This is too funny.  A guy lawyer might say it was an invasion of privacy and costing him his marriage and his Range Rover???  HUUH?  Did it occur to him that cheating might be the cause of his marriage failure? 

http://www.foxnews.com/stor...

What a sad world we live in.  I don't know if violence is escalating or if it's just that media misses little, but today I read of a young man who stabbed his 17 year old sister to death, decapitated his 5 year old sister and tried to kill the 9 year old sister.

Just now I read of a gunman who burst into a nursing home and killed 7, a nurse, and wounded 3 others.

The mass murders seem to be coming more and more common and it's very scary.  Who next?  Your neighbor?  Your family?  You?  When so many violent crimes are random, how safe do you feel?

I don't care if it's the state, city, county, or the feds.  I just got my DMV renewal and it's $179.  Up from $124 last year.

Here's how it breaks down so you'll know what's been raised.

2008

• Registration $41
• License fee     61
• Weight fee
• Special plate fee
• County/Dist fee  10
• Smog abatement fee   12

2009

• Registration fee    $56
• License fee       &nbs p;     93
• weight fee
• special plate
• County/Dist fee       10
• Smog abatement fee   20

And there you have it.  I was looking forward to a cut again this year due to the car now being 5 years old but I can see the state had other plans.

I realize things are tight and cutting costs by laying off employees must have been necessary, and increasing revenue with banner ads is also necessary, what's up with Quizos ads just about every other time I refresh a page? 

No one else..just Quiznos.

Bush's 'folly' is ending in victory

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
March 25, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/5...

"MARKETS WITHOUT BOMBS. Hummers without guns. Ice cream after dark. Busy streets without fear." So began Terry McCarthy's report from Iraq for ABC's World News Sunday on March 15, one of a series the network aired last week as the war in Iraq reached its sixth anniversary.

A nationwide poll of Iraqis reveals that "60 percent expect things to get better next year -- almost three times as many as a year and a half ago," McCarthy continued. "Iraqis are slowly discovering they have a future. We flew south to Basra, where 94 percent say their lives are going well. Oil is plentiful here. So is money."

In another report two nights later, ABC's correspondent characterized the Iraqi capital as "a city reborn: speed, light, style -- this is Baghdad today. Where car bombs have given way to car racing. Where a once-looted museum has been restored and reopened. And where young women who were forced to cover their heads can again wear the clothes that they like." One such young woman is dental student Hiba al-Jassin, who fled Baghdad's horrific violence two years ago, but found the city transformed when she returned last fall. "I'm just optimistic," she told McCarthy. "I think we are on the right path."

ABC wasn't alone in conveying the latest glad tidings from Iraq.

"Iraq combat deaths at 6-year low" USA Today reported on its front page last Wednesday. The story noted that in the first two months of 2009, 15 US soldiers were killed in action -- one-fourth the number killed in the same period a year ago, and one-tenth the 2007 toll. The reduction in deaths reflects the reduction in violence, which has plummeted by 90 percent since former President Bush ordered General David Petraeus to implement a new counterinsurgency strategy -- the "surge" -- in early 2007. Even in northern Iraq, where some al-Qaeda terrorists are still active, attacks are down by 70 percent.

In the wake of improved security have come political reconciliation and compromise. Iraq's democratic government continues to mature, with ethnic and religious loyalties beginning to yield to broader political concerns.

The Washington Post reports that the country's foremost Shiite politician, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has formed an alliance with Saleh al-Mutlak, an outspoken Sunni leader. It is a development that suggests "the emergence of a new axis of power in Iraq centered on a strong central government and nationalism" -- a dramatic change from the sectarian passions that fueled so much bloody agony in 2006 and 2007. In the recent provincial elections, writes the Post's Anthony Shadid, Maliki's party won major gains, with the prime minister "forgoing the slogans of his Islamist past for a platform of law and order." Despite his erstwhile reputation as a Shiite hardliner, Maliki now echoes Mutlak's call for burying the hatchet with supporters of Saddam Hussein's overwhelmingly Sunni Baath Party.

Those elections were yet another blow to the conviction that constitutional democracy and Arab culture are incompatible. For the 440 seats to be filled, more than 14,000 candidates and some 400 political parties contended -- a level of democratic competition that leaves American elections in the dust. A Jeffersonian republic of yeoman smallholders Iraq will never be. But over the past six years it has been transformed from one of the most brutal tyrannies on earth to an example of democratic pluralism in the heart of the Arab world.

