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Finally..here they are.  My apologies for the terrible quality of some.  Not enough light at times and too much other times.  Thank goodness there were more cameras present than mine.

Sent to me by an on line friend.   

The next time you hear the expression "Bush's war" remember this----note that there's no "opinion," just direct video which deserves wide distribution.

     http://www.bercasio.com/mov...  
 

Jacoby is a lttle late getting his opinion out there but since so many here have started new blog on the topic I decided to add Jacoby's to the list of contributors.

IT’S STILL A QUESTION OF WRIGHT AND WRONG
By Jeff Jacoby
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     I have known my rabbi for more than 20 years. The synagogue he serves as spiritual leader is one I have attended for a quarter-century. He officiated at my wedding and was present for the circumcision of each of my sons. Over the years, I have sought his advice on matters private and public, religious and secular. I have heard him speak from the pulpit more times than I can remember.

     My relationship with my rabbi, in other words, is similar in many respects to Barack Obama's relationship with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But if my rabbi began delivering sermons as toxic, hate-filled, and anti-American as the diatribes Wright has preached at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, I wouldn't hesitate to demand that he be dismissed.

     But it wasn't true for Obama, whose long and admiring relationship with Wright, a man he describes as his "mentor," remained intact for more than 20 years, notwithstanding the incendiary and bigoted messages the minister used his pulpit to promote.

     In Philadelphia yesterday, Obama gave a graceful speech on the theme of race and unity in American life. Much of what he said was eloquent and stirring, not least his opening paean to the Founders and the Constitution -- a document "stained by the nation's original sin of slavery," as he said, yet also one "that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time." There was an echo there of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in his great "I Have a Dream" speech extolled "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence" as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

     The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King -- who in that same speech warned against "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred" -- but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church's magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the "mentor" whose church he joined and has generously supported with tens of thousands of dollars in donations is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, the expounder of a "black liberation” theology that teaches its adherents to "accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

     Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister's odium.

     When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. "There's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group."

     When it came to Wright, however, he wasn't nearly so categorical. Oh, he's "like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He's just "trying to be provocative," he told another. "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," he said. Far from severing his ties to Wright, Obama made him a member of his Religious Leadership Committee -- a tie he finally cut only four days ago.

     Such a clanging double standard raises doubts about Obama's character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of race-transcending healer. Yesterday's speech was finely crafted, but it leaves some serious and troubling questions unanswered.

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

Have you been looking for a unique home?  Here's your chance.  Well..the sale is today so you may not make it.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Space-S...

SLAUGHTER AND JUBILATION

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     The slaughter of eight young yeshiva students and the wounding of nine others by an Arab terrorist in Jerusalem last week was a cold-blooded act of evil. It is difficult to make sense of the depraved fanaticism of someone like Ala Abu Dhaim, who calmly entered the school's busy library, took three guns from a box, and sprayed the room with hundreds of bullets, emptying clip after clip until finally being shot dead by an off-duty military officer and a part-time student who heard the gunfire and came running.

Victims of the yeshiva massacre:

Top row: Avraham David Moses, 16; Ro'i Roth, 18; Neria Cohen, 15; Yonatan Eldar, 16.

Bottom  row: Yochai Lifshitz, 18; Segev Peniel Avihail, 15; Yehonadav Hirschfeld, 19; Doron Meherete, 26.

     Even more perverse and revolting that Abu Dhaim's massacre, howevere, was the behavior that followed it.

     In Gaza, the news that unarmed Jewish students, most of them kids, had been gunned down while at study set off paroxysms of joy. Thousands of jubilant Palestinians whooped it up in Gaza's streets, firing guns in the air to celebrate and distributing candy to passersby. Many residents went to mosques to offer prayers of thanksgiving before joining the festivities. Television cameras recorded the revelry; you can see it for yourself on YouTube.

     Hamas, the terror organization that controls Gaza, issued a statement applauding the bloodshed. "We bless the [Jerusalem] operation," it said. "It will not be the last."

