My Stupid Soapbox

Happy Elvismas!!!

2007-01-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

Happy Elvismas!!!

Elvis was born on January 8.

“And it came to pass that in the winter of 1935, the shadow of a Great Depression lay over all the land. And nowhere was this Depression more deeply felt than in Mississippi, in the dark days of the Deep South. For it was there, in the little town of Tupelo, that Papa Vern and Mama Gladys were dwelling in a tiny, two-room wooden shack among the poorest of the poor.

Their faces were gaunt and careworn and their spirits were heavy for they had not two sticks to rub together to make a fire, and they were reviled as outcasts known cruelly as white trash. Papa Vern was greatly dejected and unemployed and engaged in all manner of scams to survive. And his heart trembled for the future, for Mama Gladys was big with child. And when her time was upon her, the midwife was called, and that night of the holy birth would bring both joy and tragedy. For Mama Gladys was delivered of twins and the first was stillborn. And he was called Jesse and was later buried in an unmarked grave, in a shoebox tied with a red ribbon.

The second son was called Elvis and He survived.

Yet the outcome was long in doubt for both Mama Gladys and the baby Elvis were weakened by the terrible ordeal of His birth and the death of His twin brother. But even as the tiny Elvis fought for His life, wailing louder than the cold wind outside the dismal shanty, many miracles did occur which heralded His arrival.

A mysterious blue light appeared outside the shack that was seen by Papa Vern and Mama Gladys. And the light was seen also by three wandering musicians who had followed it from afar. They appeared at the door bearing humble gifts for they were but poor and itinerant bluesmen. The first was named Furry and he offered a gallon of wine to warm the family and keep from them the chill of the drafty shack. The second was named John Lee and he brought pills of many colors which would keep the family awake and alert during the long hours of their vigil over their newborn son. The third was named Robert and he was the greatest musician of all. And his gift was the most precious of the three, a great can of oil, which Mama Gladys used forever after to fry the foods that would make her son grow big and strong.

And after they bestowed their gifts, the three bluesmen gazed upon the baby Elvis, saying, ‘Let us give praise for this miraculous babe for, surely, on this day and in this unknown shack in the little town of Tupelo, one is born who will reveal to the world a new way of music, and all the world shall some day proclaim Him King.”

And so it was to be. Amen. Celebrate Him this Holy Day of Twinity in the Sprit of The Rock. For he is Elvis, our Rock and our Roll.

Today's Rachel

2007-01-02T22:34:00.000-08:00

College Football Playoff System

2007-01-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

OK.

I figured out how to make a playoff system for college football work.

The highlights of this plan

16 teams make the tournament - 5 At large bids and 11 conference winners
All the major bowls are preserved.
All major bowls are played in the first round.
Conference winners get automatic bids to bowls that they are affiliated with traditionally. PAC10 & BIG 10 will ALWAYS play each other in the ROSE Bowl on New Years Day. The SEC goes to the Sugar, the ACC to the Orange, BIG 12 to the Fiesta. New affiliations are made with other conferences like the MWC and the Cotton Bowl.
There is still an orgy of football on 12/31, 1/1, and 1/2.
The second and third rounds are on different days than the NFL playoffs.
The national championship game is on the weekend between the AFC & NFC Championship games and the Super Bowl.

Drawbacks

Tournament must be seeded every year to ensure a fair playing field or announced well in advance to ensure that the matchups are random.
The ROSE Bowl game is a tough first round matchup for both teams placing them at a competitive disadvantage. But hey! There are no easy roads to the national championship.
There are two weeks between the semi finals and the championship game.
Some bowls may be moved from day to day each year to make the schedule work.
There is no AUTOMATIC place for Notre Dame. Join a conference fellas!

You're Welcome!

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww

2006-12-24T00:33:00.000-08:00

Here are Rachel's Christmas presents to her mom and dad.

For the #1 (and only) fan of the blog

2006-12-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

Hi Kelli!

Surprise! Electronic voting machines make mistakes in early voting!

2006-11-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

I wonder which party benefits from these mistakes? Oh yeah, the REPUBLICANS!

All Four Major E-Voting Machines Flip Votes in Early Voting

By Warren Stewart, VoteTrustUSA

November 05, 2006

Early voting in five states showed that voters' choice are being flipped to the opposite candidate on all four major e-voting machines — Diebold TSx, Sequoia Edge, ES&S iVotronic, and Hart InterCivic eSlate.

Three counties in Texas report vote-flipping on the Diebold and ES&S machines. Three counties in Florida report vote-flipping on the ES&S and Sequoia machines. One county in Illinois, on the Sequioa Edge, and one county in Arkansas, on the ES&S iVotronic.
In some cases, when the voter selects one candidate, the machine shows an opponent is selected instead.

A South Florida voter reports:

"When I touched the one [button] for the Democratic vote, that button disappeared and the vote went to the Republican."

And from Illinois:

"Corrine Stoker pushed the button for one candidate, but her voting machine showed she voted for the opponent."

In other cases, the votes are reported wrong on the review screen. From Texas:

"El Paso County Attorney José Rodríguez said 16 people complained Friday that a vote cast on their touch-screen ballot was the wrong vote when they reviewed their ballots."

And from Florida:

"He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist."

Douglas Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa, says he's heard similar stories from voters in several states, including one computer scientist in South Carolina who said that his attempts to vote for one candidate on the iVotronic were repeatedly changed to an opposing candidate by the time he got to the voter verification screen."

Officials normally explain the vote-flipping as calibration errors — touches on the screen are simply registering incorrectly They point to the 15-step process that poll workers can do to re-calibrate the screen.

But vote-flipping on the eSlate can't be explained as a calibration error, since the eSlate doesn't have a touch screen. Voters use physical dials and buttons to move the highlight on the screen and make their selections.

A professor at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky (Calloway County) used the eSlate in early voting and reports that his straight-party votes were switched to the opposite party in contested races:

"I tried to vote a straight ticket, but when I checked the final page, which summarizes one's vote, I noticed that I had voted for some of the candidates of the other party. I went to the first screen again and ticked the straight ticket box for the Democratic party, and, again, I found that for all of the contested races the Republican boxes were ticked.

"I had to go through individually to tick the Democratic boxes. I'm not a Democrat, and I don't suspect vast right-wing some conspiracy. I'm just telling those of you who will be voting soon to check the summarizing page carefully, regardless of your voting preferences."

UPDATE Now the ES&S iVotronics in Sarasota County Florida aren't flipping, just deleting votes from the summary screen. Several people from different polling places report that their votes for Jennings (Dem candidate for 13 Cong Dist) don't appear on the review screen. They have to go back and vote for her again.

Hey I wonder why the vote totals are wrong? (don't think, sleeeeeeeep)

2006-11-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Look kids, the Republicans are already casting doubt on the veracity of exit polls! Exit polls are the same tools that are used to determine if election fraud has occured in other countries. The latest example is in the Ukraine in 2004 where the fixed election was overturned.

I wonder if the exit polls will match the vote totals in areas that have electronic voting systems that cannot be audited? It's funny how the GOP cites instances where the exit polls did not match vote totals in 2002 & 2004. Maybe it's because there were irregularities during those elections as well.

Keep an eye on the irregularities, dirty tricks, and vote totals today. In 2004 all of teh "computer glitches" seemed to break in favor of the Republican party. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. That's curious! If they were true computer malfunctions shouldn't they have favored the Democrats half the time?

