Tuesday morning I was on 99 on my way to work when traffic started moving over out of the slow lane.  I could see a few vehicles on the side of the road ahead and a man motioning us to move over.  I couldn't see any real signs of a wreck but as I passed another man was wildly waving his arms.  I could also see someone lying on their back on the ground but still saw no evidence of an accident.  No overturned vehicles.  No scattered debris and no CHP cars or ambulances.

When my co worker got to work about 45 minutes after I did, she said she had gotten stuck in slow traffic where there had apparently been an accident with a bunch of CHP cars gathered.

It wasn't until I opened Wed. paper that I found out what happened.  The story is here.  http://www.bakersfield.com/...

It seems that the accident had just happened just before I got there and people were trying to avoid further involvement.  My instinct was to stop, or at least call 911 but there were several vehicles already and one was a utility truck (I forget..PG&E or phone company.)    I guessed correctly that the authorities had already been notified as I passed a CHP car headed in that direction with lights and sirens on..

The only reason I bring this up is that another blogger recently posted about good deeds and pet peeves.  Tragically, this good deed resulted in the death of one and the serious injury of another.

I was reminded of the old saying that "No good deed goes unpunished."

I heard reference to this situation yesterday.   People congregate on YOUR property to wait for contractors to choose them for day labor and YOU are required to provide facilities for them?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id...

Lets see what you folks have to say about this.   I'm sure it will bring lots of comments about denying religious freedom but check out who and what it's about.   Try to keep an open mind even though it's by a conservative columnist.  (Although he's not new to you since I post his column from time to time.)  I'm especially interested in what our fellow blogger in Boston thinks.

THE ISLAMIC SOCIETY'S MERITLESS LAWSUIT

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     Four weeks ago, the Islamic Society of Boston folded its cards. On May 29, it abandoned the sweeping defamation lawsuit it had filed in 2005 against 17 defendants -- journalists, scholars, activist groups, and others who had expressed concerns about the Islamic Society's leaders, some of whom had ties to jihadist extremism, and about the land the city of Boston had sold it at a cut-rate price in order to build a mosque.

     The complaint had accused the defendants of despicable behavior -- lying about the Islamic Society, vilifying innocent people, conspiring to deprive Boston-area Muslims of their religious freedom and other civil rights. If even some of the charges were true, the defendants deserved to face harsh legal penalties and be shunned by the entire community. Instead, the Islamic Society dropped its suit without collecting a penny. Why?

     Because the charges were false, that's why. And pretrial discovery -- the evidence being gathered through subpoenas and depositions -- was proving it.

     For example, the Islamic Society claimed that publicity about its leaders' ties to Islamist extremism had "been devastating" to the organization's fund-raising. "Donations to the ISB have decreased," the lawsuit charged. In a press release, the organization lamented that negative media coverage had resulted in "donations trickling to a halt."

     But in July 2005, well after the supposedly "devastating" news coverage had first appeared in the Boston Herald and on Fox 25 TV, a letter written by the Islamic Society's attorney and e-mailed by Chairman Yousef Abou-allaban conveyed a very different message. "Fund-raising has been robust," it reported, "and ISB has $2 million in cash."

     Fund-raising had indeed been robust. Documents acquired during discovery revealed that some $4.2 million had been wired to an Islamic Society bank account in New Hampshire between April 2004 and May 2005 -- nearly all of it from Saudi Arabia. Another $1 million came from the Saudi-based Islamic Development Bank in late 2005.

     Those ties to Saudi Arabia were a key reason for concern about the Islamic Society. Saudi Arabia's state religion is Wahhabism, a radical and belligerent form of Islam, and as the 9/11 Commission reported, Saudi money is used "to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world, including in mosques and schools. . . . Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims."

     But in its lawsuit, the Islamic Society had *denied* any Saudi connection to the mosque it was building in Boston. It said it had been libeled by the "false information" that it received money "from Wahhabis and/or Muslim Brotherhood and/or other Saudi/Middle Eastern sources." As the evidence amassed during discovery made clear, however, that wasn't libel. It was the simple truth.

     Repeatedly, the Islamic Society sought court orders blocking the release of such evidence. In one case, it warned that publishing certain documents would "create serious security risks" for Muslim worshipers, since it would reveal the new mosque's architectural schematics. The court denied that request after the defendants pointed out that the schematics were not exactly a secret: They are publicly posted on the Islamic Society's own website.

