The question was asked..."Why the delay in Fred Thompson’s announcement that he’s running for President?"

Response from Parade Mag.

"The orchestrated suspense enhanced Thompson's popularity with many GOP primary voters.  What's more, federal communications law requires broadcasters to give candidates equal time on public airwaves.  If and when reruns of his Law and Order shows have to be pulled, Thompson, 64, and his co-stars will lose their residuals."

Enjoy...or attack. LOL.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

 As always, I'm happy to provide you with something to chew on.  Or up.  :-)

WHY ARE WE REWARDING IRAN?

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

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

     Four months ago, Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized 15 British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf, and held them hostage for nearly two weeks. They were released only after a stage-managed appearance with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who freed the captives as "a present to the British people" and was thanked for his "forgiveness" by one of the servicemen.

     For this outrage, Tehran was richly rewarded. How richly? Let us count the ways:

     (1) It humiliated the British government, which declined to label the abduction of its personnel an act of war or to retaliate with anything stronger than press releases. (2) It demonstrated the ease with which it is able to flout international law and civilized norms. (3) It exposed the cravenness of Britain's European allies, which refused London's request for a freeze on exports to Iran if the hostages weren't released. (4) It secured the release of an Iranian "diplomat" being held in Iraq, and was allowed access to five members of Iran's paramilitary Quds Force, which trains insurgents to murder Americans, whom US troops in Irbil had arrested in January.

     An outrage rewarded is often an outrage repeated, and Tehran soon grabbed another set of hostages. Early in May, it arrested four visiting American citizens: Haleh Esfandiari, a director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars; social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh of the New York-based Open Society Institute; journalist Parnaz Azima of Radio Farda, the Persian-language equivalent of Radio Free Europe; and peace activist Ali Shakeri of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine. Iran accuses the four of espionage; all but Azima are being held in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.

     Now, why would Tehran -- already at odds with the United States for sponsoring international terrorism, supporting Iraqi death squads, stoking hatred of the United States, calling for Israel's liquidation, repressing dissidents, and illegally pursuing nuclear weapons -- want to further complicate its relations with Washington? Nearly three decades into a regime one of whose defining characteristics is thuggish criminality, some people are still baffled when the mullahs act like thuggish criminals.

     "How Iranian officials can believe they will benefit from Ms. Esfandiari's imprisonment is impossible to understand," a New York Times editorial brooded on May 12. But it's no mystery. Tehran takes hostages because it finds it beneficial to d so. The 444-day abduction of US diplomats in 1979 solidified the Khomeini dictatorship's jihadist bona fides, helped marginalize its domestic opponents, and showed that the Great Satan's nose could be bloodied with impunity. Twenty-eight years later, the mullahs find that the seizure of American citizens still pays off nicely. Consider:

     The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran's ability to produce weapons-grade uranium is accelerating even more rapidly than previously thought, and Washington reacts not with fury or alarm, but with an antsy craving for more "engagement" with Tehran. On May 28, the United States holds its first high-level, public talks with Iran since 1980, putting a feather in Tehran's cap. On July 18, Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are dragged before Iranian TV cameras to make coerced "confessions" of guilt. The American response? More high-level talks -- and not for the purpose of demanding the hostages' release. "When US Ambassador Ryan Crocker sits down today for only the second round of direct US-Iranian talks in 27 years," Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, "there's one issue that won't be on the agenda: the fate of four Iranian-Americans being held against their will in Tehran. US negotiators don't want the detainees to get in the way of their main priorities."

     There was a time when Americans seized by international outlaws could expect their government to consider them a priority.

     In Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a sweeping new account of America's 230-year involvement in the Middle East, historian Michael Oren recalls the 1904 kidnapping of Ion Perdicaris, a 64-year-old Greek-American expatriate in Morocco. Perdicaris was abducted by gunmen loyal to Ahmad ben Muhammad al-Raisuli, a Berber warlord, who demanded a large ransom and political concessions from the sultan of Morocco. When the sultan refused, writes Oren, President Theodore Roosevelt tried without success to interest Britain and France in a joint expedition to free Pericardis. Undeterred, TR ordered seven US warships to steam toward the Moroccan coast.