This information page is one part of the Public Relations strategy of "crafting a narrative". Partisan hacks use these "factual" examples (otherwise known as talking points) to defend why the Republicans kept control of one or both houses of Congress. The other part of this narrative is the focus on polls that show the national race tightening. If you have been on Drudgereport the last few days you have seen what I mean.

FYI the bullshit stream flows this way.
RNC headquarters to Drudge (and other righty bloggers) to conservative talk radio to Fox News to other cable news outlets to the networks and major newspapers. Sometimes the bullshit stream stops at Fox News. In that case it is called "energizing the Republican base".

I can see a talking head on TV tonight at 11pm saying, "Well, I guess the exit polls were wrong again and the races really were closer than we thought. The Republicans did make a surge in the last week. I think we are seeing the effect of the Saddam Hussein verdict and John Kerry's gaffe about the troops."

Sweet Jesus I hope I am wrong and paraniod.

From GOP.com

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Beware Of Exit Polls

BEWARE OF EXIT POLLS

Biased And Inaccurate Predictions Have Led To Poor
GOP Exit Poll Showings In Past Three National Elections
_______________________________________

FAST FACTS ON EXIT POLLING

Election Experts Believe Exit Polls Give An Edge And Sway Towards Democrat Candidates.
National Exit Polls Will Skew In Favor Of Democrats This Year, Due To Large Numbers Of Uncontested Democrat Seats In The House Of Representatives.
Early Exit Polling Returns In 2004 Were Widely Inaccurate, Declaring Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) To Be The Next President Of The United States And Republicans Barely Holding A One Seat Majority In The U.S. Senate.
In The 2002 Midterm Elections, Exit Polling Produced Unusable Data.
In 2000, Exit Polling Malfunctioned And Incorrectly Projecting Vice President Al Gore As The Winner Of The Crucial Battleground State Of Florida.

EXIT POLLS TRADITIONALLY HAVE A DEMOCRAT BIAS

Exit Polls Give Democrats An Edge:

Exit Polling Always Tends To "Give An Edge To Democratic Candidates." President of Mitofsky International, Warren Mitofsky: "Mitofsky said exit polls have always tended to give an edge to Democratic candidates ..." (John Cook, "Early Exit Polls Overstated Kerry Results, Media Group Says," Chicago Tribune, 1/20/05)

"[Mitofsky] Said That For Reasons That Remain Unclear, Democratic Voters Are More Likely Than Republicans To Agree To Interview Requests From Pollsters." (John Cook, "Early Exit Polls Overstated Kerry Results, Media Group Says," Chicago Tribune, 1/20/05)

Democrats More Likely Than Republicans To Respond To Exit Polls:

October 2006 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll Found Democrats Were More Likely To Respond To Exit Polls Than Republicans.

72% Of Democrats Responded They Were Very Or Somewhat Likely To Fill Out Questionnaire, Compared To 66% Of Republicans. (Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, 10/26/06)
44% Of Democrats Claimed They Were Very Likely To Fill Out Exit Poll Survey, Compared To 35% Of Republicans. (Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, 10/26/06)
Democrats (37%-10%) And Republicans (25%-18%) Agreed That Democrats Are More Likely To Share How They Voted With A Pollster They Do Not Know. (Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, 10/26/06)

In 2006, Exit Polls Skew In Favor Of Democrats, Due To Large Numbers Of Uncontested Seats In The House:

In 2006, There Are Over 40 Uncontested Democrat Seats And 10 Uncontested GOP Seats, Which Will Overstate National Democrat House Vote In Exit Polling. (National Journal Website, www.nationaljournal.com, Accessed 11/6/06)

In 2004, There Were 39 Uncontested Republican Seats, Compared To 30 Uncontested Democrat Seats. (National Journal Website, www.nationaljournal.com, Accessed 11/6/06)
In 2002, There Were 45 Uncontested Republican Seats, Compared To 36 Uncontested Democrat Seats. (National Journal Website, www.nationaljournal.com, Accessed 11/6/06)

IN 2004, EXIT POLLING PREDICTED OVERWHELMING DEMOCRAT VICTORIES

In 2004, Exit Polls "Got All Of The Bush States Wrong" - Predictions Were "Most Skewed" Since Exit Polling Began:

Exit Polls Showed Across-The-Board Failure. "[T]he networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just one of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong." (Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, 11/4/04)

"It Was Dej? Vu All Over Again With Major Embarrassment For Exit Pollsters Since It Was Clear That They Way Underestimated Bush's Support In States Like Virginia That The President Won Handily Once The Real Vote Came In." (Deborah Orin et. al., "Voters Choose Double Dubya," New York Post, 11/3/04)

USA Today: "In fact, the 2004 numbers were the most skewed since joint exit polling began in the 1980s." (Editorial, "Exit Polls' Cloud Crystal Ball," USA Today, 1/20/05)

The [Cleveland, OH] Plain Dealer: "Add in poor weather, data programming errors and other technical glitches, and the end product, calculated to give major news operations an inside glimmer as to which way the vote was going, instead produced the most inaccurate information in the past five presidential elections." (Editorial, "The Pollsters Were Pole-Axed," The [Cleveland, OH] Plain Dealer, 1/23/05)
San Francisco Chronicle: "If exit polls have a role at all, they need to be staged carefully and handled with caution. Along with improved methods, the report [by firms who came up with flawed 2004 exit polls] suggested that no numbers be released to news organizations until near the end of Election Day. That's the least poll-takers can do." (Editorial, "Exit-Poll Errors," San Francisco Chronicle, 1/21/05)

In 2004, National Election Pool (NEP) Incorrectly Projected Victories For Sen. John Kerry (D-MA):

"ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, And NBC ... Created The National Election Pool To Provide Tabulated Vote Counts And Exit Poll Surveys ... These Six Major News Organization, In A Joint Decision ... Appointed Edison Media Research And Mitofsky International As The Sole Provider Of Exit Polls ..." (Exit-Poll.net Website, http://www.exit-poll.net/, Accessed 10/24/06)

"In The 32 States With Exit Poll Estimates For Both A Presidential Race And A Senate Race The Average Error On The Difference Between The Top Two Candidates Was 5.0 Points In The Democratic Direction For President And 3.6 Points In The Democratic Direction For Senate." (Edison Media Research And Mitofsky International, "Evaluation Of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 For The National Election Pool," 1/19/05, p. 20)

Iowa: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 1% - President Bush Carried Iowa By .7%;
Nevada: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 1.4% - President Bush Carried Nevada By 2.6%;
New Mexico: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 4.2%- President Bush Carried New Mexico By .8%;
Ohio: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 6.5% - President Bush Carried By 2.1%;
Virginia: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 0.5% - President Bush Carried Virginia By 8.2%. (Edison Media Research And Mitofsky International, "Evaluation Of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 For The National Election Pool," 1/19/05, p. 21-22)

NEP's Exit Poll Projections Underestimated President Bush's Support In Several Key States:

Minnesota: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 14.3% -- Sen. Kerry Won By 3.5%;
New Hampshire: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 15% -- Sen. Kerry Won By 1.4%;
North Carolina: NEP Projected President Bush Winning By 3.6% -- President Bush Won By 12.4%;
Pennsylvania: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 13.8% -- Sen. Kerry Won By 2.3%;
Wisconsin: NEP Projected Sen. Kerry Winning By 5.7% -- Sen. Kerry Won By .4%. (Edison Media Research And Mitofsky International, "Evaluation Of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 For The National Election Pool," 1/19/05, p. 21-22)

