Among other things

From an email

2011-04-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

I received this in my email the other day:

I went to a sporting event in the city with a friend of mine. We arrived in separate cars and met in the parking lot where I received my ticket. After we went in he stopped at the food stand while I waited for him by the glass doors leading to the outside. One the other side of the doors were some teens of an ethnic minority. They were most likely deaf because they used a lot of sign language. I didn't know what to do so I remember seeing sign language by different individuals of the same ethnic minority group so I used the sign language from that other group with this group. Well that seemed to be a mistake because one of them asked if I had a problem and can they fix it for me. I was thinking that I sure do have a problem with sign language and if the can help me resolve it I sure would be appreciative. I also thought that if they can speak why are they communicating with sign language? Just then a security officer appeared and asked to see my ticket which I showed him and he escorted me to my seat. When the event was over my friend and I parted company. On the way to my car I was walking along and I heard someone behind me. It was the teens I saw earlier and one of them showed me they had a gun in their waistband. That is a good thing because the city can get really bad at night and it's good to have an armed escort. Not only that they had their friends drive real slow beside them just in case there was trouble. I'm glad they were there because it made me feel real safe. When we reached my car the one with the gun took it out and said they wanted to get this over with. I think they were referring to target shooting or something. Just then a police car drives by and my new found friends get in their friend's car and take off at a high rate of speed. Before they left I believe one of them wrote down my license plate number so hopefully I'll be hearing from them real soon. You meet such nice people in the city.

Sharpton again

2010-12-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

Well Al Sharpton is at it again. This time he wants to censor talk radio and the Internet, specifically bloggers on the internet. I wonder if he was thinking of yours truly when he came up with this scheme. He really has it in for Rush Limbaugh in particular and really wants to censor him. Sharpton has even go so far as to ask the FCC to regulate what is said over the airwaves. First of all the FCC cannot regulate political speech as it is prohibited from doing so by the first amendment to the constitution. Second even if they were Sharpton also has a talk show and then someone can threaten Sharpton with the removal of his show. If that were to happen Sharpton would cry like a baby saying they cancelled his show. It's amazing how little these liberal think things through.

Bogyman

2010-07-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

America has always needed the presence of an enemy to unite the people in one way or divide them in others. With the republicans it's been the presence of the Soviet Union and terrorists and with democrats it has been males particularly white males but recently I've noticed a new enemy emerge and that new enemy is the Mexican drug cartel. I've been watching FOX and they had a sheriff from Pinas county Arizona on and he stated there have been threats on his life by the cartels. If someone were to charge forth emotionally in this they would think this is an outrage and demand action. However if one were to objectively analyze this they would see that this is the government wanting more power (less liberties) in the name of "protection". The government wants more power with intrusive laws: The Know Your Customer Act and the Patriot Act are a couple of examples and has tried to censor the internet so I'm a little suspicious when a politician asks us to give up more of our rights. This current government is very socialist and trying to take more of our rights. Let's hope this November results in different people in congress.

Dept. of Justice excuses black racism part 2

2010-07-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

In emotional and personal testimony, an ex-Justice official who quit over the handling of a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party accused his former employer of instructing attorneys in the civil rights division to ignore cases that involve black defendants and white victims.

J. Christian Adams, testifying Tuesday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said that "over and over and over again," the department showed "hostility" toward those cases. He described the Black Panther case as one example of that -- he defended the legitimacy of the suit and said his "blood boiled" when he heard a Justice official claim the case wasn't solid.

"It is false," Adams said of the claim.

"We abetted wrongdoing and abandoned law-abiding citizens," he later testified.

The department abandoned the New Black Panther case last year. It stemmed from an incident on Election Day in 2008 in Philadelphia, where members of the party were videotaped in front of a polling place, dressed in military-style uniforms and allegedly hurling racial slurs while one brandished a night stick.

The Bush Justice Department brought the first case against three members of the group,accusing them in a civil complaint of violating the Voter Rights Act. The Obama administration initially pursued the case, winning a default judgment in federal court in April 2009 when the Black Panther members did not appear in court. But then the administration moved to dismiss the charges the following month after getting one of the New Black Panther members to agree to not carry a "deadly weapon" near a polling place until 2012.

In a statement Tuesday, a Justice spokesman said the civil rights division determined "the facts and the law did not support pursuing claims" against the two other defendants and denied Adams' allegations.

"The department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved. We are committed to comprehensive and vigorous enforcement of both the civil and criminal provisions of the federal laws that prohibit voter intimidation," the spokesman said.

The Civil Rights Commission, which subpoenaed Adams, has been probing the incident since last year. Adams said he ignored department directives not to testify and eventually quit after he heard Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testify that there were concerns the Black Panther case was not supported by the facts.

Adams has described the case as open-and-shut and said Tuesday that it was a "very low moment" to hear Perez make that claim.

But he described the department's hostility toward that and other cases involving black defendants as "pervasive." Adams cited hostility in the department toward a 2007 voting rights case against a black official in Mississippi who was accused of trying to intimidate voters. Adams said that when the Black Panther case came up, he heard officials in the department say it was "no big deal" and "media-generated" and point to "Fox News" as the source.

But as the investigation unfolded, he said he discovered "indications" that the Black Panther Party was doing the "same thing" to supporters of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary season in early 2008. He urged the commission to pursue testimony from other Justice officials to corroborate his story.

It's unclear how far the commission will get. The commissioners want to hear from
Christopher Coates, the former chief of the Justice Department's voting section, but the commission claims the Justice Department is blocking Coates from testifying about why the case was dropped.

In a written statement last week, the department questioned the motives of Adams, now an attorney in Virginia and a blogger for Pajamas Media.

"It is not uncommon for attorneys with the department to have good faith disagreements about the appropriate course of action in a particular case, although it is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda," the statement said.

Adams said Tuesday that his personal views played no part in his handling of the case. He also said he did not fight to testify before the commission but resigned after the department would not take action to quash the subpoena.

Source:click here

Justice Dept. excuses black racism

2010-07-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

A former Justice Department attorney who resigned last month in protest of the Obama administration's handling of a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party accused a top Justice official of lying under oath about the circumstances surrounding the decision to drop the case.

J. Christian Adams, now an attorney in Virginia and a blogger for Pajamas Media, told Fox News in an exclusive interview that aired Wednesday that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez provided false testimony in May to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which is investigating the department's decision to drop charges against three members of the radical group in a case that the government won.

Perez told the commission that the facts and the law didn't support the case against the group.

"I know about the truth…and I know what the truth is and I know to say the facts and law don't support the Black Panther case is not true," Adams said, adding that Perez ignored his warnings not to provide false testimony.

"We made it very clear that continuing to say that the facts and the law don't support this case would not be consistent with the truth," he said.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler called Adams' allegations "baseless."

"It is not uncommon for attorneys within the department to have good faith disagreements about the appropriate course of action in a particular case, although it is regrettable when a former department attorney distorts the facts and makes baseless allegations to promote his or her agenda," she said in a written statement provided Wednesday.

In the final days of the Bush administration, three Black Panthers -- Minister King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson -- were charged in a civil complaint with violating the Voter Rights Act in November 2008 by using coercion, threats and intimidation at a Philadelphia polling station -- with Shabazz brandishing what prosecutors called a deadly weapon.

The Obama administration won a default judgment in federal court in April 2009 when the Black Panthers didn't appear in court to fight the charges. But the administration moved to dismiss the charges in May 2009. Justice attorneys said a criminal complaint against one of the Panthers, which resulted in the injunction, proceeded successfully.

The department "is committed to comprehensive and vigorous enforcement of both the civil and criminal provisions of federal law that prohibit voter intimidation. We continue to work with voters, communities, and local law enforcement to ensure that every American can vote free from intimidation, coercion or threats," Schmaler said.

But Adams told Fox News that the department's decision to dismiss the case reeked of racial politics and corruption.

"I don't think the department or the fine people who work there are corrupt, but in this particular instance, to abandon law-abiding citizens and abet wrongdoers constitutes corruption," he said.