     "On the morning of May 30, the gleaming white bow of the battleship Brooklyn was sighted off the shores of Tangier. Soon, a detachment of Marines landed in the port to guard the American consulate, while an additional 1,200 leathernecks prepared to occupy Tangier, if necessary.... But the move was merely an admonishment, as Roosevelt made clear in a telegram to the sultan: PRESIDENT WISHES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE DONE TO SECURE THE RELEASE OF PERDICARIS. . . . WE WANT PERDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD."

     Morocco got the message. Perdicaris was freed.

     Granted, threats and gunboat diplomacy are not always the wisest course of action. But as Roosevelt -- who would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War -- understood, there are times when they are far more effective than "engagement." Faced with the enemy we face today -- a hostage-taking, nuke-pursuing, terrorist-sponsoring, apocalypse-invoking, America-hating Iran -- what would TR do?

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

Folks, I'm made my stance on this crystal clear and, as I stated before, a discussion just becomes an argument when it is beaten into the ground.  I have nothing further to add so I will end my part in it.  With all due respect to the gentleman who titled his comment (Open letter to NancyII), I won't be reading what you have to say.  I've been on this blog for close to 3 years (I think) and this topic has come up over and over.  If you weren't around at the times it was previously hashed over (no pun intended) then I regret that, but don't intend to keep going over the same ground every time someone decides to make it the topic of the day.  I do respond from time to time but again, as I've stated, it's a busmans holiday for me.

Again, no disrespect, but I'll save my breath, and my typing fingers, for people who are beginning their recovery and hopefully will be able to help them along with long term abstinence (yes, even from alcohol.)   If this doesn't sit well with you, then you'll just have to deal with it because, for the time being, I am DONE with that topic.

Now, lets move on to something else we can disagree on.  Or, (shock), something we can AGREE on.

:-P

Click on this llink and enjoy.

http://www3.telus.net/publi...

After numerous warmings over the years to "TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN", the chickens are coming home to roost for many people.  When I hear before I see a car, I often wonder what kind of damage is being done to fragile eardrums, but that's after I wonder how long I can take this guy being on my last nerve of course.

Here is an interesting article on the subject titled in the paper this weekend as "Generation 'huh?' drives  industry."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007...

I happened across this and had to give it a listen.  Even if you have an intense dislike tor talent shows and Simon Cowel, you owe it to yourself  to listen to this 6 year old girl.  I think you'll find her as amazing as I did.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

You can go to the site and see her other performances as well as the cell phone salesman who sang opera and beat this litle girl out of a chance to sing for the queen.  My guess is that she'll get to do that anyway.

MUSINGS, RANDOM AND OTHERWISE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, July 15, 2007

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

     Twenty years ago the Federal Communications Commission scrapped the never-very-fair Fairness Doctrine. Now talk of a revival is in the air as Democrats, complaining that talk radio is dominated by conservatives, have started lobbying for Washington to get back in the business of refereeing public discourse.

     "It's time to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine," Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois announced on June 27. Similar noises have been made by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and California’s Diane Feinstein. From across the aisle, meanwhile, there has been some pushback: On Wednesday, GOP Senators Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Jim DeMint of South Carolina offered legislation to block the FCC from resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine.

     Better than a debate over the Fairness Doctrine, though, would be a debate over whether radio and television should be regulated by government in the first place. The standard justification for such regulation is that the airwaves are public property. There are only a finite number of broadcast frequencies, the statists say. If the government didn't own and license them, the result would be chaos.

     Well, the supply of land is finite, too. Yet no one argues that real estate should be nationalized and licensed by the feds. It is obvious that land can be bought and sold in a free market without resulting in anarchy. Why should the broadcast spectrum be any different?

(*)   (*)   (*)

     The Democratic presidential candidates have agreed to another televised debate, this one focusing on issues related to homosexuality. The sponsors are the Human Rights Campaign, a gay activist lobby, and Logo, a gay-themed cable channel, which will broadcast the event live from Los Angeles on Aug. 9. Human Rights Campaign chairman Joe Solmonese will moderate, along with lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge.

     They can call it a "debate," but it will undoubtedly be a pander-palooza, with each candidate trying to outdo the others in pledging fealty to the gay-left agenda. Well, why not -- if I were a Democratic candidate, I'd also grab the chance for some face time before a friendly audience. Indeed, if I were a Republican candidate, I'd take part -- why pass up the free publicity and a chance to be seen and heard?

