Feb. 9, 2008

Pundits are busy dissecting the vote totals and telling people what is missing from the movement behind Barack Obama. They are busy, too, telling us who won’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

The so-called Protect America Act will expire Feb. 15 if it is not renewed. The Senate is about to vote on a deeply flawed version passed in the summer as a temporary fix for what the Bush administration claimed were problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Disappointed on ‘Juno’

Dialogue

Goodbye to Utah as we know it?

More on ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’

What’s happened to nursing?

To a woman and man, both Democratic presidential candidates pledge to bring our troops home. It is a question of when, not if. That’s cautious good news for the families of 160,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq. But when are the estimated 130,000 military contractors leaving? That is nearly a one-to-one ratio of uniformed soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines to non-uniformed mercenaries. Even if every private is pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the U.S. would still have an army of rent-a-thugs on the ground.

For over a decade, an abandoned refilling station owned by Venezuelan oil company PDVSA in western Caracas was a place of death. Community residents said it was a place where women were raped, murdered bodies dumped and drugs used and dealt.

The recently announced Oscar nominations include films of interest to progressive cineastes.

“Atonement” came out last December but I passed on it. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, so finally I went to see it.

“There Will Be Blood,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is based on the Upton Sinclair novel “Oil!” It was filmed in West Texas, so as a Texan I recognized the landscape without difficulty. It is a visually stunning flick with a great portrayal by Daniel Day-Lewis of the boundless greed, violence and cutthroat competition of wildcat oilmen in the early days of the oil industry.

Las elecciones del 2008 están aquí y particularmente los elementos más conservadores (el ala derechista) del Partido Republicano, están en marcha para ganar las elecciones y culpan todos los males del pais a los inmigrantes, especialmente a los de México y el resto de América Latina.

CHICAGO — Josué, 14, Juan, 11 and Paloma, 9, viven en el estado mexicano de Guerrero. No han visto a su madre, Flor Crisostomo desde que cruzó la frontera por el desierto de Arizona en junio del 2000. Crisostomo vino a Estados Unidos en busca de trabajo para suportar a sus hijos.