     Hamas is monstrous, but give it this much: It makes no secret of its bloodlust. The same cannot always be said of Fatah, the other main faction in the Palestinian Authority. Fatah is headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whose polished spokesman, Saeb Erekat, was quick to assure journalists -- in English, for Western consumption -- that Abbas condemned the killings and "reiterated his condemnation of all attacks that target civilians, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis."

     Yet just a few days before the yeshiva massacre, Abbas had told the Jordanian daily Al-Dustur -- in Arabic, for Arab consumption -- that he is against terrorist attacks only for tactical reasons "at this time" and that "in the future, things may change." He boasted of his long involvement with PLO violence -- "I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965" -- and claimed with pride that Fatah "taught resistance to everyone, including Hezbollah, who trained in our military camps."

     Abbas's supposed condemnation notwithstanding, the Palestinian Authority's official daily newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, hailed the killer on its front page, prominently displaying his picture and identifying him as a "shahid" -- a term of approval and reverence denoting an Islamic martyr. And the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent Fatah subsidiary identified by the US government as a terrorist organization, praised the slaughter as a "heroic operation."

     Meanwhile, the family of Abu Dhaim erected a mourning tent near their East Jerusalem home, where, amid banners of Hamas and Hezbollah, visitors came to honor the dead terrorist. Incredibly, the Israeli government made no effort to prevent this public display of respect for a mass-murderer; it  insisted only that the Hamas and Hezbollah flags be taken down.

Mourning tent for Ala Abu Dhaim (Photo: AP)

     By contrast, when Abu Dhaim's relatives in Jordan put up a similar tent to receive well-wishers, Jordanian officials ordered them to dismantle it immediately. The terrorist's uncle was indignant. "We were hoping that people would come to congratulate us on the martyrdom of my nephew," he said. "This is a heroic operation that must be celebrated by everyone." It is a mark of how feckless the Israeli leadership has become that the Arab government of Jordan shows more common sense than the Jewish state in reacting to those who would lionize the killer of Jewish kids.

     And that is indicative of the most perverse behavior of all: the refusal of Israel to face the fact that it is in a war for survival -- a war that it will win only by fighting and defeating its enemy, not by clinging blindly to a phony "peace process" that has brought it nothing but terror, tears, and a mounting toll of death.

     Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's reaction to last week's massacre of the innocents was to announce that he would "not give up on making a tremendous effort to take another significant, important, and dramatic step that might bring us to an opportunity for real reconciliation."

     The Israeli Foreign Ministry spouted the same drivel: "These terrorists are trying to destroy the chances of peace," its spokesman said, "but we certainly will continue the peace talks." The White House chimed in too: "The most important thing is that the peace process continue and that the parties are committed to it."

     Wrong. The most important thing is to recognize that there is a war against Israel by enemies profoundly committed to its elimination -- enemies who regard negotiations, concessions, and all the trappings of the "peace process" as evidence that the Jews are in retreat, and that hitting them even harder will bring victory even closer. That is why there was such jubilation in Gaza. And why last week's atrocity in Jerusalem was only the latest such horror -- not the last.

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

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Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally.

HOW GOVERNMENT MAKES THINGS WORSE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, March 9, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bosto...

     What do ethanol and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? On the surface, nothing at all. But dig down a little, and each is a good reminder of that most powerful of unwritten decrees, the Law of Unintended Consequences -- and of the all-too-frequent tendency of solutions imposed by the state to exacerbate the harms they were meant to solve.

     Take ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel made (primarily) from corn. Ethanol has been touted as a weapon in the fashionable crusade against climate change, because when mixed with gasoline, it modestly reduces emissions of carbon dioxide. Reasoning that if a little ethanol is good, a lot must be better, Congress and the Bush administration recently mandated a sextupling of ethanol production, from the 6 billion gallons produced last year to 36 billion by 2022.