For a long time the foes of the Iraq war and the president who launched it insisted that none of this was possible -- that the war was lost, that there was no military solution to the sectarian slaughter, that the surge would only make the violence worse. Victory was not an option, the critics declared; the only option was to partition Iraq and get out. Time and again it was said that the war would forever be remembered as Bush's folly, if not indeed as the worst foreign policy mistake in US history.

Even now, with a stubbornness born of partisan hostility or political ideology, there are those who cannot bring themselves to utter the words "victory" and "Iraq" in the same sentence. But six years after the war began, it is ending in victory. As in every war, the price of that victory was higher than we would have wished. The price of defeat would have been far higher.

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

Related Topics: Iraq

Hey everyone, the weather is great and before it gets too hot, we need to plan a date for a big get together.

Post comments here and keep them coming so we can get it nailed down.  I'll try to keep this blog on the top of the page so that you folks won't forget.

All suggestions welcome.  No one is in charge, we just need a consensus at some point.

Please take a little time out of your evening and from the animosity of some of the blogs and watch this video.  I don't know about the rest of you but it humbles me.

We have a friend right here on the blog who can relate to this young man.

http://vodpod.com/watch/116...

Four US deaths yesterday.

http://www.columbiatribune....

Embryos and ethics

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
March 15, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4...

SHORTLY AFTER the president announced his new policy on funding embryonic stem-cell research, CNN's Larry King devoted a special program to the subject. His first guest was Mary Tyler Moore, the international chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, who has long been involved in raising funds and awareness for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there is still no cure.

"I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. I think it's a good one," Moore told King when he asked for her reaction to the president's statement. "What's wonderful too is that this means that the United States will maintain its leadership in things medical and scientific. . . . So this is a very good thing."

Moore's words of praise might not strike you as exceptional, given the widespread approval last week of President Obama's order reversing the Bush administration's restrictions. But Moore wasn't speaking about Obama. Her interview on "Larry King Live" followed President Bush's stem-cell decision, which was announced in a televised address on Aug. 9, 2001. Also joining the conversation that night was Christopher Reeve. His take on Bush's policy was "a little bit more mixed," he acknowledged. "However, I think it is a step in the right direction. I'm grateful for that to the president."

For eight years Bush's critics caricatured him as a Bible-thumping yahoo for whom ideology routinely trumped science, so it might be difficult to remember that the policy he articulated in 2001 was anything but a knee-jerk rejection of scientific progress. The commentator Charles Krauthammer-- a graduate of Harvard Medical School, a quadriplegic, and a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics who did not agree with Bush's decision -- recalled it a few days ago nonetheless as "the single most morally serious presidential speech on medical ethics ever given." In it, Bush explained why "embryonic stem-cell research offers both great promise and great peril," conscientiously laying out the arguments for and against supporting such research with tax dollars. In the end, he concluded that federal funding could be justified for work on existing stem-cell lines, but not for research that would require the destruction of additional human embryos. Bush's decision had clearly been reached after much deliberation and consultation. "I don't think he did it just politically," Reeve observed. "I do believe he really thought about it."

Obama had an opportunity last week to deliver an equally thoughtful speech. He could have explored the moral dilemmas involved in exploiting a living embryo to advance scientific knowledge. Instead he resorted to political rhetoric and ill-disguised scorn for his predecessor.

The president rejected the "false choice between sound science and moral values" that supposedly characterized the Bush policy, and declared that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." Promoting science, Obama said, means "letting scientists . . . do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion" and "listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient."

But science is not an unqualified good, and scientific ends do not justify any and all means. It is not "manipulation" or "coercion" or "ideology" to insist that scientific research -- especially when funded by taxpayers -- be restrained by moral and ethical guardrails. The absence of those guardrails can lead to such abominations as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which government doctors -- with the support of the American Medical Association -- deliberately withheld medical treatment from infected black men in order to better understand the natural progression of venereal disease. Those who raised ethical qualms about the study were disregarded by the Public Health Service -- an example of what Obama might call rejecting the "false choice between sound science and moral values."

