator McCain has taken the tactic of burying his head in the sand on many all-important clean/renewable energy votes.

Two weeks ago John McCain was the only Senator to miss a crucial vote on the future of clean energy in America, dooming it to failure. The measure that would have helped make renewable energy more affordable and accessible. Now it turns out this missed vote is part of a pattern. Last week, the League of Conservation Voters released the 2007 National Environmental Scorecard giving Senator McCain a score of ZERO. According to the scorecard, McCain was the ONLY member of Congress to skip all 15 crucial environmental votes scored by LCV.  McCain's LCV score shows the real record behind the rhetoric, a lifetime LCV score of 24, a long history of siding with the polluters and special interests, and a consistent pattern of missing crucial environmental votes.

Obama's success has been so inspirational to so many people this election season. I actually started to feel people in this country had turned a corner on racial relations, and then I made the mistake of looking in on the Hidden Comments Tools here at Kos. Damn! I thought I was old enough to no longer allow this stuff to upset me so much. I guess I was wrong. One commenter with a few entries listed there just knocked the wind out of me.

I came to Boston 20 or so years ago from graduate school with quite a few reservations, having seen some of the racial tensions in the city play themselves out on national news a couple of decades earlier regarding school busing/desegregation. I wasn't sure what to expect when I got here in '88. The Clinton years accomplished a great deal in the race relations area with his focus on bringing people together and addressing racial/economic justice issues. (Perhaps his greatest achievement was providing a place at the table for minorities for the first time in more than a decade.)

Retailers across the country have been laying off staff and closing stores as consumers cut back on discretionary spending, faced with weak credit and housing markets and high food and gas prices. Consumers used to pay 10 cents of every dollar for food and fuel, they now pay up to 20 cents per dollar in part, because of those higher energy costs and the need to find alternatives to oil. The ethanol craze is behind a lot of the food inflation in the sense that it's driven up corn prices and increased the demand for crop space because people want to grow crops to make ethanol. The price of food, in Boston at least, is going through the roof!

Food and energy prices have been tracking higher for some time, but the data for January showed a more worrisome trend: Those higher costs seem to be working their way through the economy faster than expected. The price increases were broad-based, a sign that companies can no longer absorb the higher costs of producing goods and services, economists say.

When companies costs of producing goods and services go up, pink slips go out.

The Maverick is at it again! Senator McCain seems to be quite happy hitching his campaign, and moral authority, to the Bush administration's on the few remaining "core" issues that made Mr. Maverick a maverick in the first place, namely torture. From todays Boston Globe-

Senator John McCain, who has long distanced himself from the Bush administration on legal issues involving the war on terrorism, this week aligned himself with conservative supporters of the White House on key votes related to the interrogation of prisoners and warrantless surveillance.

As someone who experienced his share of torture, (and I'm not referring to the famous Bush/McCain hug), I'm referring to his extended stay in the Hotel Hanoi back in the sixties and got to experience that form of hospitality firsthand, I would think the last issue he would capitulate on would be a bill restricting CIA interrogators to the techniques approved in the Army Field Manual, which complies with the Geneva Conventions.

An estimated 2700 square miles of forest was cleared between august and december of 2007 by Brazil's cattle and soy industries. AP reports a 30% increase in these numbers over the same period for 2006.

SAO PAULO, Brazil - The rate of Amazon deforestation rose sharply during the last five months of 2007 as land was cleared for soy and cattle, prompting a top-level emergency meeting Thursday by government officials to deal with the problem.

from AP.

Last year Brazil cited a drop in Amazon deforestation, but the new statistics indicate that this trend has been reversed. Most of last year's destruction was concentrated in the three Amazon regions of Mato Grosso, Para and Rondonia. Mato Grosso is the center of Brazil's soy industry, and is second only to the United States for soy production. Jungle is typically cleared in the Amazon to provide pasture for cattle, later soy farmers move in and cultivate their crops. Brazil also has a booming beef export industry, and cattle ranchers have been expanding their operations in the Amazon.

more below.

Are you sick of all the attack diaries by the various primary candidate's surrogates on Daily Kos? Are you sick of the primaries in general yet? You aren't alone.

A second senate republican has voiced oppostion to the Bush Surge in Iraq. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine has joined Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska in their public rebuke of the latest Bush strategy for victory in Iraq. Hagel's and Snowe's support for the measure is a major victory for Democrats, who believe their support will open the door for other Republicans to jump on board and challenge Bush. The resolution does not call for a withdrawal of troops or threaten funding of military operations, as many Democrats have suggested. Instead, it says the U.S. should transfer responsibility to the Iraqis "under an appropriately expedited timeline" that is not specified.
Second Republican Opposes Bush Iraq Plan

more below fold.

