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I'm not going soft, but sometimes I like these heartwarming stories, and this one truly is. In 1986, Dan Harrison was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Dan approached it very carefully.. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Dan worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Dan stood frozen, thinkng of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned and walked away. Dan never forgot that elephant - or the events of that day. Twenty years later, Dan was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Dan and his son, Dan Jr., were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Dan, lifted its front foot off the ground and then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Dan couldn't help wondering ... Dan summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Dan's legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly. Probably wasn't the same elephant. And it's not your father's Republican Party, either. Look what it and George W. Bush have done to us.
From MSNBC: "Republicans and business-friendly Democrats (Including, of course, Joe LIE-berman) on Thursday scuttled a plan to give people threatened with losing their homes more leverage in winning favorable loan terms from their lenders in bankruptcy courts.
The Senate killed the bankruptcy plan by a 58-36 vote on the first full day of debate on a bill designed to boost the slumping housing market.
The Democratic-backed bankruptcy law changes, opposed by banks and their GOP allies and a handful of Democrats, would have given judges the power to cut interest rates and principal on troubled mortgages to help desperate borrowers trapped in subprime mortgages keep their homes."
"The defeat of the bankruptcy plan highlighted a weakness that many people find with the bill _ that it showers generous tax breaks on money-losing businesses like home builders but does little to help people facing foreclosure."
"The measure is advertised as helping people keep their homes and injecting demand into the teetering housing market. But its most costly provision simply gives tax cuts worth $25 billion over the next few years to businesses like home builders and banks.
Meanwhile, it provides just $3 billion in tax relief to homeowners over the same period, according to an estimate by the Joint Tax Committee, which explores for lawmakers the effects of tax legislation on the Treasury."
And the Republicans are intent and purposeful in their drive toward Bush's Great Depression II
Farm foreclosure sale. (Circa 1933)
The Bush Administration is now claiming that records of visits to the White House by Jack Abramoff, convicted felon Republican lobbyist who bought and paid for so many Republican congressmen and presidents, are secret.
From the Associated Press: "The Justice Department, citing a Cold War-era court ruling, declared that the contents of the "Sensitive Security Records" cannot be publicly revealed even though they could show whether Abramoff made more visits to the White House than those already acknowledged.
"The simple act of doing so ... would reveal sensitive information about the methods used by the Secret Service to carry out its protective function," the Justice Department argued."