NEP's Exit Poll Projections Had Republicans Winning Only 51 Senate Seats Instead Of 55 Seats They Hold Now:

Alaska: NEP Projected Former Gov. Tony Knowles (D-AK) Senate Victory; Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) Won;
Florida: NEP Projected Dem Betty Castor (D-FL) Senate Victory; Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) Won;
Kentucky: NEP Projected Dem Dan Mongiardo (D-KY) Senate Victory; Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) Won;
North Carolina: NEP Projected Dem Erskine Bowles (D-NC) Senate Victory; Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) Won. (Edison Media Research And Mitofsky International, "Evaluation Of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 For The National Election Pool," 1/19/05, p. 23)

Political Professionals Agree 2004 Highlighted Exit Polling's Failures:

Zogby International's John Zogby: "I'm not sure that I will ever believe an exit poll again ... How could they have been so way off? They were worse than virtually every pre-election poll." (John Cook, "Early Exit Polls Overstated Kerry Results, Media Group Says," Chicago Tribune, 1/20/05)

Zogby: "The sum total of what we got today is enough to suggest that there should never be exit polls again." (Donald Lambro, "Polling Firms Blame Youth, Leaks For Errors," The Washington Times, 1/20/05)

The Washington Post's Director Of Polling Richard Morin: "[T]he 2004 election may have finally stripped exit polling of its reputation as the crown jewel of political surveys, somehow immune from the myriad problems that affect telephone polls and other types of public opinion surveys." (Richard Morin, Op-Ed, "Surveying The Damage," The Washington Post, 11/21/04)

Morin: "Instead, this face-to-face, catch-the-voters-on-the-way-out poll has been revealed for what it is: just another poll, with all the problems and imperfections endemic to the craft." (Richard Morin, Op-Ed, "Surveying The Damage," The Washington Post, 11/21/04)

President Of Mason-Dixon Polling Firm Brad Corker: "Exit Polls Are Often Wrong". "[B]rad Coker, president of the Mason-Dixon polling firm that called Bush's 2.5-percentage-point win in Ohio practically right on the nose for The Plain Dealer, says ... exit polls are often wrong." (Ted Diadiun, "Rest Assured, We Checked Out Election 2004 Thoroughly," The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer, 6/18/06)

"Herb Asher, An Ohio State University Political Scientist, Said Election Results Don't Necessarily Reflect Exit Polls." (John Nolan, "Forty Voters Want November Election Results Thrown Out," The Associated Press, 12/14/04)

Asher: "We all know that exit polls can be wrong. Exit polls are basically a sample." (John Nolan, "Forty Voters Want November Election Results Thrown Out," The Associated Press, 12/14/04)

CNN's Bill Schneider: "The lesson here is put not your faith in exit polls ... particularly if the exit poll is close ... Exit polls are designed for analysis. ... They are not very good ..." (William Douglas, "Turnout: The Early Exit Polls Mostly Wrong," Detroit Free Press, 11/4/04)

Then-CNN Anchor Judy Woodruff: "People want to jump on (exit polls) because they are the first little sliver, little shred of evidence ... It's dangerous to seize on those numbers and assume anything - and yet that's what happened." (Michelle Mittelstadt, "Exit Poll Group Assailed For Erroneous Early Results," The Dallas Morning News, 11/4/04)

Pollster Andrew Kohut: "[D]oing [exit polls] on the fly has led us astray." (Michelle Mittelstadt, "Exit Poll Group Assailed For Erroneous Early Results," The Dallas Morning News, 11/4/04)

EXIT POLLS WERE ALSO WIDELY INACCURATE IN 2002 AND 2000 ELECTIONS

FLASHBACK FACT: In 2002 Midterms, Exit Polls Were Scrapped Due To Inaccuracy:

VNS Consortium Scrapped 2002 National Exit Polls Because It Could Not Guarantee Accuracy. "Voter News Service abandoned its state and national exit poll plans for Election Night, saying it could not guarantee the accuracy of the analysis which media organizations use to help explain why people voted as they did." ("VNS Abandons National Exit Poll Operation, A Setback For Revamped Elections System," The Associated Press, 11/6/02)

"The Exit Poll Failure Was A Major Setback For VNS - A Consortium Consisting Of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox And The AP. VNS Had Completely Rebuilt Its System In Response To The 2000 Election, When Television Networks Twice Used Its Information To Make Wrong Calls In The Decisive Florida Vote For The Presidential Election." ("VNS Abandons National Exit Poll Operation, A Setback For Revamped Elections System," The Associated Press, 11/6/02)
Zogby International's John Zogby: "The early [2002] exit-poll data was awful. ... And it came with the caveat that it was unreliable. Can you imagine a doctor saying that about a diagnosis? What a mess!" (Beth Gillin, "Media Organizations Discuss What Went Wrong With Exit-Poll Service," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 11/7/02)

FLASHBACK FACT: In 2000 Presidential Campaign, Exit Polls Were Badly Flawed In Critical State Of Florida:

In 2000, Exit Polls Were Badly Flawed In Critical State Of Florida. "[S]ome bad assumptions led Voter News Service, the television network exit poll consortium, to make and then retract two dramatic election-night predictions on the winner of the presidential race in Florida." (Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, "Why The Fla. Exit Polls Were Wrong," The Washington Post, 11/8/00)

Networks Blame Incorrect Projections On Erroneous Exit Polling. "[The networks] concluded the problems were largely due to bad information supplied by Voter News Service, an exit poll consortium run by television networks and Associated Press." (Elizabeth Jensen and Megan Garvey, "TV Election Gaffes Called Statistical, Not Political," Los Angeles Times, 2/9/01)
- CBS' Director Of Surveys Kathy Frankovic: "In the Tampa area, the exit poll results from the [sample] precincts turned out to be more Democratic than the vote turned out to be." (Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, "Why The Fla. Exit Polls Were Wrong," The Washington Post, 11/8/00)

Experts Lament Exit Polling's "Poor" Predictions In 2000. "Paul Biemer, a statistician hired to review the VNS methodology, reported that 49 percent of those surveyed leaving the polls declined to respond. In the parlance of his trade, Mr. Biemer said 'a non-response rate of this magnitude is a potential source of statistical bias in the model projections ...' In other words, exit polls are poor predictors." (Jules Witcover, Op-Ed, "Voters Don't Need Instant TV Results," The [Baltimore, MD] Sun, 2/16/01)

Faulty Media Reports In 2000 Impacted Florida Panhandle And Congressional Races:

"About 7:50 P.M. EST Tuesday, Less Than An Hour After Most Of The Polls Closed In Florida, Both CBS And NBC Declared Mr. Gore The Winner In That State, A Decision Based Largely Upon Exit Polls Conducted By Voter News Service. Fox News, CNN And ABC Followed Within Minutes." (John Godfrey, "Tauzin Plans Hearings On Gaffe," The Washington Times, 11/10/00)

"A Survey Conducted By John McLaughlin & Associates Found That The Early And Incorrect News Network Announcements Declaring Al Gore The Winner In Florida May Have Influenced Thousands Of Last-Minute Voters In The Central Time Zone Section Of The Florida Panhandle Not To Vote. The Premature Announcement Discouraged Many Registered Voters Who, According To [The] Survey's Results, Would Have Voted Like The Rest Of Their Neighbors - Overwhelmingly For George W. Bush." (McLaughlin & Associates Website, "Panhandle Poll Summary," www.mclaughlinonline.com, Press Release,

Thanks for Giving! (especially on such short notice)

2006-11-04T00:16:00.000-08:00

Rachel raised $210 for the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk on Octover 22nd. I would like to publicly thank the following folks for giving to this worthy cause.

