A blog about Business & Finance.
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Al Qaeda's Message Spreading Through English-Language Sites Very sad news from a blogger friend Live from New York, a terror trial we'll regret - Jacoby Fox gets interview with obama Lou Dobbs explains why he left CNN Obama and 'The Great I Am' Fresno State Bulldog Football game on at 1 PM today, Channel 45 Would you like a joint with your fries? A joke for you, may be old, I dunno. Don't stop me if you've heard it. What's going in at the old 3Way Chevrolet place on California? August 06 September 06 October 06 November 06 December 06 January 07 February 07 March 07 April 07 May 07 June 07 July 07 August 07 September 07 October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 
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Give yourself a real treat, sit back, and listen. a composite audio/video of song whereby additional tracks were laid in by different singers and musicians from different places around the world. The finished product is tremendous! The song itself is that classic standard "Stand By Me" originally released in 1955 by The Staple Singers and released again in 1961 by the Drifters. So turn up the speaker volume and Click Here.
Well folks, it's official. I got my letter today from the Social Security Administration telling me that I have to do nothing and that $250 will be deposited in my checking account by late May. I won't type out all the details but here are some interesting points. The economic recovery legislation also provides for a one time payment to recipient of Dept of Veteran Affairs and Railroad Retirement Board benefits. However, if you receive SS or SSI benefits and you also receive VA and/or PRB benefits, you will only receive one $250 payment. The SSA will send you this payment. We will not count the one time payment as income for SSI purposes. If you keep the one time payment for nine months or more, it will count toward your SSI resource limit.
Now if I could just figure out how I can stimulate the economy with that check.
Chavez's Best Salesman
There is an unwritten rule that Americans, while abroad, should not criticize their president. It is unfortunate that the current president does not have the same consideration for his countrymen when representing them in his travels overseas. How else, then, to explain his affectionate and enthusiastic handshake for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad?
The president acted as a prop for a hardened, America-hating dictator. His propaganda photo with the dictator sent Chavez's book soaring to the top of the Amazon.com sales list. If only it were an isolated incident. President Obama has shown himself too eager to please despots while abroad, as evidenced by his deep bow to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at the recent G-20 meetings in London. He lately has spent a lot of time and effort reaching out to leaders and governments with a history of hatred toward the United States, including the aged Castro brothers and other thugs like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Fidel and brother Raul, having wreaked ruin on their country for the past five decades, are minor nuisances at this point, but Obama's would-be pen pal Ahmadinejad is busy trying to develop a nuclear arsenal that would lend chilling credence to his professed desire to wipe Israel off the map.
The Chavez handshake is of a piece with the president's continuing effort to apologize for America's transgressions, as defined by his hard-Left base and most of Western Europe. By ex pressing his desire to press the "reset" button, Mr. Obama hopes to wipe the slate clean and create a fresh start with every nation we may have offended in any way—including North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The president has expressed similar penance for each and every Muslin nation that, according to Mr. Obama, we have failed to treat with sufficient sensitivity and understanding of their religion and culture. Our disrespect for their way of life, the president has intimated, is the chief cause of the rift between the Muslim world and the West.
Part of that "reset" effort, the apologies, the urgency to please, is an extension of the new administration's renunciation of the previous one. Obama has missed no opportunity to take overt potshots at his predecessor, from his inauguration speech to the present. Chavez seemed only too pleased to create a feel-good moment with Mr. Obama, unlike his treatment of President Bush, calling him a "devil" and abusing the hospitality of his host country while delivering an insane diatribe to the United Nations. (Chavez held aloft a book on imperialism by Noam Chomsky while making his remarks.)
At a press conference following his UN screed, these were the words of the man whose grip Obama returned with such gusto: "The United States empire is on the way down and it will be finished in the near future, for the good of all mankind." Perhaps these words don't sound especially harsh to a man who sat for 20 years in a church that=2 0spews racist lunacy.
To be sure, the United States must work to develop and maintain the trust of a Latin America in which democracy has endured only in fits and starts, a region that has featured dictators and unstable governments for so many decades. Chavez is none of those things; he is a bully and a hoodlum who has cemented his position as dictator-for-life.
It should come as no surprise that the administration is anxious to disavow previous foreign policy as wrongheaded and ineffective. This administration is confident in this effort because it considers itself more enlightened than perhaps any of its predecessors since FDR. The same attitude pervades Obama's policies in general: most of what came before him should be swept aside and government must be refashioned to his worldview. But his vision of a government of unprecedented size and power over its citizens, an experiment in social engineering and wealth redistribution, is quickly wearing thin.