     These are the same Democrats, of course, who refuse to debate on the Fox News Channel because they object to its political agenda. So be it. But what does it say about their priorities that they gladly court Logo's niche viewers, yet snub the far larger mainstream audience that watches Fox?

(*)   (*)   (*) 

     More evidence that the immigration crisis is really an assimilation crisis: the current flap in Boston over whether the names of candidates on Chinese-language ballots should be printed in English or transliterated into Chinese. Because such transliterations can have ludicrous unintended meanings -- Mayor Thomas Menino's name, for instance, could be read as "Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own" -- the state's top election official is insisting that the names remain in English. The US Justice Department and Chinese community activists insist that they be rendered in Chinese. Apparently nobody insists that American citizens voting in American elections should do so in the language of American civic life.

     Bilingual ballots, mandated by the 1992 amendments to the federal Voting Rights Act, are incompatible with the American tradition of *E Pluribus Unum*. A multitude of proud ethnic identities make up this country's vibrant cultural mosaic, but superseding them is a shared American identity indispensable to full-fledged citizenship. A crucial element of that identity is proficiency in English -- an element we undercut when we provide foreign-language ballots to citizens who don't share the common tongue.

     Immigrants know that to follow a Patriots game, read a Boston street map, or order off the menu at Legal Sea Foods, learning English is a prerequisite. If that effort is worth making for football or a cup of chowder, surely it's worth making for the right to vote.

(*)   (*)   (*)

     Journalists know their profession is not held in high esteem. Poll after poll confirms it. In Britain last November, for example, a national survey measuring the trustworthiness of 19 professions found that journalists ranked dead last. Even politicians managed to edge them out.

     But it's one thing to know it in the abstract. It's something else to unexpectedly get your nose rubbed in it, as Diane Sawyer can attest.

     "I wanted to sit on a jury once," Sawyer mentioned on "Good Morning America" last Thursday, "and the judge said to me, 'Can you tell the truth and be fair?' And I said, 'That's what journalists do.' And everybody in the courtroom laughed! It was the most hurtful moment I think I've ever had."

     The more the press proclaims itself accurate and unbiased, the less the public seems to agree. It isn't clear that Sawyer grasped it, but there was a message in that laughter.

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

I'm curious.  Has anyone had the problem of the gas company not being ablt to read your meter because they come on a day when you aren't home?  They won't come in my back yard because of the dog and refuse to come to any agreement about coming to read it once in a while when I'm home.  I looked on my bill and the next reading is August 7 which is, once again, a day I work.

I got my bill today and they're estimating it at almost 50 dollars..at a time when it's hot as blue blazes, I'm the only one using hot water, and I very rarely cook in this weather.  With the only gas in my previous house, and three of us using the water heater, the bill ran under 20 bucks a month in the summer.

I asked about the program where I read it and post it for them but they said the PUC won't let them do that any more.  I was told they would try to get permission from my neighbor behind to read my meter through the fence but they obviously didn't do that as my bill reads "estimated."

Any ideas out there?  Do I write a letter to the editor?  Do I call them every day?

larger view

Anyone ever go to this site?  It's a real restaurant with the billboard out front.  You guys oughtta love this one.  A lot of the ones I've seen in the past are anti Bush.  :-)

Check out the latest about Scooter.

http://www.casadice.com/sig...

I thought this was interesting considering so many people feel stars influence voters.

http://www.news.com.au/hera...

Here are two interesting articles on Mormanism and Christians. 

http://blog.beliefnet.com/b...

larger view

I just got the most amazing offer in the mail.  The Hyundai dealership informs me that they are in desperate need of 2004 preowned Hyundai Sonatas and that their records indicate I own one of these high demand vehicles.

Further, the General Sales Manager has pre authorized his sales consultants to buy back my current vehicle.

Now, if I'm in the market for a new vehicle this comes at a very opportune time.  What with the incentives, the buy back and all.  It seems I also have VIP status and because of this, I am qualified for this invitation only event and it will not be advertised to the general public.

I am honored.   I am humbled.        ;  But....I think I'll keep my car.