Adams said he quit last month after the department ordered attorneys to ignore a subpoena from the commission.

"After being ordered not to comply with the lawful subpoena, after hearing the lies that are being said about the case, after the corruption that we had witnessed in the case, I just said that's it, that I resign and now I'm no longer there," he said.

Adams also said the department has been caught lying about the case, including the assertion that the decision to dismiss the charges was made only by Loretta King, acting head of the civil rights division, and Steve Rosenbaum, an attorney with the division.

Citing a Washington Times article, Adams said Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the department, was responsible for the decision. He also said a written response from the department to the commission revealed that Attorney General Eric Holder was also briefed on the case.

"The initial statements of the department are being proved in hindsight to be false," he said.

When asked whether Holder signed off on the decision to dismiss the case, Adams said, "I can't answer that. We were just doing our job. We didn't even know these things. We thought we had a good case. We thought it's all going to be over with soon and we're going to win. And then it wasn't."

But Adams noted that a former Justice Department official testified to the commission that it would be "unheard of" for a decision like this to be made without the attorney general's blessing.

Source:click here

Determined pilot delievers message to IRS

2010-02-18T15:28:00.000-08:00

Man angry at IRS crashes plane into Texas building

AP – Firefighters work on putting out a fire at a seven-story building after a small private plane crashed …
By JIM VERTUNO, Associated Press Writer Jim Vertuno, Associated Press Writer – 1 min ago
AUSTIN, Texas – A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing for their lives. At least one person in the building was missing.

The FBI tentatively identified the pilot as Joseph Stack. A federal law official said investigators were looking at a long anti-government screed and farewell note that he apparently posted on the Web earlier in the day as an explanation for what he was about to do.

In it, the author cited run-ins he had with the IRS and ranted about the tax agency, government bailouts and corporate America's "thugs and plunderers."

"I have had all I can stand," he wrote in the note, dated Thursday, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother' while he strips my carcass."

Stack, 53, also apparently set fire to his house about six miles from the crash site before embarking on the suicide flight, said two law enforcement officials, who like other authorities spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on.

The pilot took off in a single-engine Piper Cherokee from an airport in Georgetown, about 30 miles from Austin, without filing a flight plan. He flew low over the Austin skyline before plowing into the side of the hulking, seven-story, black-glass building just before 10 a.m. with a thunderous explosion that instantly stirred memories of Sept. 11.

Flames shot from the building, windows exploded, a huge pillar of black smoke rose over the city, and terrified workers rushed to get out.

The Pentagon scrambled two F-16 fighter jets from Houston to patrol the skies over the burning building before it became clear that it was the act of a lone pilot, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the crash.

"It felt like a bomb blew off," said Peggy Walker, an IRS revenue officer who was sitting at her desk. "The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got up and ran."

Stack was presumed dead, and police said they had not recovered his body. Thirteen people were treated after the crash and two remained in critical condition Thursday evening, authorities said. About 190 IRS employees work in the building.

Gerry Cullen was eating breakfast at a restaurant across the street when the plane struck the building and "vanished in a fireball."

Matt Farney, who was in the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot, said he saw a low-flying plane near some apartments and the office building just before it crashed.

"I figured he was going to buzz the apartments or he was showing off," Farney said. "It was insane. It didn't look like he was out of control or anything."

Sitting at her desk in another building a half-mile from the crash, Michelle Santibanez said she felt vibrations from the crash. She and her co-workers ran to the windows, where they witnessed a scene that reminded them of 9/11, she said.

"It was the same kind of scenario, with window panels falling out and desks falling out and paperwork flying," said Santibanez, an accountant.

The building, situated in a heavily congested section of Austin, was still smoldering six hours after the crash, with much of the damage on the second and third floors.

The entire outside of the second floor was gone on the side of the building where the plane hit. Support beams were bent inward. Venetian blinds dangled from blown-out windows, and large sections of the exterior were blackened with soot.

Andrew Jacobson, an IRS revenue officer who was on the second floor when the plane hit with a "big whoomp" and then a second explosion, said about six people couldn't use the stairwell because of smoke and debris. He found a metal bar to break a window so the group could crawl out onto a concrete ledge, where they were rescued by firefighters. His bloody hands were bandaged.

The FBI was investigating. The National Transportation Safety Board sent an investigator as well.

In the long, rambling, self-described "rant" that Stack apparently posted on the Internet, he began: "If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, `Why did this have to happen?'"

He recounted his financial reverses, his difficulty finding work in Austin, and at least two clashes with the IRS, one of them after he filed no return because, he said, he had no income, the other after he failed to report his wife Sheryl's income.

He railed against politicians, the Catholic Church, the "unthinkable atrocities" committed by big business, and the government bailouts that followed. He said he slowly came to the conclusion that "violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."

"I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well," he wrote.

According to California state records, Stack had a troubled business history, twice starting software companies in California that ultimately were suspended by the state's tax board, one in 2000, the other in 2004. Also, his first wife filed for bankruptcy in 1999, listing a debt to the IRS of nearly $126,000.

The blaze at Stack's home, a red-brick house on a tree-lined street in a middle-class neighborhood, caved in the roof and blew out the windows. Elbert Hutchins, who lives one house away, said the house caught fire about 9:15 a.m. He said a woman and her teenage daughter drove up to the house before firefighters arrived.

"They both were very, very distraught," said Hutchins, a retiree who said he didn't know the family well. "'That's our house!' they cried. `That's our house!'"

Red Cross spokeswoman Marty McKellips said the agency was treating two people who live in the house.

___

Associated Press writers April Castro and Jay Root in Austin; Devlin Barrett, Lolita C. Baldor and Joan Lowy in Washington; and Melanie Coffee in Chicago contributed to this report, along with the AP News Research Center.

Source:click here

Politician's confession

2010-02-16T19:18:00.000-08:00

Disillusioned Bayh advocates electoral “shock” to broken system

In an interview on MSNBC this morning, newly retiring Sen. Evan Bayh declared the American political system "dysfunctional," riddled with "brain-dead partisanship" and permanent campaigning. Flatly denying any possibility that he'd seek the presidency or any other higher office, Bayh argued that the American people needed to deliver a "shock" to Congress by voting incumbents out en masse and replacing them with people interested in reforming the process and governing for the good of the people, rather than deep-pocketed special-interest groups.

Bayh's announcement stunned the American political world, as up until just last week he looked to be well on his way to an easy reelection for a third term in the Senate, and his senior staff was aggressively pursuing that goal.

But Bayh had apparently become increasingly frustrated in the Senate. In this morning's interview he noted that just two weeks ago, Republicans who had co-sponsored a bill with him to rein in the deficit turned around and voted against it for purely political reasons. He also stated repeatedly that members of his own party should be more willing to settle for a compromise rather than holding out for perfection.

"Sometimes half a loaf is better than none," Bayh insisted.

It's no secret that the Senate has struggled to take action this year. With the two major parties unusually far apart in their substantive proposals for the direction of the country, even finding half a loaf to agree on has been difficult. Though the Democrats have had a substantial majority in the Senate for the last year, Republicans have escalated their threats to use filibusters (by forcing a cloture vote, see the graph below) to force Democrats to come up with 60 votes to pass any major legislation. And after Scott Brown's election to the Senate last month gave Republicans a 41st seat, health-care reform and other Democratic goals were stopped dead in their tracks.

Bayh blamed the current atmosphere of intense partisanship on the need for senators to constantly campaign to be reelected to another six-year term. Citing his father, a popular liberal senator in the '60s and '70s, he noted that "back in the day they used to have the saying: 'You campaign for 2 years and you legislate for 4.' Now you campaign for 6!" He noted that the need for constant fundraising made it nearly impossible to focus on passing legislation.