Steve
Aunt Sharon
Uncle Don & Aunt Elaine
Winston & Mary
Autumn
Nicole
Ed & Cheri
Ginsu

Here is a pic of Angela and Rachel at the walk.

4 Days until Election day...

2006-11-04T00:08:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of election season posts for you

Fox wants to scare you to the polls

Go ahead, try to say it in one breath....

Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk 10/22

2006-10-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

A message from Rachel

My mommy and daddy (Angela & Graham) are walking with me in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk this Sunday. We need YOUR support to make sure that I never have to worry about this disease when I get older.

I am walking because I never met my Great Aunt Irene who had this disease. I will be wearing her name during the walk to honor her courage and memory. If you would like me to honor a friend or a relative of yours please send me their name when you make a pledge (send the name to grahamstewart@usa.net). I promise to send a cute picture of myself modeling the name of the person you want to remember or the survivor you want to honor.

All donations go to the American Cancer Society to fight breast cancer in our community. Please give what you can, any amount is appreciated.

Love,
Rachel

PS If you get this email after Sunday 10/22 you can still donate on my page.

Click here to visit my personal page.
If the text above does not appear as a clickable link, you can visit the web address:
http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?px=1242704&pg=personal&fr_id=2130&et=5legRltM7lRkBcBYx6Sb1w..&s_tafId=60381

Big Fish and Pumpkins

2006-10-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

Large number of Put Options for 10/6

2006-10-02T23:40:00.000-07:00

I have no idea if this is bad news or not

Apparently there have been a large number of PUT OPTIONS taken out for 10/6/06. Basically, a PUT OPTION is when someone is betting that the stock or commodities market is going to go down. A PUT OPTION is a bet that there will be a drop in value for a specific stock, fund, or commodity (I think).

Why would there be a larger number of options taken out for that day, does somebody know something that the rest of us don't?

DIRECT LINK

(REPOST) PUTS FORECAST OCT. SURPRISE?

Monday, October 02, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com

INITIAL POST 09.30.06

A faithful reader and commentator, "A. Magnus" writes the following email, posted to FMNN General Feedback:

"Do you like October suprises? Is there a big bang coming to hit the markets? If you believe that those in the know use insider information before major events then you might be interested on the HUGE number of October 6th put options for the big indexes. Check out the concentrated puts on the Diamonds DOW Trust (DIA):

https://fastquote.fidelity.com/webxpress/ia_optionchain_frameset.phtml?priced=Y&SID_VALUE_ID=DIA

Ditto for the S&P Depository Receipts (SPY):

https://fastquote.fidelity.com/webxpress/ia_optionchain_frameset.phtml?priced=Y&SID_VALUE_ID=SPY

And the NASDAQ (QQQQ):
https://fastquote.fidelity.com/webxpress/ia_optionchain_frameset.phtml?priced=Y&SID_VALUE_ID=QQQQ

Even the Market Vectors Gold Miners has significant puts for October 6th:

https://fastquote.fidelity.com/webxpress/ia_optionchain_frameset.phtml?priced=Y&SID_VALUE_ID=GDX

Make no mistake - something wicked this way comes, and the smart money has already taken preventative steps."
Staff&nbspSelections - Links

Web Address: http://www.FreeMarketNews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=22476

Rachel Pics

2006-10-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

If we weren't fighting them in Iraq, they would be here in America....

2006-09-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

I just watched a clip of the majority leader in the House of Representatives talking about our mission in Iraq. John Boehner said that Iraq was important because if we were not fighting the terrorists in Iraq then they would be in Boston or New York.

Personally, I am sick and tired of this illogical argument. If anyone is stupid enough to mutter this around me I will give them the following:

If a terrorist really hated America and wanted to kill us why would he go to Iraq, where we have 130,000 troops with state of the art equipment, to kill Americans. Isn't it easier to walk down the street in Boston, New York, or Miami and suicide bomb a cafe?

POP QUIZ

Which will get more attention and cause more TERROR, killing a handful of well armed soldiers in Iraq that will be ignored by the media, or splattering tourists all over Fisherman's Wharf in San Fransisco?

ANSWER

Terrorists are crazy, not stupid. They would pick the event that had the most impact. Just because they have not hit us here in the US since the Anthrax attacks of 10/2001 does not mean that the strategy in Iraq is working. The same assholes are trying just as hard to attack America on our own soil. They don't care about the sideshow in Iraq. Being able to operate a terrorist campain in Baghdad does not have the same impact as an attack on US soil. And they know it.

A textbook definition of cowardice

2006-09-27T16:10:00.001-07:00

A textbook definition of cowardice

Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News interview

SPECIAL COMMENT

By Keith Olbermann

Anchor, 'Countdown'

MSNBC

Updated: 6:01 a.m. MT Sept 26, 2006

The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong.

It is not essential that a past president, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President’s portable public chorus has described his predecessor’s tone as “crazed.”

Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation’s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit.

Nonetheless. The headline is this:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. "That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."

The Bush Administration did not try.

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest “pass” for incompetence and malfeasance in American history!

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs—some of them, 17 years old—before Pearl Harbor.

President Hoover was correctly blamed for—if not the Great Depression itself—then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War—though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this president.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11^th, 2001 -- or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive.

But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.

Except for this.

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts—that he was president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

Consider the timing: the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is—not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it.

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired—but a propagandist, promoted:

Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.

And don’t even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for “e-mailing” you the question.

Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.

He told the great truth untold about this administration’s negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden.

He was brave.

Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.

The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.

Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11." Of that company’s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new and improved history.

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it—who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews—have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog."

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri—the future attorney general—echoed Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?

Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, “All Monica All The Time”?

Who distracted whom?

This is, of course, where—as is inevitable—Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.

The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.

Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since—a statement that might range anywhere from zero, to 100 percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair—writing as George Orwell—gave us in the book “1984.”

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power...

"Power is not a means; it is an end.

"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power… is power."

Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln’s State of the Union address from 1862.

"We must disenthrall ourselves."

Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s sentence.

He might well have.

"We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."

And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.

The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us—then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

Rachel Fix

2006-09-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

Here are some pics of Ray. I will post more soon.

Keith Olbermann sums it all up

2006-09-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

Here is the transcript of Keith Olbermann's special comment on the 9/11/06 edition of Countdown. To see the video go to crooksandliars.

Sept. 11, 2006 | 8:32 p.m. ET

This hole in the ground

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

An Idea to Honor 9/11

2006-09-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

September 11^the should be a day of National Remembrance. The National Day of Remembrance will honor all American victims of terror from Oklahoma City, to the USS Cole, to the embassy attacks in Africa, to September 11th. This will not be a holiday in the traditional sense; there will be no car sales, picnics, or three day weekends. Everybody will go to work. Most of those victims of terror were at work when they died. Their memories are honored by the fact that their fellow citizens refuse to be terrorized and continue on with life as normal as possible.

Workers will give their day’s wages to charity. Whether that charity is local, national, or tied to victims of terror or not is unimportant. What is important is that citizens are giving to their communities honor the innocent victims of these tragedies.

If you do not work on September 11, whether it is a weekend or other day off, you will give one day's labor to charity. Whether you take September 11 and work for eight hours that day or spread your labor over a longer period of time is up to you. What is important is that you pledge to spend one day helping your local or national community above and beyond what you are doing now.