     But now comes word that expanding ethanol use is likely to mean not less CO₂ in the atmosphere, but more. A lot more: Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline by 20 percent -- the estimate Congress relied on in requiring the huge increase in production -- ethanol use will cause such emissions to nearly double over the next 30 years.

     The problem, laid out in two new studies in the journal Science, is that it takes a lot of land to grow biofuel feedstocks such as corn, and as forests or grasslands are cleared for crops, large amounts of CO₂ are released. Diverting land in this fashion also eliminates "carbon sinks," which absorb atmospheric CO₂. Bottom line: The government's ethanol mandate will generate a "carbon debt" that will take decades, maybe centuries, to pay off.

     Actually, that's not quite the bottom line. Jacking up ethanol production causes other problems, too. Deforestation. Loss of biodiversity. Depletion of aquifers. Deadlier fires (ethanol fires are harder to extinguish than those fueled by gasoline). More ethanol even means more hunger: As more of the US corn crop goes for ethanol, the price of corn has been soaring, a calamity for Third World countries in which corn is a major dietary staple.

     Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa bloviates that everything about ethanol is “good, good, good," but it plainly isn't, isn't, isn't. Which is why the fate of ethanol, including how much of it is produced, should be determined by the decentralized process of free exchange -- the voluntary interactions of countless consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, each acting according to his best judgment and in his own best interest. Instead, Congress and the president, convinced as always that they know best, imposed a single, inflexible, ham-fisted directive from above. The result is that the carbon dioxide they aimed to reduce will be increased, and many people will suffer unnecessary misfortune.

     The subprime mortgage collapse is another tale of unintended consequences.

     The crisis has its roots in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Carter-era law that purported to prevent "redlining" -- denying mortgages to black borrowers -- by pressuring banks to make home loans in "low- and moderate-income neighborhoods." Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the "credit needs" of "predominantly minority neighborhoods." The higher a bank's rating, the more likely that government regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition.

     But to earn high ratings, banks were forced to make increasingly risky loans to borrowers who wouldn't qualify for a mortgage under normal standards of creditworthiness. The CRA, made even more stringent during the Clinton administration, trapped lenders in a Catch-22. "If they comply," wrote Loyola College economist Thomas DiLorenzo, "they know they will have to suffer from more loan defaults. If they don't comply, they face financial penalties . . . which can cost a large corporation like Bank of America billions of dollars."

     Banks nationwide thus ended up making more and more "subprime" loans and agreeing to dangerously lax underwriting standards -- no down payment, no verification of income, interest-only payment plans, weak credit history. If they tried to compensate for the higher risks they were taking by charging higher interest rates, they were accused of unfairly steering borrowers into "predatory" loans they couldn't afford.

     Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government's making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. Mortgage lenders have been bankrupted, thousands of subprime homeowners have been foreclosed on, and countless would-be borrowers can no longer get credit. The financial fallout has hurt investors around the world. And all of it thanks to the government, which was sure it understood the credit industry better than the free market did, and confidently created the conditions that made disaster unavoidable.

     "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe," warned Mark Twain, "while Congress is in session." Mark Twain was a humorist, but that was no joke.

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

These have been around a while and passed around the internet for years but they always make me laugh.  Hopefully you folks will enjoy them again too.

_________________________________________________ ____________

Hollywood Squares:
 If you remember the Original Hollywood Squares and its comics, this may bring a tear to your eyes. These great questions and answers are from the days when 'Hollywood Squares' game show responses were spontaneous, not scripted, as they are now. Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions, of course..


Q. Do female frogs croak?
A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.

Q.If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be?
A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.

Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years.
A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.

Q.You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?
A. Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.

Q. According to Cosmopolitan, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he's married?
A. Rose Marie: No; wait until morning .

Q.Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.

Q. In Hawaiian, does it take more than three words to say 'I Love You'?
A. Vincent Price: No, you can say it with a pineapple and a twenty.