Frustration over the increasing amount of money being spent on political campaigns isn't exactly a new thing, as spending by candidates in the 2008 presidential election nearly quadrupled the amount of money spent by candidates in the 2000 election. Additionally, winners of House races in 2000 spent an average of $849,158 to do so, while House winners in 2008 spent an average of $1,372,591. Enhancing the concerns of many on the left and the right has been a recent Supreme Court decision to strike down the country's existing campaign finance laws. Put simply, the ruling opens the door for an even greater influence of money by allowing corporations spend money directly on campaigns.

Meanwhile, voter frustration is high, making the fight for campaign cash all the more crucial to politicians hoping to remain in office. A recent poll found that 44% of Americans believe incumbents should be voted out of office.

However, reforms of Congress appear unlikely. There doesn't appear to be any significant momentum at this time behind efforts to change the rules that govern passing legislation or Congress's need to constantly campaign and fundraise. With an election year beginning, it's also unlikely that congressional leaders will begin to see eye to eye more often on major legislation.

Perhaps a "shock" is indeed called for in order to change that.

-- Andrew Golis is the Editor of and Brett Michael Dykes is a contributor to the Yahoo! News blog

Source:click here

Honesty from a politician,very refreshing.

FBI invades privacy

2010-02-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

FBI director Robert Mueller

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited

WASHINGTON--The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users' "origin and destination information," a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

The FBI is not alone in renewing its push for data retention. As CNET reported earlier this week, a survey of state computer crime investigators found them to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea. Matt Dunn, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Department of Homeland Security, also expressed support for the idea during the task force meeting.

Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI's digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to "retain for a period of 18 months" records including "the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call."

At Thursday's meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.

"The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records...addressing, routing, signaling of the communication," Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added "there's going to be a balance of what industry can bear...He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data."

Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the "retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community."

Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.

"We're not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network," said Drew Arena, Verizon's vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

And, Arena added, "if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act."

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.

What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.

While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States.

The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.

"Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged," a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI's request was to identify visitors to two URLs, "to try to find out...who's going to them."

A Justice Department representative said the department does not have an official position on data retention.

Disclosure: The author of this story participated in the meeting of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, though after the law enforcement representatives spoke.

Source:click here

This is an invasion of privacy and very a slippery slope but with that son of a bitch in the White House nothing is off limits. Look for this law to be used for unconstitutional political purposes.

Global warming? Where? Where?

2010-01-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Millions Pray for Global Warming as Cold Spell Grips the Planet
Thursday, January 7, 2010
By Carey Roberts
For global warming protesters, the week was a total downer.

A University of Utah “scream-in” for the failed Copenhagen climate conference had to be iced, thanks to an errant December blizzard. Then faced with historic snowfalls in Europe, bicyclist Thaneite Khandekar cut short his global awareness trek. “There were times when my feet would be frozen,” a dejected Khandekar had to admit.

Meanwhile, newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia warned readers of the deep freeze that lay ahead. In the United States, over 1,200 new records for cold and snow were set in a single week.

In Europe, the UK Telegraph warned readers of “one of the coldest winters in 100 years.” A jet careened off a snow-covered airport runway in Germany. And avalanches rumbled down the Swiss Alps.

The India Meteorological Department announced, “It could turn out to be the coldest Calcutta winter ever.” Traffic bedlam reined as Seoul, Korea struggled to cope with a foot of snow.

Meanwhile a dwindling number of climate alarmists struggled to keep the faith. “In the context of global warming, extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently,” explained Mr. Guo, head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, as the Chinese capital dug out from its biggest snow dump since 1951.

While temperatures took a nosedive, the Climategate scandal continued to surge out of control like an El Niño-driven tidal wave.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Control, reverted to damage-control mode. “It is a well-known fact that powerful vested interests and those opposed to action on climate change are working overtime to see that they can stall action for as long as possible,” he blustered.

And what of pesky rumors that Pachauri stood to take in millions if proposed fossil fuel surcharges took effect? “As for pecuniary benefits from advice that I may be rendering to profit making organisations, these payments are all made directly to my institute, without a single penny being received by me,” Pachauri explained with a straight face.

Former Director of the National Hurricane Center Neil Frank declaimed how Climategate “reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science.”

Canadian climatologist Tim Ball laid much of the blame for the Climategate fiasco on a “Blind and Biased Mainstream Media.” And in the Canadian arctic, Inuit hunters report the polar bears are doing fine. Harry Flaherty, chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, says the bear population has become so, well, unbearable, that its numbers need to be trimmed.

No surprise, laws based on the fraudulent climate research came under fire as well.

In the U.S. Senate, President Obama’s signature “cap-and-trade” bill was shunted to the back burner. Six Georgia Congressmen charged the EPA’s emission regulations were based on “questionable and potentially fraudulent data.” In France the Constitutional Council KOed an impending national carbon tax as unconstitutional.

And come to think of it, where is Al Gore these days?

Following a disastrous Copenhagen speech where he predicted a polar melt-down within 5-7 years, the Guru of Global Apocalypse has been keeping a low profile. Nothing on his personal blog: http://blog.algore.com/ And at his ClimateProject.org, eco-speech requests for 2010 have petered off. At $100,000 a pop, corporations hit by a weak economy are having doubts about inviting the high-priced Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Meanwhile back in India, New Delhi remained under the grip of an intense cold wave. In the northern territories, 154 are reported dead from weather-related causes.

But hopefully the cold snap will end by next week.

Beginning January 14, millions of Hindus will congregate for the holy Kumbha Mela, the largest gathering of Hindus in the world. In attendance will be the renowned Naga Sadhus, members of a Hindu sect who parade through the streets unclothed.

Any guesses what the naked men’s mantra will be? Stop Global Warming.

Source:here

An interesting question: where is Al Gore? Nowhere to be found. I've never really bought into these end of the world theories. I remember back in the '80's Christians were saying that the world will end and the antichrist will reign in the '90's. If you consider Clinton to be the antichrist then you are right otherwise it didn't happen. They said that the year 2000 will usher in the second coming of Christ and that is certainly not the case. In the '90's they said the year 2000 will result in computer crashes,money being lost from bank records and that the nuclear missles will fire on their own thus bring an end to the world. Guess what? Y2K was accompanied by a whisper not a thunderbolt because nothing happened. Now they are saying that 2012 the world will end,according to the Mayan calender and the Mayan calander goes up to 2012 and ends. What does that say? Maybe they had no concept of 2013. Is the Mayan calendar in sync with the Georgarian calender that we use? Is the 2012 in the Mayan calender the same as 2012 in the Geogarian calender. Then there is the Hebrew calendar and that too invites discussion. I'm a skeptic but after all that I've heard I have become one. What am I saying? See you on Jan. 1st 2013.

Proofreading: the thing to do

2009-10-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

And now a public service anouncement:

Proofreading is your friend
Embrace it.

Sharpton says something wrong;O'Reilly pissed

2009-07-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

I was watching The O'Reilly Factor the other day and he had a quote from Al Sharpton that put O'Reilly and his show in a bad light. O'Reilly was pissed because of the inaccuracy of Sharpton's comment. O'Reilly said that only honest guests are allowed on his show and Sharpton has been on the factor a lot. O'Reilly is not the brightest bulb in the world and I think he sees the real Al Sharpton: the black racist that has it in for anyone not black and Sharpton himself is not the brightest bulb in the pack either or he is a liar. He doesn't stick up for nonblacks and just totally ignores them. He is an instigator that the world is better off without. Maybe O'Reilly sees the real Sharpton for once.

Misquote

2009-05-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote
Irish student hoaxes world's media with florid but phony quote from dead French composer
Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press Writer

On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT

Buzz up! Print DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.

"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.

He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.

"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."

Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w

Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh

Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia

Source:here

This is a good example of why I don't trust wikipedia as anyone can add or subtract anything they want.

Judicial corruption

2009-03-02T19:01:00.000-08:00

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. - For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

“I’ve never encountered, and I don’t think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids’ lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money,” said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles’ records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

'I have disgraced my judgeship'
The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.

Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County’s juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, “I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.” Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.

Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.

Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.

In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.