In addition to these acts of giving, Americans will fly their flag on September 11 as a symbol of national unity.

Imagine what one day of giving would do for our country. I plan on starting this year.

Please forward this to your friends and your political representatives.

Sincerely,
Graham Stewart
grahamstewart@usa.net

Today's Buddhist Wisdom

2006-09-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

From beleifnet.com

If we single-pointedly practice great compassion, then, with little effort, we will be able to gain all other virtues.

-Geshe Namgyal Wangchen, "Awakening the Mind"

Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations," www.wisdompubs.org.

Today's Hindu Wisdom

2006-09-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

From beliefnet.com

The ego and the Self dwell as intimate friends in the same body, like two golden birds perched in the same tree. The ego eats the sweet and sour fruits of the tree, while the Self looks on detached. For as long as you identify with the ego, you will feel joy and sorrow. But if you know you are the Self, the Lord of Life, you will be free from suffering; the supreme source of light; the supreme source of love. You will transcend duality and live in a state of Oneness.

-Mundaka Upanishad

Reprinted from "The Wisdom of the Hindu Gurus," edited by Timothy Freke, published by Godsfield Press. The book can be purchased online through Amazon.

Pat Tillman in Sports Illustrated

2006-09-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

Sports Illustrated is running an article about Pat Tillman, the NFL Safety who died from friendly fire as an Army Ranger in Afganistan. It is a well written and compelling story. Here is the first part. Follow the link after the excerpt for the rest of the article. It's long but well worth the read.

Remember His Name

Even as a boy Pat Tillman felt a destiny, a need to do the right thing whatever it cost him. When the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11, he thought about what he had to do and then walked away from the NFL and became an Army Ranger....

By Gary Smith

One day, God willing, Russell Baer was going to tell his son this story. One day, after the boy's heart and brain had healed, he was going to point to that picture on the kid's bedroom shelf of the man doing a handstand on the roof of a house, take a deep breath and say, Mav, that's a man who lived a life as pure and died a death as muddy as any man ever to walk this rock, and I was there for both. That's the man, when your heart stopped for an hour and they slit you open neck to navel, who I prayed to because ... well, because you wouldn't exist if he hadn't died, and I wouldn't be half of who I am if he hadn't taught me how to live. That's Pat Tillman, the man you take your middle name from, and I've been waiting for you to ask since the day you were born.

Russ never got that chance: Maverick Patrick Baer died on Monday. So now Russ has Pat's story stuck in his heart....

Maybe it's best to keep it simple, to start with the day Russ first laid eyes on Pat, keep the moralizing to a minimum and let everyone figure out what Pat's story says about human beings and fear and the country in which we live.

Start with the day, in December 2002, when the big green duffel bags hit the ground in front of the barracks at Fort Lewis in Washington, followed by the boots of the new Rangers joining Russ's platoon, the Black Sheep. Russ watched them, trying to guess which one of the cherries was the famous football player, the one -- truth be told -- he had never heard of until his mates began saying, "Did you hear? Pat Tillman's been assigned here."

Maybe it was because Russ wasn't raised on the religion of NFL Sundays, or because the whole world disappears for a man once the Army begins melting and molding him into a Ranger, but somehow -- even though he had grown up only 40 miles from Pat's home in San Jose -- Russ had never heard of the guy or his much-ballyhooed decision to walk away from the Arizona Cardinals and a $3.6 million contract to enlist in the aftermath of 9/11. So 22-year-old Private First Class Baer kept quiet and listened to the chow-hall chatter.

"I'll treat him just like a normal person," one platoon mate vowed.

"He's nothing special," said another. "I'll make him do push-ups."

"That dude was stupid to give up football," more than a few said. "I'd never do that."

Pat's younger brother, Kevin, fresh out of the Cleveland Indians' farm system, was coming too. Likely a couple of meathead jocks, Russ thought, remembering the big-shot athletes at his high school in Livermore, Calif. It wasn't hard to pick out Pat from the pack of rookie Rangers: Had to be the guy carrying those big green bags into the barracks as if they were marshmallows.

The newbies -- Rangers who hadn't undergone the last and harshest phase of the weeding-out process required to become "tabbed Rangers" -- spent those first two days scurrying like headless chickens, stammering and spilling socks from their bags as officers barked at their heels, outraged by gear that wasn't tied down properly, unit identifiers that weren't sewn onto everything just so. Not the Tillmans. They didn't rattle.

But a man can't walk into a Ranger unit with Pat's self-assurance, reputation and anvil jaw without every antenna on the base going up, probing for arrogance. Russ conducted his own reconnaissance, poking his head into a smelly little squad room to watch Pat receive his lessons. Man, he walked away thinking, he liked Specialist Tillman. Humble, soft-spoken, polite, tuned in; swift to volunteer for crap chores, swift to knock out the 25 push-ups the punks four years younger than he was -- but with one more stripe -- ordered him to do.

Continue reading here

It's all fun and games until there's a buddhist prayer before kickoff

2006-09-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

I'm glad that this guy decided to choose empathy as a response instead of trying to force the "right" kind of prayer into the pre-game ceremony.

Original Link here

Why I'm against
pre-game prayers

Posted: October 14, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By LETTER OF THE WEEK

� 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

I was prompted to write and comment after reading the story on the New Jersey football coach that resigned because he was prohibited from leading his team in pre-game prayers.

Let me start by saying I am an evangelical Christian and have pretty hard-core beliefs about the rights of individuals, particularly students, to express their faith, to include religious themes in their school work, to perform Christian-themed music and dramas during school talent events, etc. If a school administrator had ever tried to stop one of my kids from carrying a Bible, participating in voluntary prayer, or openly discussing their faith with another student, I would have sued him back in to the Stone Age.

You might be surprised then to learn that I am adamantly opposed to teachers and other school officials leading students in prayer or the conduct of prayer rituals, even by students, at officially sanctioned events. Why would I take a position that is seemingly so at odds with my core beliefs?

Throughout the vast majority of the United States, most religious practices and beliefs are rooted in a traditional Judeo-Christian belief system. As such, prayers conducted before a football game or at a graduation ceremony, even if so bland and non-proselytizing as to be meaningless, are generally offered in the context of the traditional Jehovah God of the Old and New Testament. However, that is not the case in all corners of our nation.

I had the privilege of serving our nation's Air Force while assigned to Hickam Air Force Base on the beautiful island of Oahu in the beautiful state of Hawaii. Because of the arrangement of military housing in that location, my family and I actually lived not at Hickam near the Honolulu metropolitan area, but at Wheeler Air Force Base in the central part of the island just out side of the small pineapple-farming town of Wahiawa. In Wahiawa we found a small Baptist church that met our family's needs. However, Christians and others from various Judeo-Christian traditions were in the very distinct minority in this little village that was populated predominantly by people of Japanese and Chinese ancestry. Rather than a church on every corner, as is common in the continental 48 states, Wahiawa had a Shinto or Buddhist shrine on every corner.

Because we worked in the youth department of our church and taught teenage Sunday School classes, we were anxious to be involved in the lives of the students we worked with. So we were quite excited to be able to attend our first football game at Wahiawa High School. Upon our arrival at the stadium it seemed like so many other high school athletic events we had been to in many other places. The teams were warming up, the band was gathering, the ROTC was preparing to raise the colors � a pretty typical fall ritual.