The more immediate problem facing the country is the damage that can be done before Americans come to their senses. Foreign relations is a principal area in which the harm created can long outlast the politicians responsible for it. By giving Hugo Chavez a propaganda photo, Obama has sent a signal to Latin America that we will make no distinctions in the region between tyrants and democrats who support human rights.
A tortured debate over the 'torture memos'by Jeff Jacoby http://www.jeffjacoby.com/5...
ON THIS PAGE a few years ago I wrote several columns arguing strongly that torture was never acceptable -- not even "as a last and desperate option" in the war against jihadist terrorism, a war I strongly support. At a time when not only conservative hawks but even some notable liberals were making the case for using torture to thwart al-Qaeda, I contended that the cruel abuse of terrorist detainees was something we could never countenance -- not just because torture is illegal, unreliable, and a threat to the innocent, but because it is one of those practices that a civilized society cannot engage in without undermining its right to call itself civilized. Rereading those columns amid the tumult over the Justice Department "torture memos" released last week, I see little that I would change. I am still convinced, as I wrote in 2005, that interrogation techniques amounting to torture "cross the line that separates us from the enemy we are trying to defeat." Yet the Bush-era memos strike me as much more thoughtful than most of the moral preening and tendentious grandstanding they set off. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, apoplectically declares that the memos not only authorized torture "without a shadow of a doubt," they "gave explicit instruction on how to carry it out." The New York Times pronounces them "a journey into depravity." A petition at Democrats.com urges the appointment of a special prosecutor for "torture . . . and other heinous crimes of the Bush Administration." All three demand the impeachment of US Appeals Court Judge Jay Bybee, who used to work in the Office of Legal Counsel and wrote one of the memos. What's missing from all this sanctimony and censure is any acknowledgement of the circumstances under which the CIA interrogations took place, let alone the successes with which they have been credited. That may be a good way to score cheap political points. It doesn't add much to the public discourse. Context matters. Actions that are indisputably beyond the pale under normal conditions -- waterboarding a prisoner, for example -- can take on a very different aspect when conditions are abnormal, as they surely were in the terrifying wake of 9/11. We did not have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with," recalled Dennis Blair, the Obama administration's director of national intelligence, in his statement accompanying the declassified memos last week. "Our every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill more Americans." Knowing little about al-Qaeda's capabilities, desperately seeking to head off another slaughter, fearing the worst, the government's highest priority was to extract critical intelligence from al-Qaeda detainees. That was the state of affairs when the CIA sought legal approval to use harsher interrogation methods. "Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," Blair's said. But there was nothing sunny or safe about the post-9/11 emergency in which they were used. Any honest discussion of the memos authorizing them ought to say so.
But what if it hadn't been foiled? Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and al-Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands of additional victims in California. What kind of conversation would we be having once it became known that the refusal to subject KSM to the waterboard had come at so steep a price? How many of those now blasting the Bush administration for allowing torture would be blasting it instead for not preventing a second bloodbath? None of this is meant as a defense of torture, which I oppose as adamantly as ever. But even those of us who were against the Bush interrogation policy should be able to acknowledge the good faith of those who disagreed and the exigency in which they found themselves. To say nothing of the lives their decisions may have saved. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) Related Topics: Defense and National Security, Torture
Exerpt from the article linked below. Emphasis on bold is mine. (quoted from the article. ) "Chavez has hardly mellowed, either. Last month, in a radio address, he called Obama a "poor ignorant person,"