One of the contracts — a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million — was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.

The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.

Allegations of extortion

Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.

“Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands,” he said. “These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies.”

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters’ constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.

The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups’ worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.

Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.

Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.

“I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?” said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.

'I was completely destroyed'

Laurene Transue said Ciavarella “was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children.”

Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn’t know his friend was going to steal anything.

Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.

“Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed,” said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.

“I got a raw deal, and yeah, it’s not fair,” he said, “but now it’s 100 times bigger than me.”

Source:here

I just had to include this as it is an grave injustice. These are kids thrown to the wolves so the wolves could prosper. Who knows what these kids were subjected to while in lock up.

Old media vs new media

2009-03-02T16:46:00.000-08:00

When the internet first came out it was demonized by the old media as "harmful to children" and they did they're best to undermined it and then to have Al Gore demonize the net (yes,the same Al Gore who claimed to have invented the internet) as harmful to children. Now we can see why they feared the net,with printed newspapers losing circulation we see the truth. The internet gave a voice to everyone not just the priveleged elite few who have a stranglehold on the old media of newspapers and TV and cartel the prices to keep ordinary people from voicing their opinions with pictures and only allowing their opinions in the "op-ed" section of the newspaper with lower chances of being seen and subject to an editors discretion and if that editor has an axe to grind and you have the opposing opinion then there is a chance your letter won't get published. It happened to me when I wrote the Los Angeles Times opposing feminism. The old media had a stranglehold; you wanted something visual you put it on TV if it was visual and audio then you also selected radio and one will cost big bucks let alone two. TV and radio,they were your only choice and they both had high prices,truly a sweetheart deal for both and no competition. Now let's introduce the internet giving a voice to the people and letting them know that things are not how the elite paint them to be and people such as myself that are as far from politically correct as you can get as assures us we are not alone in our beliefs. There was also other reasons they feared the internet such as competition as I've said but also the internet holds the old media accountable we can point out watch was inaccurate about what was said on radio and/or TV thus holding them accountable. No wonder they feared the internet. I've heard that politicians are now paying attention to bloggers just as they paid attention to the old media when it was a cartel and that is truly revolutionary. The internet is taking us in an original voyage that is unheard of in the past and I trust take us down a positive path in the future.

Superbowl victory

2009-02-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

Way to go

~~Arizona Cardinals~~

Pittsburgh Steelers

We were behind you all the way.

The shakedown of Michael Richards

2008-11-24T21:03:00.000-08:00

The Rogue Jew

The Black Mafia’s Shakedown of Michael Richards
2006-11-28 at 7:27 am · Filed under Vox Populi

What Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame did and said was wrong. The way the African American Community is handling it, even more wrong then the action itself!

The NAACP, a racist organization in its own right along with some other Racial oriented groups, now want to “SHAKEDOWN” Michael Richards for millions of his dollars saying that if he were to donate Millions of his dollars to their childrens charities, then all would be forgiven.

Two men who were at the comedy club when “Kramer” went on his racial tirade are using the help of attorney Gloria Allred to shakedown Richards and separate him from millions of his dollars that he earned.

Allred would like Michael Richards to go not before a judge, but a retired judge of her choosing so that Richards can apologize and then the judge can decide whether or not Richards should poney up the dough to the two men who are visually upset to the point that they see dollar $ign$.

Of course where the microphones and cameras are, you are more then likely bound to see the Shakedown King of Racism himself, Jesse “Whose Your Daddy” Jackson, who is also trying to cash in on Richards’ slip of the tongue.

The group of Politically Correct idiots have now come out of the woodwork calling for censorship by banning the N word.

I don’t defend the behavior or the words, but I defend the right of someone to be as big an idiot as they want to be and say those words.

I am not saying what Richards did wasn’t wrong, it was without a shadow of a doubt wrong as hell, but to cash in on what he did and said, is even more wrong. A$$holes like Jackson and Sharpton are always extorting money from people and businesses in the name of their race, although the only ones benefiting from the ill gotten dollars are crooks like Sharpton and Jackson.

What’s next, banning of the Muhammad Cartoons? Not on my watch.

Source:here

Bill O'Reilly meltdowns

2008-10-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

A series of Bill O'Reilly meltdowns where Bill just loses it and it is so fucking funny.

Racist comments also Sharpton news

2008-08-17T00:03:00.000-07:00

ETHNOCRAT AL 'The 'Do' SHARPTON

On Jews:
• "... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not
anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin' and grinnin'. Pay for your deeds."

• "White folks was in caves while we was building empires... We taught philosophy and
astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it."

LIP FLAPPING SPIKE LEE:

On Trent Lott:
• "...card-carrying member" of the Ku Klux Klan."
On Interracial couples:

• "I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street."

On Clarence Thomas:
• "A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom."

NO-NAD HILLARY CLINTON
• "You f*cking Jew b@stard." - To political operative Paul Fray.

ETHNOCRAT CHARLES BARRON, N.Y.C. COUNCILMAN
During a reparations rally:
• "I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health."

MARY FRANCES BERRY, CHAIRWOMAN, US COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS
• "Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."

ETHNOCRAT SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR WILLIE BROWN
• "The old white boys got taken fair and square."

JULIENNE MALVEAUX, USA TODAY COLUMNIST
• "There's no great, white bigot; there's just about 200 million little white bigots out there."

ETHNOCRAT ZACK WEBB, NAACP
• "Reparations are a really good way for white people to admit they're wrong."

Source: here

Getting back to Al Sharpton:

Uncle Sam To Sharpton: Pay Up, Deadbeat
Source: MSNBC [05/10/08]

Uncle Sam calls it balancing his books. Reverend Al Sharpton calls his header into the IRS’s bull’s-eye something else:

"Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop," Sharpton said. "I think that that is why they try to intimidate us." (MSNBC)

If you have any residual doubts that race card waving is an enriching endeavor, get over it. Over a number of years, Rev. Al has racked up an impressive tally of unpaid taxes:

* He owes New York City $365,558 in back taxes.

* He owes Uncle Sam $931,397 in back taxes.

* His for profit company, Rev. Al Communications, owes the state of New York $175,962.

Rev. Al has been fending off these claims, for several years, by using his nonprofit cabal,the National Action Network as a smokescreen. Bad bookkeeping, misunderstandings, and the like, are at the top of the excuses list. So far, it seems to be working, but Uncle Sam won’t be patient forever. For example, the relevant bean counters are especially annoyed over the failure of Rev. Al’s do-gooder cabal to meet their workers compensation and unemployment insurance obligations.

This isn’t the first time that Rev. Al has run afoul of the authorities. As recently as 2004, the IRS and FBI tried to pin him to the mat over irregularities associated with his Oval Office candidacy. A decade early, Rev. Al was acquitted of tax fraud and charges that he stole from one of his charities. In other words, Rev. Al isn’t as dumb as he looks, and will, in all likelihood, elude the forces of ‘injustice’ this time, too.

Source: here

Jesse Jackson uses the "n" word

2008-07-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

Fox: Jackson used N-word in crude off-air remarks

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

CHICAGO - The Rev. Jesse Jackson used the N-word during a break in a TV interview where he criticized presidential candidate Barack Obama, Fox News confirmed Wednesday.

The longtime civil rights leader already came under fire this month for crude off-air
comments he made against Obama in what he thought was a private conversation during a taping of a "Fox & Friends" news show.

In additional comments from that same conversation, first reported by TVNewser, Jackson is reported to have said Obama was "talking down to black people," and referred to blacks with the N-word when he said Obama was telling them "how to behave."

Though a Fox spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that Jackson used the slur, the network declined to release the full transcript of the July 6 show and did not air the comments.

Jackson - who is traveling in Spain - apologized in a statement Wednesday for "hurtful words" but didn't offer specifics. "I am deeply saddened and distressed by the pain and sorrow that I have caused as a result of my hurtful words. I apologize again to Senator Barrack Obama, Michelle Obama, their children as well as to the American public," Jackson said in a written statement. "There really is no justification for my comments and I hope that the Obama family and the American public will forgive me. I also pray that we, as a nation, can move on to address the real issues that affect the American people."

