“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,9Lithuania was pondering changing its name,10 and a plot by retired TurkishArmy officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. 11 Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.12 George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)
So what should conservatives do, assuming that nothing changes the apparent McCain vs. Clinton match-up? I’ll vote for Ron Paul if he runs third party. Otherwise, I’ll vote for Hillary. Better to come back with a conservative candidate in 2008 than get behind another RINO. And better to let Hillary take the fall for the coming economic troubles.
I would be tempted to vote for McCain for the same reason if it comes down to a choice between McCain and Hillary, given that with either McCain or Hillary the US can look forward to more wars and a continuation of George Bush’s policies. It would be better to watch McCain go down the tubes and run Obama in 2012. 2008 has potential to be one of the wierdest elections ever where both sides hope to lose. The only people who like their candidates are going to be soccer moms, for Hillary, and cranky war veterans for McCain.
Given the economy is better in Canada anyway maybe it is time to move there.
A study suggests extreme happiness may be bad for you. Findings: 1) “The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals, but by moderately satisfied individuals.” 2) Extremely happy people “earned significantly less money” and earned lower school grades than moderately happy people. 3) They “may not live as long,” either. Theories: 1) Happiness makes you complacent and kills your drive. 2) It makes you slow to adapt. 3) It makes you too optimistic and insufficiently vigilant about your health. 4) It may overstimulate your cardiovascular system. Researchers’ conclusions: 1) “Happiness may need to be moderated for success.” 2) “Extremely high levels of happiness might not be a desirable goal.” Human Nature’s conclusions: 1) Success may need to be moderated for happiness. 2) Extremely high levels of success might not be a desirable goal.
Obama won big in South Carolina, tonight. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part but the primaries are starting to remind me of a best of 7 NBA series, where one team barely wins their home games and then gets blown out on the road. Eventually the team that is winning big usaully wins the series. Hillary has eked out a couple of victories but when she has lost she has lost badly. In Iowa she was third and tonight she was over 20 percentage points behind.
Also, if the Hillary campaign was confident I doubt they would be trying to change the rules to count Florida and Michigan, after agreeing that the results from these states would not count towards the nomination. Most of the polls have Hillary looking good for super tuesday but given some of her campaign behaviors maybe her people know something the rest of us don’t.
A teenage passenger was detained after a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles landed in Nashville, an airline spokeswoman said Thursday.
Nashville television stations, citing unnamed sources, said the teen unsuccessfully tried to hijack the plane to Lafayette, La., and crash it into a building where a “Hannah Montana” concert was to be performed.
NEW YORK (dpa) - The U.S. coffee-shop chain Starbucks is experimenting with cheap coffee, in an effort to fend off competition from rivals like McDonald’s.
In some shops around Seattle, where the world’s largest coffee-shop chain got its start, Starbucks was offering coffee for $1, a company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.
The shops were also offering free refills for a series of expensive drinks.
One of the things I miss about traveling in the east, our Dunkin Donuts and real Dunkin Donuts coffee. Starbucks coffee tastes like it was left over from the previous day. I wonder if everyone will run to Starbucks with their tax rebate checks to buy expensive burnt coffee? I guess that will be the true test of the economic stimulus plan.
(Lead Story - NYTimes Sunday Business Section - By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ) …Linking Mr. Scruggs, Mr. Patterson and other figures in the case is an obscure former college football star, farmer and politically well-connected adviser to Mr. Scruggs named Presley L. Blake (Google Search). At the hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors described Mr. Blake as a key go-between in an elaborate bribery plot, and they are now examining his ties to Mr. Scruggs. No charges have been brought against Mr. Blake.The story of Mr. Blake, who has received at least $10 million from Mr. Scruggs, threatens to reveal just how Mr. Scruggs worked the political back rooms of Mississippi — and Washington — to win a huge settlement with cigarette makers that garnered him approximately $1 billion in fees as well as a role in “The Insider,” the 1999 movie about the battle with Big Tobacco. Mr. Scruggs’s connections have never been a secret: his brother-in-law is former Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. But the expansion of the investigation is especially significant because for Mr. Scruggs, law and politics have been closely intertwined…
According to Hillary she has no flaws, at least no real flaws, as Dan Abrams recently noticed:
When the Democratic candidates were asked at Tuesday’s debate, “What is your biggest weakness?” Obama answered, “I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it, because I will lose it. … I need to have good people in place who can make sure that systems run.”
In Hillary Clinton’s hands, this self-description has been twisted into an acknowledgment of Bush-like incompetence. “Senator Obama said yesterday that he didn’t intend to try to manage or run the government, that he was going to have advisers to do that,” Clinton charged. “That is very reminiscent of what we’ve had for the last seven years. I intend to run the government.”
“Come on,” Abrams chortled. “Contrast that with the self-promotional so-called ‘weaknesses’ that Clinton and John Edwards offered up smothered in spin.” He then played video of Clinton saying “I get impatient” in response to the same question and Edwards offering, “I sometimes have a very powerful emotional response to pain that I see around me.”
“Gosh! That must have been so hard for him to admit that,” commented Abrams.
Hasn’t this been part of the problem with George Bush? He is unable to admit a mistake and certainly unable to learn from one, the country does not need another “perfect president”. By the way I am giving Edwards a pass as he does not seem to be a viable candidate so it is a waste of time to talk about why he might have the same problem as Hillary.
In Las Vegas Hillary Clinton is talking about how good she has been to the gambling industry, while at the same time bringing up that Obama has in fact tried to limit gambling in some states.