     And so it went. One by one, the Islamic Society's claims and accusations proved groundless. By the time it dropped its lawsuit on May 29, it was clear that it had no chance of winning.

     And yet the Islamic Society spins its loss as a victory, noting that the construction of the mosque is going forward. "It was never about money," said Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "It was about religious freedom."

     What the lawsuit was really about, it seems to me, was intimidation -- intimidation of anyone inclined to raise questions or express concerns about the Islamic Society's leaders and their connections to radical Islam. Libel suits have become a favorite tactic of Islamists, who deploy them to silence their critics. In yet another document produced during discovery, the head of the Islamic Center of New England advises Abou-allaban to "thwart" Fox 25 with a lawsuit. "If Fox is being sued for this story," he writes, "it stands to reason that they will be prevented from reporting on the story further while the case is in court."

     Sad to say, such legal intimidation works. Once the lawsuit was filed, Fox 25 and the Herald essentially ended their investigative reporting into the Islamic Society's radical connections. Others felt the pressure, too. When an attorney for one of the defendants was interviewed about the case on the radio, the station received a threatening legal letter from the Islamic Society’s lawyer -- followed by a subpoena for tapes of the interview and the program host’s notes. A free-lance journalist who wrote an article about the case for The New Republic was likewise hit with a subpoena.

     So while the Islamic Society's lawsuit was without merit, that doesn't mean it was without effect. Serious questions remain about the Saudi-funded mosque going up in Boston. Will journalists, public officials, and concerned citizens insist on getting answers? Or will they choose instead to look the other way, unwilling to run the risk of predatory litigation and bad-faith accusation?

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Interesting photo essay.

http://www.time.com/time/ph...

Dry Cleaner Wins in Missing Pants Case

I got this in email today and thought I'd share it.  It's not new, it's been around a while, but still fun. 

  Can you read these right the first time? 
 
      1) The bandage was wound around the wound. 
 
 
       2) The farm was used to produce   produce . 
 
 
       3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse. 
 
 
       4) We must polish the Polish  furniture. 


       5) He could lead if he would get the lead out. 
 
 
       6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert. 
 
 
       7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present . 
 
 
       8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum. 
 
 
       9) When shot at, the dove  dove into the bushes. 
 
 
       10) I did not object to the object. 
 
 
       11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid. 
 
 
       12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row . 
 
 
       13) They were too close to the door to close it. 
 
 
       14) The buck does funny things when the does are present. 
 
 
       15) A seamstress and a sewer  fell down into a sewer line. 
 
 
       16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow. 
 
 
       17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail. 
 
 
       18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear. 
 
 
       19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests. 
 
 
       20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? 
 
 
 
       Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. 

       And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? 
 
       If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? 
 
       How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on. 
 
       English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. 
 
       PS. - Why doesn't "Buick" rhyme with "quick" 
 
       You lovers of the English language might enjoy this . 
 
       There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP." 
 
       It's easy to understand UP , meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report ? 
 
       We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car . At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. 
 
       And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP . We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. 
 
       We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP ! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP . 
 
       When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP 
 
       When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP . 
 
       One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP , for now my time is UP, so......... Time to shut UP ! 
 
       Oh...one more thing: 
 
 
       What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night? U-P
 
 
 
 
 

I didn't write this.  Am giving credit to the actual author.  Agree with most of it. Am not putting it here to "stir the pot."   However I am putting it here for a presentation of "the other sides" POV.  Whew..did I cover all the bases?   (tongue in cheek)  Free free to rip into it....that's what debate is all about.

THE FIGHTS ON THE RIGHT

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     What do liberal Democrats think about the war in Iraq? That's easy: It was a blunder that has become a debacle, and it should be brought to an end as soon as possible.

     What do conservative Republicans think about the war? That's not so easy.

     The right has been fighting over the war since well before it began. The American Conservative -- a biweekly magazine launched in 2002 by Pat Buchanan, a former aide to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and twice a Republican presidential candidate himself -- has vehemently opposed the Iraq campaign, regarding it as the worst kind of nation-building, a squandering of blood and treasure for no vital American interest.

     By contrast, The Weekly Standard -- a conservative journal edited by William Kristol, an influential Republican strategist -- was among the earliest advocates of invading Iraq, and continues to vigorously defend what it calls "The Right War for the Right Reasons."

     Tune in to a Republican presidential debate, and you'll hear views on Iraq that range from John McCain ("if we fail and we have to withdraw, they will follow us home") to Sam Brownback ("we've got to put forward a political plan to create a three-state solution") to Ron Paul ("it was a mistake to go, so it's a mistake to stay").