A spokeswoman for Jackson's civil rights organization, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said she could not confirm that Jackson used the slur.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be

published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

Let's see if they run Jackson out of town on a rail like they did Don Imus or will the civil rights crowd cover for Jackson like they always do. If Don Imus or another white male said this they would demand his hide but since it's Jackson look for a cover-up which is typical for this group.

Alternative forms of energy

2008-04-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Fuel from foul
Using food and crop residues, a new breed of entrepreneur looks to cut waste and create energy

By Laurent Belsie and Mary Wiltenburg Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

ST. LOUIS AND BOSTON –
Forget Iraq, OPEC, and that Alaskan wildlife refuge for the moment. Some of the clues to the world's energy future may lie on your dinner plate.

The plants that grew the rice you're eating also produce rice straw, which is mostly burned today but could be turned into fuel. Corn already produces ethanol, but stalks left in the field have energy potential. And all the country's millions of pounds of leftover chicken and turkey bones could produce millions of barrels of crude oil. The turkey experiment is already under way.

For decades, scientists have worked to turn trash into energy: wood into gasoline and municipal waste into industrial fuel. Some ventures worked; others proved too expensive or unwieldy. Now, a new generation of entrepreneurs is trying to turn the nation's muck into black gold. Armed with better technology and understanding, they're making promising starts.

These conversions, if done correctly, could not only bolster the United States' energy reserves, they could cut its leading sources of waste, starting with the nation's farms.

"We're held hostage by troubles in Venezuela, by uncertainty in Kuwait," says Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies (CWT), a New York environmental technology company. "Let's take advantage of all this waste and make a product we really need."

CWT has made perhaps the biggest splash by teaming up with food production giant ConAgra Foods Inc. Later this month CWT's $25 million turkey-to-oil processor will start turning wastes from ConAgra's Carthage, Mo., plant into light crude oil and other products.

Jeff Tester, a chemical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, has visited a CWT pilot plant in Philadelphia and is intrigued by the technology's potential. "This is a good example of a win-win situation," he says. "It's not necessarily the holy grail, but it's an innovative idea."

Using a process called thermal depolymerization, which breaks down organic compounds with water and heat, CWT can make fuel from fowl - or corn waste or municipal sludge, for that matter. The Carthage plant, which will process about 200 tons of animal waste daily, is expected to pump out some 7.6 million gallons of bio-derived oil in its first year.

That's tiny - about the size of a Texas wildcatter's well - even compared to the 2.7 billion gallons of ethanol the US expects to produce this year, largely from corn. But that industry receives government subsidies - something Mr. Appel doesn't receive. At the moment, it costs $15 per barrel to produce oil from the Missouri turkey plant, and costs could drop below $10 as more plants go up, he says. That would put his reprocessed oil on par with conventional drilling costs, roughly between $5 and $13 a barrel.

"Right now the margins are tight," Appel says. "If we really want to reduce [US] dependence on [foreign] oil, we need help to grow more quickly."

The company is also negotiating contracts to recycle municipal sludge, solid waste, and other materials.

Meanwhile, DDS Technologies, a European environmental technology company, is bringing another new waste-recycling system to the US. Already in use by several major Italian companies, the process reuses all the elements of the material it recycles, making it much more efficient than most primary food processors.

"When I look at some of the processes we use to make foods, they're archaic," says the company's COO Kerin Franklin. "The process for making soy milk, it must have been invented by a couple of hippies 20 years ago. You wind up throwing a lot away."

DDS takes all that trash and breaks it down into small enough bits to render it useful on many levels. Take pomace, the stuff left over when oranges and other fruit are squeezed for juice. Currently, fruit processors pay roughly $40 a ton to other companies to haul away the pomace, which they turn into livestock feed. DDS can take the same waste and harvest pectin (used in yogurt, gelatin, marshmallows, and fruit snacks), flavor substitutes (used in baking and animal feed), fiber (used in cosmetics production), and essential oil of orange (used as a flavoring). "Our goal is zero left over,"Ms. Franklin says. "The entire waste stream is utilized."

The US branch of DDS, based in Boca Raton, Fla., hopes to start making use of its innovative air-pressure technology later this year. By accelerating particles of matter then suddenly stopping them, DDS can separate their components much the way a speeding motorcycle, suddenly stopped, would send first the rider's helmet, then the rider, then the bike itself flying through the air.

The company is already working with a major US cityto handle its municipal sludge, and has just signed a 10-year joint venture with biomass-to-ethanol company Xethanol to convert sewage into the sugars used in ethanol production. Because DDS's process uses air and not physical contact with the material, Franklin says, it can assure a higher level of purity than other systems.

While reprocessing agricultural waste has huge potential, no one knows how huge. In a Foreign Affairs article earlier this year, Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, and two coauthors estimated that available agricultural waste could produce 10 times the ethanol that corn does today. But it's unlikely all of it will be reused for energy. Every year some of it gets plowed under, some gets burned, some gets thrown away. Much of the rest - 45 million tons, enough to cover the entire Washington, D.C., area in 17 inches of muck, according to the American Feed Industry Association - is reprocessed into animal feed.

Clearly, if environmental rules continue to stiffen, farmers will be casting about for new solutions. For example: federal regulations ban the burning of rice straw (the detritus left over after harvest) by mid-decade. So the industry is looking for ways to reuse the straw, including ways to process it into energy. Entrepreneurial firms such as CWT and DDS see potential. But some analysts believe such efforts will require federal help to blossom. "There's the potential to accelerate this much, much faster, if this country applies the same sort of aggressive approach we've taken to finding oil," says Dr. Tester of MIT. "But you have to learn by doing it."

Source:here

Overlooked long enough...this is his time

2008-04-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

Bryant shouldn’t have to wait anymore for MVP
By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports

Apr 9, 6:36 pm EDT

EL SEGUNDO, CA - MARCH 25: DJ…

Kobe Bryant hasn’t always been the best person, the best teammate, the best ambassador for the National Basketball Association. This is the reason so many voters are searching for someone else to vote Most Valuable Player. For this, Bryant can blame himself. This is the price paid for petulance.

Still, Bryant is an MVP. He’s been the best player, a three-time champion and voters must ask themselves: If I don’t vote for him this year, what will it ever take? His talent, his accomplishments, his place in history, command multiple MVPs. This has been a season when everything has come together to make his candidacy unimpeachable.

His time, his trophy.

“You can’t just continue to take what Kobe is doing for granted,” Pistons president and Hall of Famer Joe Dumars said. “The guy is one of the truly great players and he should be recognized as such.”

No one needs historical context to make the case for Bryant this year. His season stands on its own. At 29, this isn’t a lifetime achievement award. Kobe is still the best of the best. MVPs, however, are never won overnight in the NBA. Mostly, it takes constructing credibility over the years. He’s been so great, for so long that Dumars is right: People do take him for granted.

As Mark Heisler’s informal poll in the Los Angeles Times showed, the MVP race appears to be down to Bryant and New Orleans point guard Chris Paul. Someday, Paul is going to be an MVP, a champion. He has saved basketball in New Orleans, passing Steve Nash and Jason Kidd as the best point guard on the planet. There isn’t a player in the league that I love more to talk with, that I love more to watch play, than Paul.

Yet, he will have to go No. 2 on my ballot. He hasn’t been first-team All-NBA. He still hasn’t played in the postseason. His time is coming, and coming fast, but there’s time for Paul. Before Paul and LeBron James and maybe Dwyane Wade are 29 years old, they’ll probably have MVP trophies. Bryant’s wait has been long enough.

AP - Apr 9, 2:09 pm EDT

Those who believe in Bryant’s greatness are forever ripping the voting process, saying it’s a joke that he’ll never been named MVP. Normally, they don’t tell you what year that should’ve happened, who should’ve lost out. Once Tim Duncan had won his two MVP awards, Nash and Dirk Nowitzki were winning, the Lakers losing, and Bryant lost three straight times in his prime. In those years, the mediocre Laker teams crushed his candidacy.