Like most Americans, I don't believe that microscopic human embryos deserve all the legal protections of personhood. But whether it is right to kill such embryos for the sake of medical research is not just a question about science; it is also a question of moral and political judgment. Public officials are called on to make those judgments, not to simply defer to whatever scientists say they want. Obama blithely concedes that "many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research." Yet at no point did he articulate or address those concerns, let alone attempt to allay them.

"If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable," Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem-cell science, told The New York Times in 2007, "you have not thought about it enough." Thomson's remark has been widely quoted, but it seems not everyone has gotten the message.

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

Related Topics: Abortion and Reproduction, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Science and exploration

 

If you thought you could beat the high cost of smoking by rolling your own, think again.  take a look at this article.

http://www.dailygazette.com...

Here ya go.  I wonder how many other states will agree with this.

http://www.foxnews.com/poli...

You've had your lunch and dinner may be a bit away so you can read this without getting sick.

http://www.foxnews.com/stor...

The only thing i'm grateful for is that the babies will get lots of care and attention.  Something their mother could not provide them with considering she has 14 to snuggle up to.

Tens of thousands of jobs created by the economic stimulus law could end up filled by illegal immigrants, particularly in big states such as California where undocumented workers are heavily represented in construction, experts on both sides of the issue say.

http://www.usatoday.com/mon...

Whatever happened to global warming?

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
March 8, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4...

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were entirely ice-free. Last December 25^th, not a single Canadian province had woken to a white Christmas. There was a new scientific study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures -- a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists were admitting that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front right about now, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the nightly news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

Without a doubt.

But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Quite the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On December 25^th, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea to keep them warm. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes -- Erie, Superior, and Huron -- almost completely frozen over. In Washington, DC, what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which all but shut down the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice to the tune of 193,000 square miles -- an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade -- average global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming doomsaying rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand."

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as compelling as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we're going to need.

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

Related Topics: Global Warming

 

This is a fascinating article AND video of the ditching of a Pan Am Boeing 377 Stratocruiser in 1956.  The video comes from a crewmember aboard “Ocean Station November”, the Coast Guard Cutter “Pontchartrain” that was at the scene for the rescue operation .. .. GY







http://www.mercurynews.com/...



_______________________________________________



 

Okay, I think this is a definite sign that things have now gone too far...

TOP TEN INDICATORS THAT YOUR EMPLOYER HAS CHANGED TO A CHEAPER HEALTH CARE PLAN:  

(10) Your annual breast exam is done at Hooters.

(9) Directions to your doctor's office include "Take a left when you enter the trailer park."

(8) The tongue depressors taste faintly of Fudgesicles.

(7) The only proctologist in the plan is "Gus" from Roto-Rooter.

(6) The only item listed under Preventive Care Coverage is "an apple a day..."

(5) Your primary care physician is wearing the pants you gave to Goodwill last month.

(4) "The patient is responsible for 200% of out-of-network charges," is not a typographical error.

(3) The only expense covered 100% is "embalming."

(2) Your Prozac comes in different colors with little M's on them.

AND THE NUMBER ONE SIGN YOU'VE JOINED A VERY CHEAP HEALTH CARE PLAN:

(1) You ask for Viagra and they give you a Popsicle stick and Duct Tape.

I've been following this tragedy and can't help seeing the similarity to another tragic accident at lake Isabella in 1956

Three young men 21 and 22 along with the teenaged cousin of one of the young men set off for a day of fishing at the lake.  Something went terribly wrong that morning and all four ended up in the water.  Since the older three were good swimmers, they helped the teenager to a tree where he clung all day long.  Sometime during the day he said he saw a red gas can float by, one they had in the boat.

In shock and completely traumatized, the teen was finally found by other boaters and the alarm went out that the other three were missing.  It took three days but eventually all three young men were found not far from where the boat had settled. 

We're coming up on the anniversary of that terrible time in April.  Sons, brothers, husbands and fathers never to be held again.

Charles Anderson..1956

Holiman Harbin...1956

Johnny Newell....1956

You were never forgotten, just as the three young men who are now missing never will be.  I grieve for their families and I pray they are recovered for their families..

http://www.foxnews.com/stor...

Marquis Cooper

Cory Smith

William Bleakely

 (edited for clarity)