  Our soon to be ex-governor Romney has acknowledged the growing clout of political blogs and the internet, and taken moves to make his online presence felt. It will be interesting to see how long it will take before he starts trashing the locals in this new domain the way he has the residents of Massachusetts. When he entered Massachusetts politics, he initially portrayed himself a republican moderate, to ingratiate himself with the progressive majority in our state. But when he had finished playing his cards here at home, and decided he wanted a bigger political stage, his stripes rapidly changed from a off shade of maroon to the deepest to reds.
 

  Remember that great feminist anthem of the mid-80's "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves" sung by the incomparable Annie Lennox accompanied by the ageless diva Aretha Franklin? Well this story from the London zoo adds a seasonal twist to that self-reliant credo of modern feminism.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth. Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.

Paul Barnes, founding pastor of the 2,100-member Grace Chapel in Englewood CO, a Denver suburb, told his evangelical congregation in a videotaped message he had had sexual relations with other men. What is it with these evangelicals storming out of the closet all of a sudden? Details below the fold...

see- http://news.yahoo.com/...

also see- http://www.theage.com.au/...     ----although this article lists his church incorrectly at Englewood CA.

The Denver Post reports that Barnes wasn't active in supporting the CO gay marriage ban...

A holiday card from the ACLU to be shared, below the fold... The link is -
http://action.aclu.org/...

Maybe we as a community could more productively blow off the post-election angst that results in flame wars by attacking those who truly deserve to be attacked -
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/...

I think we all need to lighten up abit around here, especially with 2 weeks yet to go before the holidays. You'd think we got our asses kicked in November with the many angry exchanges seen on here as of late.

Peace.

This poem/card has been previously posted by Stash and it came and went with only 7 comments. I'll delete if anyone objects or this breaks any of the established Kos mores.

Less than 24 hours after being outed on the Larry King Show by Bill Maher, Ken Mehlman has decided to retire from RNC chair position.  The Maher segment was later editted out by CNN.

ABC News reports- Two republican sources close to Ken Mehlman tell ABC News that the RNC chairman does not plan to seek another term in january. At this point it is just a banner running on the top of ABC News web page.... http://abcnews.go.com/

 Earlier this week, the Green Party candidate pulled out of the CT 4th race and endorsed Democrat Diane Farrell in her race against Chris Shays. Wouldn't it be honorable if other progressive minded, third party candidates followed suit? (If this was diaried elsewhere, sorry. It didn't come up on the search.)

from AP: HARTFORD, Conn. - With polls showing a tight matchup in this year's 4th Congressional District race, the Green Party is withdrawing its candidate and throwing support to Democrat Diane Farrell. "We decided to have a strategic alliance with the Democratic Party because we believed this was the quickest way to achieve peace in the Middle East," said John Sieh, treasurer for Richard Duffee, the Green Party's 4th District candidate. The race is a rematch of the 2004 contest, which Shays won with 52 percent of the vote to Farrell's 48 percent. Shays won by about 14,000 votes. In the recent Courant/UConn poll, Shays and Farrell are running even with each other. Poll results released early Tuesday have each candidate with 43 percent support among likely voters with the war in Iraq as the driving issue.

Isn't the timing of this decision on gay marriage in NJ just a bit suspicious? This decision is even closer to the election than the MA decision was two years ago that helped reinforce the idea that Massachusetts, and by association Kerry, were out-of-touch, far-left liberals...

from AP: TRENTON, N.J. - Gay couples will learn Wednesday whether they will have the right to marry in New Jersey. Winnie Comfort, a spokeswoman for the state judiciary, said the New Jersey Supreme Court will release its highly anticipated decision in a case brought by seven gay couples who claim the state constitution entitles them to marry. New Jersey is one of only five states without either a law or a state constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage. As a result, advocates on both sides believe New Jersey is more likely than other states to allow gays to wed. The decision is to posted in the court's Web site at 3 p.m. ET, a court official said.

Help support Michael Arcuri for congress from central NY district 24. visit his website at http://www.arcuriforcongress.com. This district has been represented by retiring republican Sherwood Boehlert and is part of the rust belt, loaded with 'Reagan democrats' looking to return to their democratic roots.

from (CBS/AP): The National Republican Congressional Committee is being criticized by one of their own candidates for a sensational attack ad it produced for a congressional race in New York State. Democratic congressional candidate Michael Arcuri is accused in the ad of billing taxpayers for a call to a phone sex line placed while he was in a hotel. The ad shows Arcuri leering at the silhouette of a dancing woman who says, "Hi, sexy. You've reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line." But Arcuri's campaign released records showing the call made two years ago from his New York City hotel room to 800-457-8462 -- a sex line -- was followed the next minute by a call to 518-457-8462, the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. (more below the fold)