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Taking A Break ** Open Thread **

By Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy on May 12, 2009 at 9:00 AM in Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Current Affairs, General Motors & Chrysler, George Bush, Nancy Pelosi

This past week has been a bit up and down. NH and Maine passed same sex marriage laws – YAY! And we find out more gay and lesbian soldiers have been kicked out of the military – BOO. Obama continues to morph into Bush, as I have noted on numerous occasions, but most recently based on Chris Hedges’ EXCELLENT article, “Obama As A Brand.” Barney Frank has turned from being a representative of the people to being ACORN’s representative. Nancy Pelosi says the Executive has the power to oversee budgets for private companies like GM, not Congress (H/T to jbjd). For some silly reason, I thought THEY held the purse-strings to our money, not the Executive Branch. And on it goes.

I think we all deserve a break, don’t you? For your viewing and listening pleasure, I have three selections from Loreena McKennitt, the Canadian singer. The videos below were shot a the Alhambra. Sit back, relax, and prepare to be transported to a different time…

The Mystic’s Dream:

The Lady of Shalott:

The Mummer’s Dance:

And may you be well this day, and the days to follow.

  • Kathy

    Thanks for the break. Here’s a refreshing article with hope that sanity might be prevailing somewhere:

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/12/even-a-messiah-loses-his-training-wheels/

  • Peggy Sue

    Hey, Amy! I wake up to McKennitt every morning. I have a number of her CDs and have Mummer’s Day cued in my player/alarm clock.

    So, I loved the vids and I’ve admired the music for quite some time.

    And yes, a nice respite. Thanks!

  • Diana

    I love her music Amy! She’s one of my favorite World Music singers. Here’s another one of my favs. Kate Price, she’s from Salt Lake City. Beautiful Celtic voice.

    Kate Price-The Labyrinth(This is my fav song from her.)It’s from the album Deep Heart’s Core.
    On the right side click play
    http://www.last.fm/music/Kate+Price/_/The+Labyrinth

    Another one of my favorite World Music singers. She’s a Native American singer. I love singing with her. She also has a beautiful voice. Sharon Burch. From the album Touch the Sweet Earth. This isn’t my favorite album from her, I can’t find it, but I love all these songs also. She is Navajo and until she entered school she couldn’t speak any English. She could only speak her native language. It’s a tie between First Cry and Grandmother’s Ways for my favorites on this album.

    Sharon Burch~First Cry
    http://tinyurl.com/qz47pw

    I have way too many I love so I’ll stop. These are just a couple I’ve listened to for years.

    • Diana

      Oo I have to get a plug in for Steven Halpern. I have almost all his music. If you want some beautiful music to meditate too. To relax too…
      http://www.innerpeacemusic.com/
      Gifts of the Angels is my favorite. Although I really like Relaxation Suite also and Music for Sound healing.

      Ok, I’m really going this time. ;)

  • Diana

    Oh my gosh…I’m very sorry everyone for the double post. Someone delete one of those. Please! I don’t know how I did that, I was editing it and you got both before and after.

    • http://www.rabblerouserruminations.blogspot.com/ Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

      Hey, no worries, Diana – we’re kicking back this morning! :-)

      Thanks for the links to the two other artists – I’ll check them out!

      • Diana

        Thank you Amy. You all can kick back and I’ll just run around in circles. I’ll blame it on the coffee. I don’t normally drink caffeine coffee, but I’m out of my decaf so I’m drinking Hazelnut.

        Now my minds going a mile a minute. Yes it is, it really is. ;) Or as my daughters says, “Mom your acting like a cracked out Space Monkey!”

        Oh my gosh you should have seen me when my exchange student from Brazil brought me some coffee from there! Our coffee is like water compared to theirs. I had my whole house scrubbed and was still going on into the night before I started to slow down on one cup. Her father called and asked if I would like some more and she told him she didn’t think it would be a good idea. Caffeine does funny things to me…

        • http://www.rabblerouserruminations.blogspot.com/ Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

          ROTFLMAO – especially as I kick back while on my third double cappuccino! :-D

          Cracking me up – I can just see this Tazmanian Devil racing through the house cleaning…Is that close?

  • Tricia Spiegel

    Wonderful way for me to start busy Monday morning. It’s wonderful to start a stressful day feeling calm!!!!

    • Tricia Spiegel

      Oh, forgot to say, Thank You Amy!

    • JustMe~~

      Tricia your still on Monday? Just a little nudge it’s Tuesday today and hope your day is still wonderful and calm. :)

    • http://www.rabblerouserruminations.blogspot.com/ Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

      That’s great, Tricia! Glad to help – with all of the ACORN, Wanda Sykes, Soc. Sec., UAW/GM, SEIU/CA, etc. crapola going on, it is hard to remember to take a step back and breath.