Barack Obama has warned about the dangers of gambling — that it carries a “moral and social cost” that could “devastate” poor communities. As a state senator in Illinois, he at times opposed plans to expand gambling, worrying that it could be especially harmful to low-income people.
Today, those views are posing a problem for Obama in the gambling mecca of Nevada, which holds its presidential nominating caucuses Saturday. While his top rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also talks often about aiding low-income Americans, she has embraced the gambling industry and its executives, and her campaign has used Obama’s past statements in an effort to turn casino workers and other Nevada voters against him.
From the LA times via talking points memo
In an effort to get votes and donations from industry leaders Hillary ignores the fact that gambling does cause problems for some people. That doesn’t mean gambling should be illegal in all states but it does mean that the gambling industry should be reighned in occassionally, just like alcohol and other products that have the potential for abuse. Hillary, by trying to make Obama’s comments about gambling an issue will have a hard time later, if she does get elected, controlling the industry. Anyone who wants to put up a casino will accuse Hillary of “flip-flopping” if she in any way tries to stand in the way of the casino. Given the way she is pandering to the gambling industry I doubt she would try to stop any casinos anyway. The point being that Hillary seems to think that industry is always right even in cases where their are genuine social costs to that industry and if that is what you want from your party the Republicans are very good at letting industries regulate themselves. Maybe Hillary should switch parties as I hear the Republicans are having a hard time choosing a candidate.
If this was happening in a third world country you would just shake your head and say no wonder they are the third world.
This is certainly the nastiest line we’ve heard in the push polls going out to about a million South Carolinians. Respondents who say that they’re supporting John McCain are told “Fact: McCain voted to allow scientific experiments to be done on unborn children.”
unfortunately it is South Carolina, the thiird world of the US
See the entire article here
“Iraq Vet Mutilates Wife” - Get ready America, the war’s not over when these guys leave Iraq. Typical of youngsters who sign up while suffering from a mental disorder commonly known as ‘outrageous stupidity’…Marry a woman who, like yourself, just entered legal adulthood, then take off for a 9 month horror show in Iraq. Combine this with a smart mouth and (perhaps) a man on the side, it can trigger something within this wounded, emotionally disturbed, 19 year old, “battle-hardened” trained killer…like, memories of a time not long past when someone running their mouth could be easily silenced in a number of different ways.”
We know that veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been committing suicide at higher rates, and that in an effort to maintain troop levels, the Army has been intimidating soldiers seeking treatment for post traumatic stress and other mental health issues, then separating those who fail to ’suck it up and drive on’ without medical benefits. The Army defends its poor government from all these gold-digging fakers by declaring that the soldier’s brain damage was an undeclared condition they developed before enlisting. In the air-conditioned Pentagon, our Army’s top generals assure us that the numbers look good - no doubt the product of this internal campaign of terror, while on the front end ramping up (exponentiating) the number of “volunteers” who meet their recruiter in prison.
It is a numbers game. Like police having to turn murder into manslaughter for the bosses, wounded soldiers are considered full strength. This sort of policy helps to explain why suicide numbers for both active duty and veterans keep rising. Then there’s the job itself, a bloody ordeal experienced in as many fifteen month deployments as one’s luck allows. Come home all fucked up, be without the support of this country you just put your life on the line for, and try to hold on. Along with the amount of terrorists we have created since 2003, I wonder how many Americans have been turned into psychopathic criminals along the way. How many McVeighs have the Army and this loser already produced?
“Killings After Combat 1/13/08 - NEW YORK - At least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have committed a killing or been charged in one in the United States after returning from combat, The New York Times reported Sunday. The newspaper said it also logged 349 homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans in the six years since military action began in Afghanistan, and later Iraq. That represents an 89-percent increase over the previous six-year period, the newspaper said. About three-quarters of those homicides involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the newspaper said. The report did not illuminate the exact relationship between those cases and the 121 killings also mentioned in the report.
The newspaper said its research involved searching local news reports, examining police, court and military records and interviewing defendants, their lawyers and families, victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials…The 121 killings ranged from shootings and stabbings to bathtub drownings and fatal car crashes resulting from drunken driving, the newspaper said. All but one of those implicated was male. About a third of the victims were girlfriends or relatives, including a 2-year-old girl slain by her 20-year-old father while he was recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq. A quarter of the victims were military personnel. One was stabbed and set afire by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.
Compared with what this former military interrogator described in March of 2007, it’s pretty clear that Iraq just isn’t a “by the book” type of gig:
Confessions of a Torturer It was bad, in particular the First Recon they’re sort of like marine special forces, an elite unit [attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, known as 24th MEU]. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just fuck these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones. One guy came with a blister on the back of his leg. It was big, it was horrible, a burn blister. They’d made him sit on the exhaust pipe of a running truck.
By playing the victim card Hillary Clinton has made it very difficult to talk about her record in the senate,where she has been on the wrong side of every major issue since 2000. In fact some people might argue that all she has done while in the senate is prepare for a presidential run. If anyone points that out they are obviously just a Clinton Hater, the real issue in 2008 is not Iraq or healthcare it is how do right a past wrong; and who has been more wronged in the past than Hillary?
If Democrats are not careful the Democratic primary iwill degenerate into a contest of who has been treated worse, women or African americans and whoever wins this victim olympics will be completely tarnished for the general election. The real victims are the American people.
(by Dorothy Thompson for Harper’s in August of 1941) - - - It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,9 Lithuania was pondering changing its name,10 and a plot by retired Turkish Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. 11 Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.12 George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)
