I’ve been through some tough times in my life and I wish I could say I was always comforted and lifted up by my faith in God or a higher power but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is many times in my darkest hour I was filled with such despair and such emptiness that I felt nothing but alone. I can vividly remember praying unceasingly for answers and hearing nothing but a deafening silence. I told friends that God had turned away from me and I was alone in my despair. I’ve only had fleeting thoughts of suicide because deep in my being I knew that I had an obligation to get up and keep moving for my son if not for my self. But I do understand completely a crisis of faith, a feeling of being abandoned when you need guidance and encouragement the very most. One of my favorite retorts to that old saw, “God never closes a door without opening a window,” is ”But first he lets you stumble around in the hallway.” I’ve been stuck stumbling around in that rhetorical hallway for what seemed like years at a time. I always thought my dark times were a testimony to my weak faith. Obviously if I were a true believer and a true follower of God, I would never have experienced these moments of despair and doubt.

Click to read more ...

The Ugly Side of the GOP By Bob Herbert The New York Times Tuesday 25 September 2007 I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I’d really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington. Enough is enough. Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is.

Click to read more ...

IRAQ — BUSH KNEW BEFORE INVASION THAT SADDAM HAD NO WMD: Two former CIA officers have confirmed to Salon that President Bush was told in Sept. 2002 that Saddam Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. According to the officer, CIA director George Tenet provided Bush with top-secret information that “detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn’t, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons.” Bush reportedly dismissed the warning immediately. According to one of the officers, “Bush didn’t give a f*ck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.” Tenet never brought up the information again; in fact, only a few months later he infamously referred to the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction as a “slam dunk.” The intelligence about the lack of weapons of mass destruction was never provided to Congress before their vote to authorize military operations in March 2003, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair depended on this faulty information to make his decision to support the Iraq war. “Blair was duped,” said one of the CIA officers. “He was shown the altered report.” Even though Bush finally publicly admitted in 2004 that “Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there,” he continued to believe that they were. In his new book on Bush, Robert Draper writes that the President repeated conviction that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction “to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006.”

Courtesy of the Progress Report created by The Center for American Progress