      But sometimes, we just need to take a step back…

  • JustMe~~

    Wonderful music to wake up to Amy….

    and lets give D Trump a huge salute who has supported Carrie P Miss CA and has stood by her!!

    What a tough time for such a young woman to go through in the spotlight. Keep the faith Carrie!

  • I’m a Linda too

    Thank yoy RRRA, yes, we do need a break from what these radical Dem’s are doing.

    But sadly, so do the poor Afghans that are being blown up.

    New article by Chris Hedges,

    Becoming What We Seek to Destroy

    Posted on May 10, 2009
    By Chris Hedges

    The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

    We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

    Afghan survivors carted some two dozen corpses from their villages to the provincial capital in trucks this week to publicly denounce the carnage. Some 2,000 angry Afghans in the streets of the capital chanted “Death to America!” But the grief, fear and finally rage of the bereaved do not touch those who use high-minded virtues to justify slaughter. The death of innocents, they assure us, is the tragic cost of war. It is regrettable, but it happens. It is the price that must be paid. And so, guided by a president who once again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals and militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we are transformed into monsters.

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090511_becoming_what_we_seek_to_destroy/

    INDEED!

    But, sadly, as we’ve learned from over the pond, the body count from Tuesdays’ bombing on innocent Afghans is up to 147, including children and women.

    OH! And of course, many more injured.

    Look at this little girl, burned by bombs dropped.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghans-riot-over-airstrike-atrocity-1681070.html

    • http://www.rabblerouserruminations.blogspot.com/ Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

      Oh, dear, goddess, IALT…Chris Hedges is an amazing writer, and he hits the nail on the head here, too.

      SO tragic, so horrifying, so unnecessary…

      The importance of music like McKennitt’s is not to mask the horrible tragedies in this world, or wat our leadership is doing to this country, but to help us cope with them. Thank heavens for that…

    • NomNomNom

      http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090510/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan
      Doctors after the battle say that some burns look as though chemicals were used; US immediately begins to claim that the Taliban use white phosphorus. btw this article says we don’t have any treaties saying we won’t use it and we did use it at Fallujah.
      I feel so much more secure we didn’t do it. :(

  • Mandelay

    And may you also be well this day, and in the days to come. Thanks for sharing this beautiful music. Good stuff!

  • A Nony Mouse

    Thank you RRRA, yes, we do need a break from what these radical Dem’s are doing.

    The people in this world can be divided into two fundamenal sorts, one of which is responsible for virtually all of the human-made misery in the world.

    The division isn’t about gender, race, religious, or political affiliations.

  • NomNomNom

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051103412.html
    “A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper.
    …
    “When President George W. Bush ordered the 2006 transfer to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of high-value detainees previously held in CIA custody, Libi was pointedly missing. Human rights groups had long suspected that Libi was instead transferred to Libya, but the CIA had never confirmed where he was sent.

    “I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. “He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war.”

    The first independent confirmation of Libi’s whereabouts came two weeks ago. Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said she and a colleague met him briefly in a courtyard at the Abu Salim prison on April 27. The two were there to examine the treatment of prisoners in Libya, including other detainees once held by the United States.”

  • Anti-Harkonnen Freedom Fighter

    hey no quarter….here’s an article which is close to your hearts…evidence of abuse of Clinton voters by Obama voters

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/letter_of_amends_from_a_recove.html

    • Diana

      My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary “nutcracker.” When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

      Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin’s church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama’s church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin’s voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

      Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don’t PC on me.

      This disgusts and angers me! I had no idea someone torched Palin’s church with CHILDREN INSIDE!! Where the hell was the MSM? This is what Democrats wanted? Innocent children to be killed?

      There are many of these stories. There are also many that came to this realization. Thank you for the link.

      • Docelder

        The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone

        I had been saying that there were a lot of hippies that might ought to grow up. But on thinking this through… I think that misses the point. Yes, old hippies still need to grow up. But that is not the ultimate problem. The ultimate problem is the far left are like viruses in that they hijack and consume legitimate movements and bastardize them to their own illegitimate ends. For example the environmental movement, fair housing, health care… and the list goes on. It is like the far left sucks all the life and energy from these legitimate movements and focuses it onto the larger goal of societal and world change that is not necessarily consistent with these original movements and that for the most part, nobody save for a few in the far left really wants.

      • Anti-Harkonnen Freedom Fighter

        Your welcome, my pleasure.

        I was a big no q fan during the election, figured y’all would be interested int hat article

      • justme_kc

        The church torching was not related to politics… most evidence leads to the attack being carried out by some crazy gays and/or lesbians because the church beleives they can “fix” gay people.

  • http://noquarter foxyladi14

    it.s good to just step back.enjoy some of Gods beauty.
    (((hugs)))all