Coming from a fairly traditional Southern upbringing, I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer. But to our extreme dismay, the clergyman who took the microphone and began to pray was not a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest, but a Buddhist priest who proceeded to offer up prayers and intonations to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan.

We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

As I thought through the incident over the next few days I supposed that the duty of offering the pre-game prayer rotated through the local clergy and we just happened to arrive on the night that the responsibility fell to the Buddhist priest. However, after inquiring I learned that due to the predominance of Buddhist and Shinto adherents in this town, it was the normal practice to have a member of one these faiths offer the pre-game prayer, and Christian clergy were never included. Needless to say that was our first and last football game. Although many of the students we worked with continued to invite us to the games, we were forced to decline. We knew that if we were to attend again we would be forced to abstain from the pre-game activity. And not wanting to offend our Asiatic neighbors and colleagues, we simply refrained from attending.

The point is this. I am a professional, educated and responsible man who is strong in his faith and is quite comfortable debating the social and political issues of the day. Yet when placed in a setting where the majority culture proved hostile to my faith and beliefs, I became paralyzed with indecision and could not act decisively to defend and proclaim my own beliefs. I felt instantly ostracized and viewed myself as a foreigner in my own land.

We often advocate the practice of Judeo-Christian rituals in America's public schools by hiding behind the excuse that they are voluntary and any student who doesn't wish to participate can simply remained seated and silent. Oh that this were true. But if I, as a mature adult, would be so confounded and uncomfortable when faced with the decision of observing and standing on my own religious principals or run the risk of offending the majority crowd, I can only imagine what thoughts and confusion must run through the head of the typical child or teenager, for whom peer acceptance is one of the highest ideals.

I would say in love to my Christian brothers and sisters, before you yearn for the imposition of prayer and similar rituals in your public schools, you might consider attending a football game at Wahiawa High School. Because unless you're ready to endure the unwilling exposure of yourself and your children to those beliefs and practices that your own faith forswears, you have no right to insist that others sit in silence and complicity while you do the same to them. I, for one, slept better at night knowing that because Judeo-Christian prayers were not being offered at my children's schools, I didn't have to worry about them being confronted with Buddhist, Shinto, Wiccan, Satanic or any other prayer ritual I might find offensive.

Gary Christenot

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN

2006-09-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Joe gets up at 6 am and fills his coffee pot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their
safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of
his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance -- now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station of his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It's noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at the boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house
didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where is didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is not retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

Adam Carolla vs. Ann Coulter

2006-08-31T23:27:00.000-07:00

This is fantastic

Shatner vs. Stewie - ROCKET MAN!!!

2006-08-31T21:41:00.000-07:00

I can't decide which is funnier....

Shatner

Stewie

Saddam forced to watch 'South Park'

2006-08-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Somehow this all makes sense...

Direct link here

Saddam's cartoon capers

Monday August 28, 08:11 AM

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is being made to watch his appearance in cult cartoon South Park while he is behind bars.

The deposed leader on trial in Iraq was featured in the movie spin-off as the lover of the devil. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut featured Hussein and Satan attempting to take over the world together.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said US Marines guarding the former dictator during his trial for genocide were making him watch the movie "repeatedly".

"I have it on pretty good information from the Marines on detail in Iraq that they showed him the movie last year. That's really adding insult to injury. I bet that made him really happy," Stone said.

Human Nature

2006-08-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

One of the best descriptions of human nature that I have ever heard.

"After all, take any group of nice people on a trip; if five bad things happen to them in a row, they will end up as cannibals."

--- EDWARD N. LUTTWAK - senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of many books, including Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook.

Overcoming Attachment

2006-08-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

From Beliefnet.com

Overcoming attachment does not mean becoming cold and indifferent. On the contrary, it means learning to have relaxed control over our mind through understanding the real causes of happiness and fulfillment, and this enables us to enjoy life more and suffer less.

-Kathleen McDonald, "How to Meditate"

It's funny when it happens to someone else!

2006-08-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

Our Government Screws Wounded Vets

2006-08-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

I sent the following letter to the Sacramento Bee and my representatives in Washington. Please contact your elected officials and press them to restore the funding for this important program. Find our more about TBI here.

I am writing to express my concern that Congress is slashing funding for the research and treatment of brain injuries sustained by American troops in Iraq.

Traumatic Brain Injury causes dizziness, vision, hearing and speech problems, memory loss, and even severe brain damage. Military experts say that one in ten new veterans, or more than one hundred thousand people, suffer from TBI. The 2007 Defense Appropriations bill, which totals close to $400 billion, gives TBI research and treatment only $7 million dollars -- half of what it received last year.

Congress should take immediate action to reinstate funding for this program. If the bill passes as it currently stands, we will have failed the thousands of wounded veterans who have sacrificed so much and served their country so honorably. Contact your congressman to support our troops by giving them what they need once they get home.

Rush is a Dick

2006-08-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

I guess Rush thinks that he is funny...

Click here to hear the audio

Limbaugh handicapped races in new Survivor series, suggested "African-American tribe" worst swimmers, Hispanics "will do things other people won't do"

Summary:

On the August 23 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh suggested that the competition in a new season of CBS' reality TV program Survivor, in which contestants are reportedly divided into competing "tribes" by ethnicity, "is not going to be fair if there's a lot of water events." In support of this assertion, he cited a March 2 HealthDay article reporting that "young blacks -- especially males -- are much more likely to drown in pools than whites."

During the program, Limbaugh suggested that "people at CBS" are "scratch[ing] their heads" and asking whether "the swimming portion" of the new Survivor competition is "going to be fair." When pressed by an African-American caller to identify "[w]hich team ... would be the worst swimmers and why," Limbaugh stated that "the white tribe would be the best swimmers" based on the performance of white athletes at "the Olympics." After apparently disconnecting or cutting the volume level of the caller, Limbaugh said: "[Y]ou're saying I'm being racist because I'm saying blacks can't swim." He further protested: "I mentioned the swimming comment only because it's not going to be fair if there is a lot of water competition in this. It just isn't. It is not a racial or racist comment at all."

In support of his assertion that his comments were "not ... racist," Limbaugh cited a March 2 HealthDay article reporting that "young blacks -- especially males -- are much more likely to drown in pools than whites." But the study on which the HealthDay article was based did not address the swimming abilities of African-Americans in general. HealthDay reported that "[r]esearchers don't know why black kids are at higher risk of drowning," that "[m]ost of the black [drowning] victims ... drowned in public pools," and that "[t]he study didn't examine whether the victims had taken swimming lessons or whether the pools were supervised by lifeguards." Additionally, the article noted that according to the study, "people from poorer families were more likely to drown" -- "regardless of race," and that one author of the study suggested "[f]uture research" will be done to "examine whether swimming instruction reduces the risk of drowning."

Regarding the new Survivor series, Limbaugh also stated that there "are many characteristics ... that you would think would give [the African-American tribe] the lead, and the heads up in terms of skill and athleticism and so forth." He also stated that "our early money" is on "the Hispanic tribe" -- which he said could include "a Cuban," "a Nicaraguan," or "a Mexican or two" -- provided they don't "start fighting for supremacy amongst themselves." Limbaugh added that Hispanics have "probably shown the most survival tactics," that they "have shown a remarkable ability to cross borders" and that they can "do it without water for a long time, they don't get apprehended, and they will do things other people won't do."

Limbaugh also asserted that "the Asian-American tribe" -- whom he called "the brainiacs of the bunch" -- "probably will outsmart everybody," but while "intelligence is one thing ... raw, native understanding of the land -- this is probably why the Native Americans were excluded, because they were at one with the land and they would probably have an unfair advantage."