     The Democratic candidates, on the other hand, debate only the purity of one another's antiwar stance: Whose denunciation of the war came first? Whose goes the furthest? They squabble over style, but when it comes to substance, as Hillary Clinton said during a recent debate, "the differences among us are minor."

     Iraq is not an anomaly. On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat dumped by his party for the sin of supporting the war.

      In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. (A classic expression of this idea was the Washington Post’s description of evangelical Christians in a Page 1 story some years back as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command.") Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity.

     Take immigration. National Review, an old and distinguished address on the map of American conservatism, has long championed a restrictionist immigration policy and a tough-minded crackdown on illegal immigrants; it furiously opposed the recent Senate immigration bill. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, an equally venerable conservative voice, favors more immigration, not less, and regards the crusade against illegal immigration as contrary to America's best interests. On May 31, in an editorial on their popular website, the editors of National Review threw down the gauntlet:

     "We hereby challenge the Journal's editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing -- two or three of us versus any two or three of them. . . . We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do."

     It isn't only within the conservative media that immigration policy is hotly debated. The GOP presidential field runs the gamut from McCain, co-author of the immigration bill, to hard-liner Tom Tancredo, who calls the bill "the worst piece of legislation to come down the pike in a long time." In the think-tank world, a leading advocate of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is Tamar Jacoby (no relation), an expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute. One of the most implacable voices *against* any such "amnesty" is Heather Mac Donald -- also of the Manhattan Institute.

     Another example: abortion. The GOP platform has been pro-life for decades, yet the unabashedly pro-choice Rudy Giuliani leads most of the Republican preference polls. Try to imagine a pro-life Democrat as a front-running candidate for the White House.

     Or health insurance: The Massachusetts healthcare law that takes effect next month is highly praised by the Heritage Foundation and fiercely critiqued by the Cato Institute, two of Washington's most influential right-of-center think tanks.

     From school vouchers to stem cell research to racial preferences to torture, the American right bubbles with debate and disagreement, while the left, for all its talk about "diversity," rarely seems to show any. As National Review's Jonah Goldberg points out, that may be because "liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments."

     Really good arguments are no bad thing. They energize political parties and put convictions to the test. They illuminate the issues. They make people think – politicians, pundits, and voters alike. The debates on the right enliven the marketplace of ideas and enrich the democratic process. Some debates on the left would, too.

(Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com).

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Enjoy !

spam code RFPDI....  any takers on this meaning?

LUDICROUS LAWSUITS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, June 17, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     I was once sued in state court by a disgruntled reader who accused me of calling him a "crackpot." Fortunately, the suit went nowhere; the plaintiff's nutty, hand-scrawled complaint was apparently all the court needed to dismiss the case. That and the fact that even in Massachusetts, you're allowed to use the word "crackpot" when being harangued by one on the telephone.

     But what if the plaintiff in my case hadn't been so plainly bonkers? What if he had been a lawyer, or even a judge -- someone who knew his way around a lawsuit? What if he had been another Roy L. Pearson Jr.?

     As everyone this side of Mazar-e-Sharif must know by now, Pearson is the administrative law judge in Washington, D.C., who in 2005 sued his dry cleaners for $65 million over a missing pair of pants. He later reduced his claim to $54 million, and the case was tried in D.C. Superior Court last week.

     Pearson, representing himself before Judge Judith Bartnoff, declared grandiosely that "never before in recorded history have a group of defendants engaged in such misleading and unfair business practices. You will search the DC archives in vain for a case of more egregious or willful conduct." Bartnoff let him go on in this vein, the Washington Post reported, and he argued his case "for hour upon hour," though he wasn't permitted to call all 63 of the witnesses he had hoped to put on the stand. Nor did Bartnoff allow him to rehash the saga of his 2004 divorce, which he insists the Virginia courts mishandled.

     On the other hand, Pearson did testify that he has between 40 and 60 pairs of pants hanging in his closet, none of which, he was at pains to point out, has cuffs. At one point he broke down in tears and had to ask for a recess. That emotional upwelling occurred as he was recounting the moment when the dry cleaner handed him what he says were the wrong trousers. (They were cuffed).

     The whole thing sounds like a Sacha Baron Cohen sendup, and it has certainly drawn plenty of amused media attention. (New York Times headline: "Judge Tries Suing Pants Off Dry Cleaners.")