"Here are just some of Chavez's anti-American blasts: -- "The U.S. has bombarded entire cities, used chemical weapons and napalm, killed women, children and thousands of soldiers. That's terrorism." (Sept. 25, 2005: Washington Post interview) -- The U.S. government under Bush is the "most savage, cruel and murderous empire that has existed in the history of the world." (Aug. 8, 2005: Caracas youth rally) -- "Our real enemy is called the U.S. empire, and on Sunday, Dec. 2, we're going to give another knockout to Bush, so no one forgets that is the battlefield." (Dec. 1, 2007: election speech in Caracas) -- "Capitalism will lead to the destruction of humanity ... (and America) is the devil that represents capitalism." (August 2006: speech in Vietnam) -- American policy in the Mideast is "a policy of permanent aggression, of war, of terrorism by the U.S. empire. That's the great guilty one, the great Satan, as they call it here." (April 1, 2009: Tehran, Iran) -- "The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush." (Feb. 4, 2005: rally in Caracas) -- Chavez accused the U.S. and allies of lobbing "imperialist fire! Fascist fire! Murderous fire! ... genocidal fire against the innocent people of Palestine and Lebanon by the Empire and Israel" during an address he made at the U.N. in September 2006. -- ''The axis of evil is Washington and its allies around the world, which go about threatening, invading and murdering. We [Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales] are forming the axis of good." (Jan. 3, 2005: Caracas) -- "The United States brought the (Sept. 11) attacks upon itself, for their arrogant imperialist foreign policy." (Sept. 12, 2001: Venezuelan TV) -- "The hypothesis that is gaining strength ... is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world. Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq." (Sept, 12. 2006: Caracas speech) -- "The devil came here yesterday," Chavez said at the U.N. general assembly, referring to President Bush as he made the sign of the cross and accused the U.S. of "domination, exploitation and pillage of peoples of the world." (Sept. 20, 2006: New York) -- "I hope I am wrong, but I believe Obama brings the same stench" as President Bush. (Jan. 17, 2009: Caracas speech) --"They are threatening any country that decides to be free." (Feb. 1, 2007: Caracas speech) While those kinds of words would draw the dagger stares of the Secret Service on most offenders, they earned Chavez a warm greeting and thanks from Obama, who also received a gift from Chavez at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad. On Sunday, Obama defended the handshake and said his presence at the summit would help open up relations with other nations in the Americas. "It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States," Obama said. But some veteran diplomats said Chavez would wield the gracious grasp as an important symbol to help consolidate his growing power in Venezuela. "What he's going to say is that what he has been doing in Venezuela now has the seal of approval of the United States," said Otto Reich, who was ambassador to Venezuela under President Reagan. "He sees it as a green light to continue dismantling democracy in Venezuela." Reich said Chavez is already using the handshake as propaganda and called the summit a missed opportunity by the Obama administration. "What the president of the United States last night and today is trying to explain as a handshake, Chavez is already announcing as the greatest exito -- success -- in Venezuelan political history," he said.
Anyone see this article in TBC this morning. I thought it was interesting and shows what I've noticed this past year. JFK Democrats no moreFor the people who have decided posting anything they don't believe in is baiting I suggest you NOT read this article.
by Jeff Jacoby http://www.jeffjacoby.com/5...
ARE HUMAN RIGHTS still a Democratic priority? To Democrats of a certain age, such a question might seem incomprehensible. After all, it was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address proclaimed "to friend and foe alike" that Americans would resist "the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed." It was another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who made support for human rights an explicit foreign-policy concern, declaring at his inauguration: "Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere." It was Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik -- Democrats both -- whose landmark Jackson-Vanik amendment helped win freedom for tens of thousands of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks. But somewhere along the way, Democratic priorities seem to have changed. For example: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have used her recent trip to China to vigorously defend human rights -- to make it clear to those who rule the world's largest dictatorship that the new administration in Washington cares about the liberty and dignity of China's people. Instead, she more or less announced in advance that talking to Beijing about human rights was pointless, since "we pretty much know what they're going to say." Besides, she told reporters, human rights must not "interfere" with more important issues, such as the global economic crisis or climate change. China got the message. As Clinton arrived in Beijing, dozens of pro-democracy dissidents were placed under virtual house arrest. True to her word, the secretary of state made no fuss