He added that "the white tribe," "if it behaves as it historically has," will "bring along vials of diseases" and "will wind up oppressing" the other tribes by "deny[ing] them benefits" and "property," but will later "try to put [the other tribes] on some kind of benefit program." He further asserted that if CBS "allows ... cheating" and "oppression," "then of course the white tribe is going to win."

Racial Survivor

2006-08-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

What a GREAT idea. I can't wait for religious Survivor!

New Survivor to Divide Teams by Race

People Magazine Online - WEDNESDAY AUGUST 23, 2006 09:00AM EST

By Alexis Chiu

*Survivor: Cook Islands* castaways Photo by: Monty Brinton / CBS

Fueled by critics who slammed its lack of diversity, CBS's Survivor has unveiled a new twist for its upcoming season: Contestants will be divided by ethnicity.

When it premieres Sept. 14, Survivor: Cook Islands will feature 20 castaways divided into four tribes: black, white, Asian and Latino.

"We're going to take some heat for it," says creator and executive producer Mark Burnett of the twist, which was announced Wednesday morning. "But it's a great cast."

For a show entering its 13th season with steady ratings but ebbing buzz, the decision could be a shot in the arm if it once again generates Survivor water-cooler chatter.

"Some people will think this is controversial. Others will think, 'What's the big deal?' " host Jeff Probst tells PEOPLE. "Either way, it's going to be very interesting."

Along with the usual real-estate agents and struggling actors, the cast of characters competing for the $1 million purse includes a heavy-metal guitarist, a female police officer who has been shot in the line of duty, a Vietnam War refugee who manages a nail salon and a gay fashion director for a denim company.

The segregated Survivor grew from an effort to diversify a show that has featured primarily white contestants (and winners – only two of the 12 winners have been minorities). "We've taken a lot of flack," says Burnett.

But Probst says the main reason for the Emmy-winning show's largely white complexion was a dearth of minority applicants. "Most of the people who apply are white," he says. "That's just a fact."

In response, the Survivor casting team scouted for a more diverse group of players everywhere from the Internet to audition tapes for another CBS show, The Amazing Race.

Until the tribes merge later in the season, the four teams will battle each other and, perhaps, racial stereotypes. "There are going to be people looking for stereotypes: Will this tribe be smarter than this tribe, or will this tribe be faster than this tribe?" says Probst. "That's why I think it's fun. But five people on a tribe do not represent an entire ethnic group."

Set in New Zealand's Cook Islands, the location of the famous mutiny on the HMS Bounty, this season features a pirate theme, including Tribal Councils held on an elaborate shipwreck set built into the rocky coastline of a local island.

Whether one ethnicity ends up plundering – or walking the plank – "This is a game that starts very even," says Probst. "Everybody starts the same way with the same materials and the same chance: a 1-in-20 shot at a million bucks."

Papas @ Tahoe

2006-08-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a pic of Papa and Poppy in Tahoe on top of a mountain.

Not a sermon, just a thought

2006-08-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

I found this on beliefnet.com

Sakka asked the Buddha: "Do different religious teachers head for the same goal or practice the same disciplines or aspire to the same thing?"

"No, Sakka, they do not. And why? This world is made up of myriad different states of being, and people adhere to one or another of these states and become tenaciously possessive of them, saying, 'This alone is true, everything else is false.' It is like a territory that they believe is theirs. So all religious teachers do not teach the same goal or the same discipline, nor do they aspire to the same thing.

"But if you find truth in any religion or philosophy, then accept that truth without prejudice."

Tahoe Rachel

2006-08-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

When the Rapture comes, can I have your car?

2006-08-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

Can you believe this crap? Is it really this hard to fill 24 hours of news a day

Naked Japanese Cruelty

2006-08-02T23:05:00.000-07:00

Check out the last two "wake-ups" they are definitely worth it.

Hey! Gov. Schwarzenegger said something intelligent

2006-08-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Check out this editorial that appeared in today's Sacramento Bee. In it Arnold comments on the subject of immigration. Here's an excerpt:

Schwarzenegger warns that we are entering "a dangerous area." He thinks we shouldn't blame those who want to come to America but rather the federal government, which is "not securing our borders." In an interview with the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune before the town hall meetings, he called illegal immigration "a self-inflicted wound." Along with 70 percent of California voters in a recent Field Poll, he supports comprehensive reform that includes secure borders, guest workers and legalization of undocumented immigrants.
Schwarzenegger told the newspaper that he believes in redemption and thinks the American people do as well. Above all, the governor wants to elevate the tenor of what has become a nasty public debate and see it conducted "in a civil way without prejudice and without hatred."
Later, after meeting with angry constituents who yelled slogans such as "stop the invasion," Schwarzenegger told reporters the encounter was "pretty much the first time I had seen the intensity of prejudice."
It was the word "prejudice" that set off the critics. How dare the governor use such loaded language to describe the good people who are opposed to illegal immigration, they roared.

Not bad Arnold. Good job!

Who I think about on my Anniversary

2006-07-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

July 28, 2006 was the 19^th anniversary of my first day clean and sober. On July 27, 1987, ten days out of treatment, I relapsed in the parking lot of the old State Theater in Falls Church Virginia before a 9:30 showing of “The Secret of My Success”. I was with my buddy Charlie Mullen and I took three bong hits before the movie. It was the last time I ever took a drink or a drug.

In the past I have celebrated anniversaries many different ways. From just going to a meeting and getting a chip, to a party with my non-recovery friends, to spending a quiet dinner with loved ones I have always done something to mark the occasion. Every year I reflect on how the hell I got to this point.

In the beginning I would think that I was hot shit for reaching 1, 2, or 3 years sober. I was young and I thought that I was great and the main reason for reaching each milestone. In the subsequent years as my spirituality deepened I began to give credit to god and other people for helping me reach each anniversary. The longer I stayed sober my perception changed on how I did it. In the beginning I thought that I had a great deal to do with my success. As I matured in recovery I realized that other people, things, and deities had a hand in my recovery. My ego shrunk and I began to more accurately see the world as it is.

Today I think that it is mostly luck that brought me to this point. I know that I did a lot of hard work to get to this point. The numerous meetings, personal inventories, late night phone calls, tears, therapists, endless spades games, sponsors, and sponsees were all a factor and I had to be willing to do them all.

I realize that I am nothing special when it comes to this life. Ok, ok maybe it is more accurate to say that I am equally as special as other people. I start to think of all the people I know or knew in the past that I got high or drunk with, or ran in the same crowd, or went to the same meetings as me that did not make it.

What makes me different? I have no idea. I guess that I just hit the sobriety lottery and have been able to keep it together so far. That is why on each anniversary day I look back and try to remember all of the people that I have come in contact with that did not make it. I realize that I am standing on a lot of bones and wasted lives and that I am really lucky. The sad part is that none of these people made a “sacrifice” to keep me sober. They did not surrender to their addiction just so that I could stay on the straight and narrow. Theirs was not a noble act, their lives were wasted in a life (and sometimes death) of addiction and pain.

There is a saying in recovery programs when you hear that someone has relapsed and is using again. The wise old farts in the back of the room say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Sounds very elegant. The young punks in the front of the room have their own twist on it, they say “Better you than me pal.”

Here is the list of people that I think about every year and why.