     But Pearson's ludicrous lawsuit, and the legal system's willingness to indulge it, is no joke to Jin and Soo Chung, the owners of Custom Dry Cleaning. The legal bills they have incurred in fighting this lawsuit have wiped out their family's savings. Three times they have offered Pearson a settlement, most recently for $12,000. Three times Pearson has refused.

     "How does such a case get to trial?" Post columnist Marc Fisher asked the other day. "How does one man get to make a laughingstock of the system?" His sad answer: Pearson's legal terrorism "is only an exaggerated version of what goes on in virtually every institution of American life, where humane and reasonable behavior is quashed by reminders that someone could conceivably be sued."

     Who can doubt it? The population of lawyers in America has soared in recent decades, and with their increase has come an explosion in the lawyer's stock in trade: regulation, disputation, and litigation. In 1978, noting that the number of US lawyers had increased to 462,000, Time magazine rued the way laws and lawsuits were taking over American life, making it ever more difficult for people of goodwill to rely on custom and common sense in settling differences. It quoted then-Chief Justice Warren Burger: "We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated."

     If that was true then, how much more so today, when the "hordes of lawyers" (including non-practicing ones like me) have swollen to nearly 1 million? A century ago, there was 1 lawyer for every 714 Americans. Today the ratio is 1 to 288.

     Of course lawsuits have a vital role to play in our legal system. If there were no way to hold people liable for reckless or malicious behavior, it would be difficult to keep such behavior in check. "But the converse is also true," as Philip K. Howard, author of *The Death of Common Sense* and chairman of Common Good, testified at a congressional hearing in 2004. "Allow lawsuits against reasonable behavior, and pretty soon people no longer feel free to act reasonably. And that's what's happening in America today."

     Pearson's pants case is only the most egregious example of the I'll-see-you-in-court mindset that has battered the medical profession, turned divorce proceedings into ferocious battles, and stripped playgrounds of seesaws and jungle gyms. ABC News recently rounded up reports of some others: The woman who sued an outdoor mall after being "attacked" by a squirrel, on the grounds that the mall "failed to warn" her in advance. The photographer who fell off a garbage truck he had climbed on top of to take some pictures, then sued the waste-management company for $50 million because he "never thought in a million years the truck would move." The drug-abusing patient who sued a hospital for "allowing" a visitor to sneak illegal drugs into the hospital for her. The plaintiff who demanded $832 million from superstar athlete Michael Jordan and Nike co-founder Phil Knight because he found it "distressing" to look like Jordan and be confused with him.

     Lawsuits cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Legal fear -- the fear of being sued, and the lengths to which US businesses, institutions, and municipalities go to avoid legal risk -- makes life more expensive, more frustrating, and less free for all of us. "I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters," John Keats wrote. But that was in 1819. Imagine what he would have said if he had met Roy Pearson.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

(My comment)...  So that's what happend to the merry-go-rounds in the parks.  Jerks!

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Want more? 

http://www.cafepress.com/bu...

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Today my granddaughter had to take her new husband to the airport to go back on duty at Walter Reed.  From there he's supposed to be deployed back to Germany for assignment there or back to Iraq in a non combatant role.  She took him by herself not asking any of the family to be there.  She said she was just going to drop him off and not draw "it" out.  I respected her decision to do that as it's a time they need just for themselves...and having been there myself, I understood.

As is expected, she is very depressed today and all she could say tearfully was "it sucks."  I wanted to reach through the phone and hug her like I did when she was little and tell her it will get better.

I also sent my new soldier husband off to be deployed to Korea in the 70's.  While we were relieved that he didn't have to go to Viet Nam, it was still a long year facing us that we would have no physical contact.  I think we talked on the phone twice but our contact was all by mail and I wrote daily.  We spent our first anniversary thousands of miles apart.

Cassie and her husband Joe, hopefully, will only have to be apart a few months while he makes arrangements for her to join him.  In the meantime, they have cell phones, computers, and webcams to stay in touch.  While they can't take the place of actually hugging, they go a long way toward keeping the lonliness at bay. 

So, for today, I'm taking her to lunch when she gets unloaded from thier traveling honeymoon.  Hopefully I won't cry when I tell her I know how hard it is to be a military wife at times...and how hard it is to send them off not knowing when you'll see them again.    I'll tell her how proud I am of her and Joe and how brave I think they both are.

And we'll probably both cry.

This is hilarious and It's so easy to forget it's a dummy..  Warning...profanity.