about the regime's brutality. Not long thereafter, the White House picked Charles Freeman, a longtime Beijing sycophant, to head the National Intelligence Council. In 1989, Freeman had defended the Tiananmen Square massacre, publicly regretting only that Chinese authorities didn't crack down even sooner. (He later withdrew his name from consideration for the intelligence post.) To be sure, the US-Chinese relationship has never turned solely on human rights. But Democrats have certainly traveled quite a distance since the days when Bill Clinton was blasting the first President Bush for "coddling aging rulers with undisguised contempt for democracy and human rights." Closer to home, President Obama last week relaxed US policy toward Cuba, making it easier for Cuban-Americans to travel and send money to relatives living there. The president's order was titled "Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba," but in fact it said nothing at all about democracy and human rights in Cuba. Nowhere did it mention the Communist tyranny of the last 50 years -- there was nothing about the denial of free speech; the abuse and murder of political dissidents; the persecution of journalists, librarians, and human-rights activists; the relentless surveillance and secret police; the regime's stranglehold on property and employment. This time, at least, Hillary Clinton didn't give human rights the brush-off. "We would like to see Cuba open up its society, release political prisoners, open up to outside opinions and media," she said on Thursday. By contrast, when a delegation of congressional Democrats returned from a trip to Cuba a few days earlier, it was to gush about how "very engaging" Fidel and Raul Castro are, and to insist that improvement in human rights not be made a condition of better relations with Washington. Thus at a press conference on April 7, Illinois Representative Bobby Rush extolled Raul Castro -- a man with the blood of hundreds on his hands -- for his "sense of humor" and the way he "laughed at himself" and how "down-to-earth" and "kind" he was. Why, said Rush, being with Castro was "almost like visiting an old friend." When a reporter asked about Cuba's human rights record, Rush snapped that he was engaging in a "double standard" and called it "good business sense" not to let human rights get in the way of increased trade. Another member of the delegation, Cleveland congresswoman Marcia Fudge, went even further, resolutely defending the Castro brothers' right to "run a nation the way they believe is best." After all, she said, "there is no one way that people should live." But Fudge was wrong -- profoundly wrong. All people should live in freedom. No one has the right to "run a nation" like a prison camp. Every human being is entitled to equal justice and the right to life. Those are core American truths -- truths most Democrats once understood in their bones. Do they still? (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) " On March 13, 2009, Biden addressed a former Senate colleague by saying, "An hour late, oh give me a f**king break," after he arrived on Amtrak at Union Station in Washington, D.C. The vice president's expletive was caught on a live microphone" I ran across this list and thought it was pretty funny. Except for the fact that the profanity used above is ironic considering some of the left on here ripped McCain for his language.. Here's the rest...... http://www.foxnews.com/poli... I also find it funny that some of the left on here mock FOX news but swear up and down they never watch it . (stomach couldn't take it type comments.) Sorta kinda like they never listen to talk radio but know everything said.
All too often we judge people by their appearance and manner and we should never, ever do that. Take a look. Got this one this morning. The latest in what? A scam? Normally I don't open mail from people I don't know but have had contact with long lost cousins and their families recently and looked at this. Check out the contents. "Hello, English Bulldogs don't usually just get pregnant so how did these puppies have puppies? One female puppy gave birth to two litters? Wonder what they want ....I'm not respondint to find out. I read this very interesting article in Sundays paper. What will they do when they run of of viable females? http://www.nytimes.com/2009... I guess this is one way for populaton control. This is a funny video from CNN about 911 calls from fast food customers. Just shows how stupid people can be. http://news.aol.com/article...
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtm...>
Rove Calls Biden 'Liar' After VP Boasts of Scolding BushAides to former President George W. Bush are challenging the veracity of Vice President Joe Biden's claim this week of having privately castigated Bush.By Bill Sammon FOXNews.com Thursday, April 09, 2009 Republican strategist Karl Rove called Vice President Biden a "liar" on Thursday, dramatically escalating a feud between Biden and aides to former President George W. Bush over Biden's claims to have rebuked Bush in private meetings.