Always, it was this: In the post-Shaq era, Bryant had to be playing for a contender. This was the voter’s mandate. As much as anything, Nowitzki was the best player on the 67-win Mavericks a year ago and it was declared his window, his time. To hear people say that they want to hold off voting to see who finishes the Western Conference with the better record – New Orleans or Los Angeles – is missing the point here.

Bryant doesn’t need the Lakers to finish with the best record in the regular season. When the Lakers are together, yes, they are the most talented team in the NBA. Only, they haven’t been together this season. The Lakers are still fighting for the No. 1 seed with Andrew Bynum out since the middle of January and Pau Gasol arriving in February and missing nine games in March.

The idea that an MVP has to do more with less is nonsense. For coach of the year, it’s a fairer argument. When Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were winning MVPs in the 1980s, who held their rosters against them?

No one ever made Nash reach a conference final – never mind win a title – to give him his first MVP. He came on late in his career to transform himself, but that was never necessary with Bryant. At 29, he’s been great for most of a decade. He’s paid his price for petulance. Joe Dumars is right: No more taking Bryant for granted.

His time, his trophy.

Source:here

Elections

2008-03-31T12:11:00.000-07:00

Write in Ron Paul's name on the ballot for president if it is not there. Ron Paul is the only one to resist the feminist pork so he is definitely more preferable to Obuma or Hitlery. He is still running,perhaps as an independent or better yet Libertarian. The second choice is would be John "Open Borders" McCain. The third choice would be leaving the country.

Joe Rogan on cannabis

2008-03-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Joe Rogan on Ron Paul

2008-03-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

More anti-white racism

2008-03-19T19:47:00.000-07:00

John White

RIVERHEAD, New York (AP) -- A black father was sentenced to two to four years in prison Wednesday for fatally shooting an intoxicated white teenager during a racially charged confrontation with two carloads of young people at the end of his driveway.

Parents Joanne and Daniel Cicciaro said they were unhappy with the sentence.
3 of 3 The parents of victim Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17, were irate after learning that John White did not receive the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

White, 54, was convicted in December of second-degree manslaughter and a weapons charge.

"Nice message it sends to society that as long as you're black and there's a problem at the end of your driveway you can grab an illegal handgun and shoot someone in the face and get away with it," an infuriated Daniel Cicciaro Sr. told reporters while dozens of supporters sobbed nearby.

"Well, let's see what happens when Aaron White gets shot, and see how the laws are," Cicciaro said, referring to White's 19-year-old son.

Defense attorney Frederick Brewington said Cicciaro's remarks appeared to be a threat and demanded an investigation. Prosecutor Thomas Spota said the matter was referred to police, and the Whites were assigned extra protection at their home.

White was led away in handcuffs, but his attorneys planned to seek approval from a higher court to let him remain free pending appeal.

"I've always remained remorseful about this incident," White told the judge.

At the trial, the defense invoked the nation's violent racist past in arguing the shooting was justified, referring to the teenagers as a "lynch mob."

White testified that he was trying to protect his family on a hot August night in 2006 when he got an unregistered pistol from his garage after a group of angry white teenagers turned up at his house late at night to fight his son. He claimed the handgun discharged accidentally, killing Cicciaro.

The conflict was fueled by a bogus Internet posting claiming Aaron White wanted to rape a female friend of one of the white teens.

Cicciaro, who had a blood-alcohol reading above the legal limit for driving, was just 3 inches from the pistol when he was shot in the face, a medical examiner testified.

White said Aaron had wakened him around 11 p.m. to tell him he had been feuding with other teens after being asked to leave a party and a group of the teens was headed to their house in Miller Place, a predominantly white community on eastern Long Island.

White, a construction worker, testified that he grew up in Brooklyn hearing stories about how the Ku Klux Klan torched his grandfather's business in Alabama in the 1920s and that he feared a similar attack was about to happen.

Source:here

Secret Shadow Government

2008-03-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

House Closes Its Doors for Spying Bill

Thursday, March 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - The House held a closed session Thursday for the first time in 25 years to discuss a hotly contested surveillance bill.

Republicans requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping measure that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.

Lawmakers were forbidden to disclose what was said during the hour-long session. The extent to which minds were changed, if at all, should be more clear Friday, when the House was expected to openly debate and then vote on the bill.

Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas said she didn't believe anyone changed positions but that the session was useful because no one would be able to complain on Friday that their views had not been heard.

"We couldn't have gone more of an extra mile to make sure we're doing the best for national security," she told The Associated Press.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that he read aloud the titles - but not details - of intelligence reports "that shows the nature of the global threat and how dynamic the situation is, and how fluid."

Hoekstra said the House discussed the procedures intelligence agencies use to protect the identities of innocent Americans whose calls and e-mails are incidentally intercepted in wiretaps.

Hoekstra said three Democrats spoke as did eight or nine Republicans.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said "there was nothing new, nothing that wasn't public, nothing that can't and shouldn't be debated on the floor tomorrow in open session."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he heard nothing new that would change his mind about the bill.

"Tomorrow, I will urge members on both sides of the aisle to vote for this legislation," Hoyer said.

The last such session in the House was in 1983 on U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Only five closed sessions have taken place in the House since 1825.

Four members declined to sign the confidentiality oath required to participate in the closed session, House staff members said.

Many Democrats initially objected, calling it a political ploy by Republicans to delay a vote on the bill. House leaders did in fact push off the scheduled vote until Friday, just before taking a two-week recess. If it passes, the bill would need Senate approval before going to the president.

President Bush has vowed to veto it, saying it would undermine the nation's security.

Bush opposes it in part because it doesn't provide full, retroactive legal protection to telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

About 40 lawsuits have been filed against telecommunications companies by people and organizations alleging they violated wiretapping and privacy laws. The lawsuits have been combined and are pending before a single federal judge in California.

The Democrats' measure would encourage the judge to review in private the secret government documents underpinning the program in order to decide whether the companies acted lawfully. If they did, the lawsuits would be dismissed.

The administration has prevented those documents from being revealed, even to a judge, by invoking the state secrets privilege. That puts the companies in a bind because they cannot use the documents to defend themselves in court.

It wasn't clear what information would be presented in the closed session. Just a fraction of Congress has been allowed to read secret documents underpinning the surveillance program, and those who have arrived at varying conclusions.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, after seeing classified material, said the companies acted on the good-faith belief that the wiretaps they allowed were lawful. Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees were unconvinced after being presented with the same material.

The surveillance law is intended to help in the pursuit of suspected terrorists by making it easier to eavesdrop on foreign phone calls and e-mails that pass through the United States. A temporary law expired Feb. 16 before Congress was able to produce a replacement bill. Bush opposed an extension of the temporary law as a tactic to pressure Congress into accepting the Senate version of the surveillance legislation. The Senate's bill provides retroactive legal immunity for the telecommunications companies.

Bush said lawsuits against telecom companies would lead to the disclosure of state secrets. Further, he said lawsuits would undermine the willingness of the private sector to cooperate with the government in trying to track down terrorists.

Hoekstra said intelligence was already being lost.

"Each and every day our capabilities are eroding," he said.

Directing his message at the House, Bush said, "They should not leave for their Easter recess without getting the Senate bill to my desk."

Bush predicted the Senate would not pass the House version of the bill, and said even if it did, he would veto it.

At least one Senate Republican said the lawsuits should go forward to determine whether the wiretapping program was illegal. But Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter wants to substitute the government for the phone companies as the defendant in the court cases.

"The president can't have a blank check," Specter said in an interview. "If you close down the courts, there's no check and balance."

He added: "Wiretaps are important for national security. There's no doubt about that. Al-Qaida and terrorism continue to be a major threat to this country. It is my hope that the president will not find it necessary to veto the bill, that we'll be able to work it out."