Q. What are 'Do It,' 'I Can Help,' and 'I Can't Get Enough'?
A. George Gobel: I don't know, but it's coming from the next apartment.

Q.As you grow older, do you tend to gesture more or less with your hands while talking?
A. Rose Marie: You ask me one more growing old question Peter, and I'll give you a gesture you'll never forget!


Q. Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather?
A. Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.

Q.Charley, you've just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to get any during the first year?
A. Charley Weaver: Of course not, I'm too busy growing strawberries.

Q. In bowling, what's a perfect score?
A. Rose Marie: Ralph, the pin boy.

Q. It is considered in bad taste to discuss two subjects at nudist camps. One is politics, what is the other?
A. Paul Lynde: Tape measures.

Q. During a tornado, are you safer in the bedroom or in the closet?
A. Rose Marie: Unfortunately Peter, I'm always safe in the bedroom.

Q. Can boys join the Camp Fire Girls?
A. Marty Allen: Only after lights out.

Q. When you pat a dog on its head he will wag his tail. What will a goose do?
A. Paul Lynde: Make him bark?

Q.If you were pregnant for two years, what would you give birth to?
A. Paul Lynde: Whatever it is, it would never be afraid of the dark.

Q. According to Ann Landers, is there anything wrong with getting into the habit of kissing a lot of people?
A.. Charley Weaver: It got me out of the army.

Q. It is the most abused and neglected part of your body, what is it?
A. Paul Lynde: Mine may be abused, but it certainly isn't neglected.

Q.Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do ?
A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.

Q. Who stays pregnant for a longer period of time, your wife or your elephant?
A. Paul Lynde: Who told you about my elephant?

Q.When a couple have a baby, who is responsible for its sex?
A. Charley Weaver: I'll lend him the car, the rest is up to him.

Q. Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?
A. Charley Weaver: His feet.

Q. According to Ann Landers, what are two things you should never do in bed?
A. Paul Lynde: Point and laugh

WE DON'T STOP LAUGHING BECAUSE WE GROW OLD,
WE GROW OLD BECAUSE WE STOP LAUGHING!

The terms of service are clearly listed for all to see and to abide by.  However, I've noticed in the past (and recently) that some bloggers can post just about anything they like and suffer no consequences while others get suspended.

My guess is that this is a subjective decision which puts it in the eye of the beholder.  Does it happen over one ill phrased comment or does it take repeated offenses to get one supended?

Does one get suspended for harrassement or just for language?  For content or intent?   

I've noticed quite a bit of name calling on here and not just by regulars.  However, regulars are allowed to post under as many names as they like which allows them a bit more freedom to have chamelion like behavior and speech.  One name for hateful posts, and a different name for good old boy posts.    One name for intelligent discourse, and another name for garbage.

One is chastised for sexual innuendo while one is allowed to ask if a politician had to bend over to become Bushes b****h.    I thought that was very tacky but nothing was said by the staff.

Some are allowed to post religious material time after time after time using some pretty strong language toward people who disagree with them and yet the ones retaliating are the ones punished.

I've had to rethink my feelings about this blog lately.  As much as I enjoy the company (for the most part), it gets old being attacked for opinions and thoughts.  I had one of the posters continue the battle in email and I foolishly responded.  The next thing I knew he was accusing another female blogger of some pretty disgusting things and a lot of trash that he knew he couldn't post here.  I was advised to forward the email to Jason but so far have not done so.  It's that kind of hatred and viciousness as well as the negativity that have made me seriously wonder if I should continue here. 

A joke post turned ugly.  A light hearted blog taken all out of context and attacked.  Good public information turned into a hateful personal agenda.  People called bigots and racists for their beliefs.

I don't know.  It's sort of a Simon mentality that it's ok to be spiteful and hateful as long as one contends they're giving constructive comments.

I don't absolve myself in behavior that is sometimes unacceptable.  I'm just wondering how much of the unfairness that I see on the blog is now acceptable to me.