Have you ever wondered what people in the military make?  I found this chart very interesting.  Bear in mind, there are a lot of variables in pay as this is just the base amount.  Other charts at the site show added pay.

ANTI-MORMONISM GETS PERSONAL

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, July 1, 2007

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

     Anti-Mormon prejudice reared its head during Mitt Romney's first political campaign, his 1994 run for the Senate against Ted Kennedy. Back then it usually manifested itself not as opposition to Romney's religion per se, but to the conservative political views of the Mormon Church, which Romney, as a faithful Mormon, was presumed to share.

     Rarely, though, did overt bigotry against Mormonism bare its fangs. Kennedy's nephew, then-congressman Joseph Kennedy, disparaged the challenger for belonging to a "white boys club" in which blacks and women "are second-class citizens." Even more disdainful was Vincent McCarthy, a leading liberal activist: "I have always found it a delicious irony," he sneered to The Boston Globe, "that a church founded on polygamy is so sanctimonious about fornication and homosexuality."

     But those were exceptions. While Romney's religion was often mentioned, there was a nearly universal taboo against explicitly condemning him for his faith. "In 1994," I wrote at the time, "no one dares suggest that Romney, by virtue of being a Mormon, doesn't belong in the Senate."

     Thirteen years later, alas, anti-Mormon hostility isn't so inhibited:

Ø      In Florida, televangelist Bill Keller informs his 2.4 million e-mail subscribers: "If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!"

Ø      Another evangelical leader, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary president R. Philip Roberts, tells an international Christian conference that the Mormon claim to be the true Christian church is the "overarching and primary concern" behind evangelical opposition to Romney's candidacy.

Ø      The Associated Press reports that a Romney trip to New Hampshire "started on a sour note" when Al Michaud, a Dover resident and self-identified liberal, shouted, "I'm one person who will not vote for a Mormon" and refused to shake Romney's hand.

Ø      In Warren County, Iowa, the local chairman of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign reportedly tells Republican activists that the Mormon Church funds the terrorist organization Hamas and treats women the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

Ø      Al Sharpton, during a debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens, gratuitously says of Romney: "As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways."

Ø      The Politico, a popular Washington e-zine, publishes an essay by veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, who says Romney should be hectored on whether he "personally believes" Mormonism's "offensive" teaching that mainstream Christianity is "an abomination."

     My belief is that people in public life should be judged by their behavior, not their theology, and I had hoped that such deplorable reactions to Romney's candidacy would have dried up by now. Clearly that hasn't happened. Between one-fourth and one-third of respondents consistently tell pollsters that they are unlikely to vote for a Mormon for president. In a June Washington Post-ABC News poll, 30 percent of Republicans said they would be "less likely" to vote for a Mormon; of them, half -- one Republican in six -- said there was "no chance" they would pull the lever for a Mormon candidate.

     In the end, of course, there could be less to such opposition than meets the eye. In 1960 something like 30 percent of respondents told pollsters that they wouldn't vote for a Catholic. That didn't keep John F. Kennedy from winning the White House that November.

     Two months before Election Day, JFK had taken the "Catholic issue" by the horns in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. That speech, which Romney and his advisers have undoubtedly read closely, drove home the message that to oppose a candidate for political office solely because of religion was deeply un-American. "If this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized," Kennedy said, "then it is the whole nation that will be the loser."

     That doesn't mean that voters should never pay attention to a candidate's spiritual beliefs, or that candidates who adhere to unfamiliar minority faiths shouldn't expect to be asked about them. America's civic culture has always taken religion seriously, and candidates from outside the religious mainstream will naturally draw extra scrutiny.

     Nevertheless, election campaigns are for choosing political leaders, not popes. A candidate's public record has far more to say about his fitness for office than his private devotions do. All of the presidential hopefuls, Romney included, have made their mark in the worlds of politics, business, the military, or the law. Each has a history. That, not what they believe about Jesus or Joseph Smith, is what voters and journalists should care about most.

     The Framers of the Constitution banned religious tests as a qualification for holding political office, and for good reason: What a candidate believes about the hereafter is not nearly as important as how he lives his life in the here and now. That is as true today of the Massachusetts Republican who happens to be a Mormon as it was 47 years ago of the Massachusetts Democrat who happened to be a Catholic.

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