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Associated Press writers Kimberly Hefling and Terence Hunt contributed to this report.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

Does anybody else have a problem with this? Clandestine government;it is dangerous in that it is responsible to no one. What was discussed in those closed chambers? Aren't the people part of the government? That is what is being sold in schools across the country but is it true? If not anymore than at one time did it? Is bin Laden as dangerous and as a "boogy man" as we are led to believe or is he blown out of proportion by the U.S. government in their effort to find a scapegoat/distraction? He seems to be Bush's obsession or that could be a persona for public consumption to keep the press at bay and on the subject you want to discuss. Not bad considering if you are right of center you are looking at an unfriendly press who will seek to vilify you every chance they can get and I'll bet the White House knows this too. The thing is if we really wanted Osama we would have had him by now so it very possible his infamous notoriety made be a smokescreen. This story featured "oaths to remain silent",were they required to sign these in the representative's own blood? I am a big time libertarian and I take the U.S. Constitution very seriously. If either house of congress can employ "secret sessions",just as the house as done and the senate earlier,to conceal their business what is to stop them from kicking C-SPAN out and declaring everything "secret session"? Especially if anything resulted in an arrestable offense but the public was unaware of it due to it being discussed in a "secret session". This is a slippery slope,America and one we better be careful of.

Black church opposes white shopkeeper

2008-03-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

`Redneck Shop' Creates Dispute in S.C.

Monday, March 10, 2008

LAURENS, S.C. - A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.

Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater that, according to court records, was transferred in 1997 to Kennedy and the Baptist church he leads.

"Our ownership puts an end to that history as far as violence and hatred, racism being practiced in that place and also the recruiting of the Klan," Kennedy said. "This is the same place that we had to go up into the balcony to go to the movies before the Klan took it. So there's a lot of history there."

But legal documents also indicate that the man who runs the store, 62-year-old John Howard, is entitled to operate his business in the building until he dies. Now the dispute may go to court.

Kennedy, 54, has led protests outside the store since it opened but said he's never been able to close it because of the agreement that Howard can run the shop for life.

The reverend envisions the building as a potential future home for his New Beginnings Missionary Baptist Church, which now meets in a double-wide trailer.

Kennedy claims he can't even visit his own property because Howard won't let him in when he appears in the door. But that didn't happen during a recent visit with an Associated Press reporter and photographer.

"Reverend Kennedy, where you been hiding?" Howard shouted when the door opened.

Inside the store, hooded Klan robes hang on the same rack as the racist T-shirts. Pictures of men, women and children in Klan clothing and pamphlets tell a partial history of the organization.

Howard used to own the whole building. When his store first opened, he said, people threw rocks at his windows, spit in his doorway and picketed. A month later, a man intentionally crashed his van through the front windows.

"If anything turns people off, they shouldn't come in here. It's not a thing in here that's against the law," Howard said, adding that he was once the KKK's grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina.

To blacks, Kennedy said, the store is a reminder of this region's painful past, which includes the lynching of his great, great uncle by a white mob.

The town of Laurens, about 30 miles southeast of Greenville, was named after 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens.

Some street addresses are still marked with the letter "C" that once designated black homes as "colored." Racial tension was heightened in recent years when two white female teachers were sentenced for having sex with male students - all of them black.

Kennedy has a long history of fighting racial injustice. He protested when a South Carolina county refused to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and he helped lobby to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome.

When people in the region allege racism, he rallies attention to the cause. A walk through the neighborhood where he was born shows that he seems a stranger to no one.

"Hey Rev," one man says as he strolls by.

"Pump it up," Kennedy responds with the phrase he uses at his protests.

Mary Redd, who lives across from the house where Kennedy was born, said blacks know to contact the pastor with their problems.

"And he helps them out," added neighbor Deborah Cheeks.

Kennedy said progress has always been slow to come to Laurens.

"There are two powers in the world: the mind and the sword," he said. "In the long run, the sword is defeated by the mind. I want to destroy the concept of hatred."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

Has the reverend ever taken on pro-black groups such as the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers? They mentioned that the property was transferred to the church but they don't go into how the church acquired the property. These people that drove their cars through the front of the shop,was it at the request of the reverend? It seems that the shop owner has a legal standing and the reverend and his group are trying to terrorize him and he is not budging. Do we have a new asshat along with the other two clowns that are reverends and get themselves into trouble.

Excuses,excuses,excuses

2008-03-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

Dean urges do-over voting in Fla., Mich. By JOAN LOWY, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The former head of the Democratic National Committee said Thursday it was doubtful DNC Chairman Howard Dean would be able to get approval for a plan for do-over presidential nomination contests in Florida and Michigan. "It'll be a hellacious battle," said Don Fowler, a former DNC chairman who sits on the party's rule-making committee.

Before the primaries started, "Howard Dean had enough votes to get most everything he wanted. Now that this thing has gone as far as it has and the lines have formed according to candidates. I'm not sure how that vote would shake out now," said Fowler, who has endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Now, everything is being viewed in terms of how it benefits a particular candidate, not the party or the process, Fowler said.

Nonetheless, Fowler said, something has to be done, "the rules be damned" to seat delegates from states Democrats have to and can win in the general election. "We're going to forfeit those two big states? What kind of fools would we be."

Dean has urged Florida and Michigan party officials to come up with plans to repeat their presidential nominating contests so that their delegates can be counted.

"All they have to do is come before us with rules that fit into what they agreed to a year and a half ago, and then they'll be seated," Dean said during a round of interviews Thursday on network and cable TV news programs.

The two state parties will have to find the funds to pay for new contests without help from the national party, Dean said.

"We can't afford to do that. That's not our problem. We need our money to win the presidential race," he said. The DNC offered to pay for an alternative contest in Florida last summer but was turned down, officials at the party say.

Officials in Michigan and Florida have expressed renewed interest in holding repeat presidential nominating contests so that their votes will count in the epic Democratic campaign.

The Michigan governor, top officials in Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, and Florida's state party chair all are now saying they would consider holding a sort of do-over contest by June. That's a change from the previous insistence from officials in both states that the primaries they held in January should determine how their delegates are allocated.

Clinton said she's waiting to see what proposal Democratic leaders in Florida and Michigan put forward. She won both contests, but the results were meaningless because the elections violated national party rules.

"I think it would be a grave disservice to the voters of Florida and Michigan to adopt any process that would disenfranchise anyone," Clinton told reporters Thursday at a news conference in Washington. "Therefore I am still committed to seating their delegations, and I know they are working with the Democratic party to determine how best to proceed."

She said it would be especially unfair to punish the 1.7 million Floridians who voted in the Democratic primary since the contest's date was moved up by the Republican-controlled state Legislature and the state's Republican governor.

"They clearly believed that their votes would count, and I think that there has to be a way to make them count," Clinton said.

The DNC stripped both states of all delegates for holding the primaries too early, and all Democratic candidates — including Clinton and rival Barack Obama — agreed not to campaign in either state. Obama's name wasn't even on the Michigan ballot.

Florida and Michigan moved up their dates to protest the party's decision to allow Iowa and New Hampshire to go first, followed by South Carolina and Nevada, giving them a disproportionate influence on the presidential selection process.

But no one predicted the race would still be very close at this point in the year.

"The rules were set a year and a half ago," Dean said. "Florida and Michigan voted for them, then decided that they didn't need to abide by the rules. Well, when you are in a contest you do need to abide by the rules. Everybody has to play by the rules out of respect for both campaigns and the other 48 states."

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.

Source:here

I was watching Bill O'Reilly last night and he was saying this election is going to destroy the Democratic party and I think that is great. Not that I'm a Republican which I'm not but because the democrats are the most misandrist and anti-white racist of the two parties and the most heavily left wing feminist and the most radical of the feminists and multiculturalists. O'Reilly was saying if Hillary wins Jackson and Sharpton will be protesting the results. I was thinking if Obama wins NOW and other feminist groups will do the same. Was a rule violated? Are we being told the truth? Considering this is coming from the democrats it is hard to tell. The recent thing about Obama is that Hillary felt he was getting more favorable media coverage that she was. It didn't help Obama to have Louis Farrakan give him an endorsement,especially at the same time he is trying to court the white male voter. This is a reverse of the 2004 elections in which white males were solidly in the Bush camp,especially those most familiar with the ideals of John Kerry and females,white or not,were the swing voters. Today the feminists and other women are in the Hillary camp and it will be men,white or not,that are the swing voters.