"I hate to say this, but he's a serial exaggerator," Rove told FOX News. "If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop." Rove added: "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States." Biden's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox on Wednesday: "The vice president stands by his remarks." Carney was referring to two controversial assertions by Biden, the latest coming Tuesday during an interview on CNN. "I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office," Biden began, "'Well, Joe,' he said, 'I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.'" The exchange is purely "fictional," said Rove, who was Bush's top political adviser in the White House. "It didn't happen," Rove, a FOX News contributor and former Bush adviser, told Megyn Kelly in an interview taped for "On The Record." "It's his imagination; it's a made-up, fictional world. "He ought to get out of it and get back to reality," Rove added. "He's making this up out of whole cloth." Rove's skepticism was echoed by a variety of other Bush aides, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Candida Wolff. They also disputed a similar assertion made by Biden in2004, when the former senator from Delaware told scores of Democratic colleagues at a lunch that he had challenged Bush's moral certitude about the Iraq war during a private meeting in the Oval Office. Two years later, Biden repeated his story about dressing down the president. "When I speak to the president - and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with the president, at least prior to the last election, a lot of hours alone with him. I mean, meaning me and his staff," Biden said on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in April2006. "And the president will say things to me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and he'll say - my word - he'll look at me and he'll say: 'My instincts.' He said: 'I have good instincts.' I said: 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough.'" On Thursday, Rove ridiculed the claim that Biden spent "a lot of hours alone with" Bush. "Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than few moments," Rove said. "There was staff in the room the whole time." Rove was equally appalled by Biden's claims of having given Bush his comeuppance. "If you notice, all of these incidents have the same structure: Joe Biden courageously raises the impudent question; the president befuddles the answer; and Joe Biden drives home the dramatic response." Rove scoffed at Biden's claims that "he and the president were sitting there in the Oval Office, he was tutoring the president, he was asking him the critical questions that no one was willing to confront him with." "With all due respect to the vice president, these are the kind of things you can get away with if you are a United States Senator, ora backbencher in the U.S. House of Representatives," Rove said. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States." Carney declined to specify the dates of his boss's purported Oval Office scoldings of Bush. Nor would he provide witnesses or notes to corroborate the episodes. Throughout his career, Biden has often been accused of boasting about his accomplishments, embellishing his credentials and even stealing the words of others. He dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after being accused of plagiarizing British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Last July, Biden came under fire for telling a questionable story about being "shot at" in Iraq. When questioned by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled by saying: "I was near where a shot landed." Biden went on to say that some sort of projectile "landed" outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said. "No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn't that kind of thing," he told the Hill. "It's not like I had someone holding a gun to my head." In September, Biden again raised eyebrows with another story about his exploits in war zones -- this time on "the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where my helicopter was forced down." "If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are." But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden's visit to Afghanistan in February 2008. Fighter jets kept watch overhead while a convoy of security vehicles was dispatched to retrieve Biden and fellow Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Kerry. "We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn't have to," joked Kerry, a Democrat, to the AP. "Other than getting a little cold, it was fine." My memory is pretty sharp most of the time (ahem, no comments please) so I have a tendency to think everyone else has been around that long too. Or at least has heard of "those days." I was talking to a class about alcohol poisoning and asked how many remembered Roy Rogers. They all looked at each other in puzzlement and shook their heads. I understood they weren't around then but not to have heard of him? Never on TV? No parent talk about him? Nothing about stuffing Trigger? Then somehow the discussion came around to books and I said something about "bodice rippers" and again, got the blank look. Now I KNOW that's a recent term (I just used it on another blog referring to pirates and it reminded me of the discussion.) So what's up? Out of step? Out of time? That's all right though, their time is coming. I sincerely hope when they get my age they get in a discussion with youngsters and when they ask a question about a previous time they get that same puzzled look. Too bad I won't be around to get revenge and say "HA, I told you your turn would come."
Folks, I'm about to give up blogging here on any kind of regular basis. It doesn't matter which computer I'm on or which browser I use the time spent waiting for posts to post and pages to load just isn't worth it any more. I've cleared the cache of all temp internet files and cookies, run spyware, run virus checks, shut down the whole system to give the computers, the modem and the router time to reboot. Unless it's my connection, I don't know what else to try. I've written posts and gone off to do other things while it loads. Somtimes it's 30 seconds, somtimes minutes and sometimes it just locks up. My patience is at an end. I know we have some computer gurus on here so if anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate hearing them. Caught this on the money news this morning. Check this guy out, he shared with employees.. Enjoy folks.
Four Great Religious Truths During these serious times, people of all faiths should remember these four great religious truths: 1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God's chosen people. 2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. 3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian world. 4. Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.
"Later, President Obama told an audience in Strasbourg that the US and Europe had allowed the alliance to drift in recent years. He said the US had been “arrogant” and “dismissive” towards its allies, while there was “insidious” anti-Americanism in Europe. He said these attitudes had to change." Do you believe an American president should speak of US citizens that way? Just a reminder to all bloggers and TBC staff. This coming Saturday..that's right, day after tomorrow. 11 AM but you can come as early as you like. Witters and I will be there around 10 to sort of set up. I'll be looking for some sort of attraction to show you where we are and will post it this evening. Bring the kids, bring the family, bring your own main course (hot dogs or hamburgers) and any side dish you like. Don't feel obligated to bring for others (salads or such) as this is strictly a non organized happenin'. Jastro park, start on 18th street and look for us. |
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