If the shipments stop, North Korea would be within its rights to stop disabling its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and resume producing plutonium for weapons.And the Norks should test their first one on the NYTimes. Well, not in New York. Maybe at an off-site. In, like, Pyongyang.
Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.You're goddamn right it's Hamas' fault, and Israel should bomb 'em back to the stone age (not very far, to be sure).
Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann told KSSK radio that Obama is in one of the "most secure places, so he'll be OK." The mayor said he talked to Obama at 9:30 p.m., and that Obama said he was fine and planned to go to bed and sleep through the blackout, The Honolulu Advertiser reported on its Web site. (Emphasis mine.)Ya gotcha a real leader there, America. If he had any real sense of service he'd volunteer during the blackout.
What happens to a person when elected to Congress? He (or she) arrives on the steps of the Capitol with the intentions of making changes that will improve the lives of those who elected him. He promises to be the new voice of the people; he promises to reduce spending, and he promises to make a difference.
After a few years, when the elected official is questioned about his promises, he dodges the questions. He's learned how to deliver an answer without really answering the question. When a news crew follows him through the halls of the Capitol building, he's always in a hurry to get to a meeting and does not have time to speak with anyone. He has forgotten where he came from.
I believe there is an Evil Force that hides in the nooks and crannies of the Capitol Building and only elected officials are affected by the Evil Force. This evil force slides along the hallway walls, moving from office to office like the plague. The Evil Force turns elected officials into greedy, selfish, self-centered zombies of the Evil Force.
It is no longer about those who elected him, it is all about him. The economy is slowing down, the stock market is dropping like a rock and thousands of people are losing their jobs, savings, and retirements.
The zombies of the Evil Force have voted themselves a raise.
They are calling it a "cost of living" raise that will increase the annual salary of zombies of the Evil Force by $3,400 to a total of $158,103 per year.
I ask you, how could a person in his right mind sit there and vote "Yea" on giving himself a raise? The Evil Force makes idiots out of what might otherwise be sane, normal people. I can think of no justification they could make that I would accept or believe. Their pictures should hang on a Wall of Shame in the halls of Congress.
And for the record, I say "throw the bastards out". -- Texan in Wisconsin
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to deploy three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over a proposed near-term “surge” of spec ops forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.
The National Security Council’s surge proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.
Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the so-called “war czar”...
...the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies. (Emphasis mine)My buddy COB6 will tell ya that soldiers, especially SOF, are meant to be used to take it to the enemy -- quickly, violently, and overwhelmingly. His actual words about SOF are "with surgical, extreme violence". Let's quit arguing about the role, and start thinking about the GOAL.
Labor officials said they were considering filing a lawsuit to prevent job losses."We definitely think we have grounds for filing an unfair labor charge," said Jim Herron Zamora, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, Local 1000, the largest state employee union. "Our contract doesn't allow him to do this."
That's the same union that Blago was trying to extort money from.
Gee, take a 10% paycut or lose my job entirely -- which one do I chose?
How are those union dues working for ya?
It seems that some people have taken it upon themselves to create a program to endorse Santa Claus as black for black children. They are trying to get me to believe that without Santa Claus being black, these children are somehow deprived of the true meaning of Christmas and Santa Claus.
I can hear it now, “Judge, my client is not guilty of this armed robbery because he was denied his constitutional rights as a black child by the local mall not providing a black Santa for him to sit on his lap and express his wishes.”
Are we now to have a numerous lines at the malls for those wishing to see a black Santa Claus, Chinese Santa Claus, White Santa Claus, Hispanic Santa Claus? And hey, what about a Santa Claus for Gay and Lesbians? Why stop there?
To all the people reading this email, give me a break. Go to your local library, get on the internet and look up the cultural history of Santa Claus. Facts are facts, he was white.
I have one last question:
If your Santa Claus can be black, can my Martin Luther King be white?
Barack Obama has proven that a minority can rise to the highest position in this country. This should prove to every black person, no matter what their means, that they too can succeed if they work at it.
They should no longer be allowed to enter our universities with lower scores just to fill an Affirmative Action quota. A black male should no longer have an advantage over black females and none of them should have an advantage over anyone else just because of the color of his skin.
Remember what the Declaration of Independence says ….”that all men are created equal.”
From THE BOSS:
The unions of today are a far cry from what my grandfather and others fought for many years ago. I am sure my grandfather is turning in his grave at what the UAW has become and what it represents in the minds of most people.
I was born into a Union family in Detroit. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Overpass. I listened to many stories from my grandmother about how grandpa would come home bruised and bloody on numerous occasions and how she would doctor his wounds and care for him, only to have him go right back to work and fight for the union again.
He fought to protect the workers' safety on the job and he fought for the rights of the workers to be financially taken care of if hurt on the job. He fought for what each one of us expect today from our employers; it wasn't always so.
There is a government agency called OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) this agency was formed in 1970 as part of the Department of Labor. In 1970, the United States Congress passed the Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act. As a result, OSHA was formed.
The Act required that "every employer under the Act furnish to his employees employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees" (29 CFR 1903.1). This passage is commonly known as the General Duty Clause.
Prior to OSHA, it was the Unions that made the employers provide a safe workplace for the employees.
So where and when did the Unions go wrong? Who is at fault for the union mess we are in today? Where should I begin? It was not one person but one thing that cascaded into this dismal mess we see today: greed. Greed on the part of those that formed the administration of the union, those men that left the factory floor to run and manage the UAW. Could I name names? You bet; I knew them all. I am glad to say that my grandfather was not one of them. When given the opportunity to leave the factory assembly line and become part of management of the UAW my grandfather said "no", he wanted to stay in the factory as a UAW representative to make sure the employers followed through on their promises to the workers and to make sure the safety changes were made. He spent the rest of his life doing just that.
During these past weeks, it has pissed me off to no end to listen to Congress belittle and chastise the heads of the big three auto makers. Is there fault on their part for the financial mess they are in? The obvious answer is "yes" but to what degree?
Why isn't Congress bringing the UAW executives to the hill? Why are they not tearing them up and spitting them out like they did to the big three CEO's? There is enough blame to go around and in my mind the bulk of it belongs at the feet of the UAW. These men should be forced to resign their positions and the government should put a Union Czar in place just like the Car Czar who will oversee the big three.
Do I still believe that Unions are a good thing for the American work force? My answer is "yes"? I still believe in protection for the workers, and now with the government stepping in I believe it is more important. I can only hope that those at the helm of the UAW will go back to their roots and help lead the car companies out of this mess instead of creating more. This is no longer about them (UAW), it is about the survival of the American auto industry.
As I said at the beginning of this post, my grandfather is turning in his grave as to what has become a once highly respected part of the auto industry.
"Well, it’s a great drama. It doesn’t have a political axe to grind, and yet you know, it speaks to democracy, the media, the way it all works in the modern era. The only thing that’s kind of quaint about the story at all is the fact that, you know, uh, that the Nixon crimes pale by comparison, with uh, with uh, um, um, [picks up pen] you know, what we’ve been reading about and hearing about in the last few years. Uh, and yet, it also reminds us that abuse of power at any level cannot be accepted, and, so if there’s a political point to be made, you know, I’d say it’s nonpartisan, but that’s the point."Opie, STFU, will ya? Bush can waterboard all he wants, and listen in on international phone calls, and he's broken no laws. You bumbled and stumbled through trying to say that he has committed crimes, yet you couldn't even bring yourself to say it directly when asked. That's because you know it's not true, you freaking moron.