Congress may ease embargo against Cuba

2008-03-03T14:26:00.000-08:00

Congress Re-Examines Cuba Embargo

Monday, March 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - Congressional opponents of the half-century-old attempt to isolate Cuba have been emboldened by Fidel Castro's resignation. But people who might be planning their vacation getaway to Havana should also be mindful that while President Fidel may be gone, President Bush, a staunch defender of the embargo, still has a year to go.

For years lawmakers of both parties have been trying to chip away at the Cold War trade, travel and home visit restrictions aimed at undermining a hostile government just 90 miles from U.S. shores. They argue that last month's change in leadership from the ailing Fidel to his brother Raul provides the opportunity to end a prolonged exercise in futility.

"Our policy leaves us without influence at this critical moment, and this serves neither the U.S. national interest nor average Cubans," more than 100 House members, including nine Republicans, wrote Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "After 50 years, it is time for us to think and act anew." Twenty-four senators wrote a similar letter to Rice.

The embargo, said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., has been an enabler to decades of oppression. "We should not give Raul Castro the same benefits that we gave his brother, Fidel. We cannot continue to be the Goliath to their David."

The Bush administration, however, has been adamant that a new Castro in power doesn't mean a new Cuba, and that changes in U.S. policy hinge on Cuba first improving its human rights record and holding free elections.

"I can't imagine that happening any time soon," said Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.
That won't stop Congress from making the attempt. The top two trade lawmakers, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., are both pushing legislation to ease trade and travel restrictions.

Acting House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., has scheduled a hearing Wednesday with administration officials to review U.S. policy and discuss the opportunity "to inject creativity and fresh ideas into that policy."

Rep. Jerry Moran of Kansas, one of many farm-state Republicans to oppose the embargo, said he will continue efforts to change Treasury Department rules imposed in 2005 that have been an impediment to agriculture sales. The House in recent years has tried several times to attach anti-embargo measures to annual spending bills, only to have those provisions stripped later under threat of a presidential veto.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said he will try again this year, focusing on restrictions that bar most Americans from traveling to the island and removing those administration regulations that block sales of food and medicine.

"I think there are Republicans who now understand that this country's policy toward Cuba has no grounding in common sense," Dorgan said.

But Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-born lawmaker and a leader of the fiercely anti-Castro community of south Florida, insisted that power in Cuba has merely shifted to "hard-liners with the most blood on their hands." There may be rumblings in Congress this year to change course, but "there always are and we defeat them," he said.

Jake Colvin, director of USA Engage, a group that opposes economic sanctions as a political tool, predicted there will be some "stage-setting" this year for changes under a new administration next year. "This is a very political year and Cuba is a very political issue."

Among the presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain's views are the closest to those of Bush. Easing the embargo should be linked to evidence of a transition to a free and open democracy, McCain says.

Of the Democrats, Sen. Barack Obama supports easing restrictions on family related travel and money that Cuban-Americans can send to their families in Cuba. He says he would meet with Raul Castro without preconditions. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she is willing to respond positively to actions that demonstrate a willingness to change in Cuba.

President Eisenhower imposed a partial embargo on the new Castro government in 1960, and President Kennedy expanded trade and travel restrictions. Barriers to travel were temporarily lifted during the Carter administration but later reimposed.

In 1996, shortly after Cuban fighter jets shot down two private planes operated by a Miami-based anti-Castro group, Congress passed the tough Helms-Burton Act that penalized foreign companies making use of property formerly owned by U.S. citizens but expropriated by the Cuban government.

But in 2000, President Clinton also signed a law allowing the sale of agricultural goods and medicine to Cuba for humanitarian reasons. Since then, agricultural sales to Cuba have risen from almost nothing to more than $440 million last year.

Moran of Kansas said he got into the issue to help his state's farmers, but said it has become "something much broader to me." America, he said, "can bring about additional personal freedom in Cuba by these kinds of activities. Personal freedom follows economic freedom."
---
On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/

USA Engage: http://www.usaengage.org/

I've always found the Cuban situation very fascinating. We traded with the Soviets and Chinese yet never with the Cubans even though all were communists. We have gone to war with China and now we are trading with them. China has neither a decent human rights record nor free elections yet that never comes up when China is mentioned. There has even been talk of normalizing relations with Viet Nam,a country we also went to war with. No American soldiers have stormed the beaches of Cuba,in fact the closest was a group of Cuban expatriates who stormed the beaches in a fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs that resulted in the expatriates being captured by the Cuban military and held until Kennedy assured the Castro government that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and the expatriates were returned to the U.S. I've got to give Castro his due;he has managed to outlive his enemies. He foiled CIA attempts from trying to make his beard fall out to attempts on his life he does seem to foil his enemies. While other dictators have kept their dissidents within their own borders Castro has exported his,he has put an ocean between him and his enemies this way that can't stir up the people into a counterrevolution. There also could be a nostalgic,sentimental reason behind the embargo and that is to preserve the memory of the last president who made it permanent and that is John F. Kennedy.Kennedy was the one who placed the blockade of Cuba to prevent Russian ships from depositing missiles there and it worked the Russians backed down. There are those today are saying close Guantanamo Bay,which would be a big mistake at this time.I doubt the current situation will change with Raul in power considering Fidel still has friends in high places within the Cuban government and Raul could easily be said to be just a puppet. So we'll see.

Race baiters

2008-02-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

What really chaps my hide is these two race baiters. Everytime some black motherfucker and/or bitch gets into trouble these two asshats show up and cause problems and the worse thing is that the liberal media won't hold them accountable for the damage they do. No one in the liberal media holds Jackson accountable for what he said about his own people (Jackson said that if he were alone on a dark street late at night and heard footsteps behind him he would hope the owner of those footsteps was white) and nobody holds Sharpton accountable for allying himself with sexist/racist Tawana Bradley. Speaking of sexist/racist,that reminds me of Crystal Gail Mangum who knowingly made a false rape complaint against the Duke university lacrosse team and Jackson vowed to pay all her expenses. I think the height of hypocrisy came when Jackson had the nerve to console Bill Clinton even though Jackson has had affairs of his own. Black America just bends over and does what these two say and they think nothing about it. Jackson and Sharpton come off like they oppose the "white slavemaster" (whoever that may be these days) but in reality they just want his job. These two just piss all over black America and black America just laps it up like a masochistic whore. These asshats,along with the rap community,foster anti-white racism but if racism comes against them they scream foul. Black America demanded that white America do something about the racists within them and white America has. Now it is time for black America to do the same and that is for black America to disown the racists among them otherwise it is bullshit hypocrisy and not worth it. So my message is clear,black America: do something about the racists among yourselves or shut up about other groups. You've played the vicim for so long and now that is the only role you know and since you know no one blames victims you cling to this role and willfully look the other way when the racist among you make anti-white comments and you try to make it look like you couldn't be racist. Bullshit,you are the world sees it. One of the most recently underreported things in the media is when Shaquille O'Neal made a racist remark about Steve Nash and O'Neal gets away with it,no one cared that he made a racist statement. Contrast that with what happened to Don Imus and that Imus was crucified for the statement he made. Apparently political correctness only works one way and as long as liberals asshat apologists run things it will continue to be that way.

Welcome

2008-02-26T14:18:00.000-08:00

On this board I would like to talk about issues other than gender. If you wish to discuss gender issues then you are more than welcome to go to my Men's Rights blog and post there if you wish. This is going to be the "other things" blog,such as politics,sports,jokes,etc. Again welcome aboard and good reading.