Brian Hall – One of my first using buddies. We would get high in the old neighborhood until I moved. Brian was shot and killed in a coke deal that went wrong in the early nineties.

Charlie Mullen – Charlie was my best buddy after Brian and the guy I relapsed with when I got out of treatment. I tried to get Charlie into the program by informing his folks about what exactly we were up to. They sent him to treatment 3 months after I got out. It didn’t take. Last I heard he was married to a stripper and had a kid. He was following the Grateful Dead with his wife. They would arrive in town and she would strip for cash for food, shelter, drugs, and transport. That was in the mid-nineties. I have no idea if he is alive or dead.

John New – We ran in the same crowd. John was shot and killed by his step-father after he found that John had stolen his crack stash. He was shot in the back.

Jimmy/Joey Fisher - We ran in the same crowd. I can’t remember which one this happened to, they are identical twins and I could never keep them straight. Anyway, one of them was stealing a case of beer from a 7-11. He was shot and killed while fleeing the scene. He was shot by an off duty cop who was walking in the store.

Joe Deariso – Joe was actually one of my older brother’s best friends when we were growing up. I ran into Joe at the Alano club in the summer of 1991. We played on the Alano club softball team together. Joe was not much of an athlete but he was early in his recovery and was trying to surround himself with sober people. Later that year I heard that Joe had relapsed. One night he was drinking at Great Falls park outside of DC. He was climbing on a trail and fell off because he was wasted. Joe fell 10 feet and hit his head on a rock. Joe is not dead in the clinical sense but he is not very alive either. Last I heard he was home and his parents had to change his diapers.

Greg McDaniel - We ran in the same crowd. In fact, Greg and I went to school together before we ran into each other at the Alano club. Greg was buddies with Joe Deariso and played softball with us. Greg had a year and some change clean when he went out and used again that next winter. The next time I saw Greg was at a meeting. He had come back and sobered up. The problem was that the reason he had sobered up is because he was in a coma for a year. Greg was shot in the back of the head during a drug deal. When he came out of the coma he had permanent brain damage. He walked with a limp because his did not have complete control of his right side. That part of his brain was gone. I asked Greg to exchange phone numbers so I could give him rides to meetings if he needed. He obviously could not drive a car with the damage that he sustained. When I asked Greg to tell me his phone number he had to right it down. Greg could not verbalize numbers, that part of his brain was gone.

Uncle Kevin – My mother’s brother was drunk and high when he was fleeing the police in 1989. He crashed his car into a brick was during the pursuit. Kevin became a quadriplegic as a result of the accident and had to live the rest of his life with a full time attendant or in a nursing home. Kevin died a couple of years ago.

Jeff Kirkpatrick – I managed a family restaurant and brew pub for a few years in my recovery. Jeff was in recovery when his bother Joe brought him to me for a job as a bar back. I talked with Jeff and asked him what his status in recovery was and what I should do with him if he started drinking again. He said that I should fire him if he relapsed. I said OK. Jeff started drinking after a few months and I did nothing. During the summer of 1996 he was hospitalized with a blood alcohol level of 0.45 and almost died. I still did nothing. Thanksgiving weekend 1996 Jeff was found dead in his shitty apartment from an overdose of heroin. He was snorting it. I don’t know what I could have done to make things different but I do regret not trying.

Anonymous guy (Richmond VA) – There was a man who was very popular in the recovery scene in Richmond while I was in college. He did not use but he did kill himself one night. Apparently he could not take living with drugs or living without them. I’m sorry that I cannot remember his name. I try not to forget his lesson.

Will Phaup – Childhood friend. Will and I were best friends in elementary school. In High School we shared a gym locker for all four years which is remarkable because I was using the first three and Will was straight as an arrow. He was the valedictorian of my high school class and spoke at graduation. Will watched me descend into addiction right before his eyes and he saw me start to climb into recovery during me senior year. Will applied to MIT, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. UVA was his safety school. After he was declined from MIT and waitlisted at Hopkins will thought about not going to college even though he was accepted at Virginia. We talked about it and I told him that he was nuts to throw his academic career away because he didn’t get into the REALLY prestigious schools. Will came to his own decision and enrolled at UVA in the fall of 1989.

As I said earlier Will gave the valedictorian address at my high school graduation. That was officially his high water mark. At beach week he decided to start experimenting with all kinds of drugs. Apparently he liked what he found because Will was off and running in his career as an addict. I ran into him in the fall of 1991 at the Virginia-Maryland football game in Charlottesville. Will was wasted. He said that he had failed out of school and had decided to live in his fraternity house (TKE) and do odd jobs in Charlottesville. That was the last time I talked to him. The following spring he was climbing on the second story of the TKE house where he was living. Apparently Will was trying to get into the house because it was locked and he did not have a key. Will was drunk and fell off the house and landed on his head. He did not die, but he now lives with his parents because of severe brain damage. He has the intelligence and maturity of a first grader.

Fred Phelps is GAY?!?!

2006-07-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

This Australian guy hits on Fred Phelps. Fred is the jackass that started godhatesfags.com and protests at soldier's funerals. I think Fred was flattered and maybe a little turned on. I like how these women call the interviewer a "pervert". Like that's a bad thing...

Kitler?!?

2006-07-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

More proof that cats are evil.

http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that one in the uniform is actually Hitler reincarnated.

Dr. D & Roy L. Fuchs

2006-07-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

I found this video on the net. I have been looking for YEARS for this thing.

Dr. D Slaps John Stossel

So many things to like about this clip, at the top of the list is Mr. Saito and his scheming face in the background.

Also Jack Warden, the man who played Luke & Roy L. Fuchs in USED CARS is dead. I heard that the last words his hospital orderly said to him was:

"Pills?!? Whaddya need those pills for old man??!!??!?"

Kelli & Rachel

2006-07-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

Here is aunt Kelli with Rachel.

Was there a deal between the US government and Al Queda to kill al-Zarqawi?

2006-07-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

A few things caught my eye yesterday as I scanned the net for news. The first thing that jumped out at me was that the CIA is closing the unit that is dedicated to capturing and/or killing Osama Bin Laden. Remember Bush said he wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive" in the days following 9/11/01. Since the battle against Al Queda and their leader would be of utmost importance in the Global War on Terror I am surprised that our government would close down the Bin Laden desk in the CIA. Here is a portion of the article from the New York Times detailing this new policy.

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, July 3 Â The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

The decision to close the unit was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."
The rest of the article is here

I was reading an article on CNN.com about what was about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's cell phone and what intelligence the US was able to gain against Al-Queda in Iraq. I found this tidbit that supposedly came from al-Zarqawi's wife.

Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden.
The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful.
She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal.
"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome."
She was identified only as "Um Mohammed," which means "mother of Mohammed" and would be a nickname, not her full name.
The Rome-based newspaper said the interview was conducted in Geneva and described her as Jordanian and about 40 years old.

Of course as always you should consider the source. There is no telling if this woman is actually al-Zarqawi's wife or if she has been in contact with him in the month's before his death. There is also no way to know how much this woman knows about the inner workings of Al Queda.

In my opinion, the story makes sense. I would not put it past this administration to let up on the search for Bin Laden in order to calm things down in Iraq. It is apparent to me that the Bush administration has never made the capture of Bin Laden a priority. If they killed or captured him then a newbogeymann would have to be created to scare the bejesus out of theAmericann public. Bin Laden serves this function quite well.

Also, the US desperately needed something good to happen in Iraq to change the situation on the ground and influence public opinion in the US towards the war. Killing al-Zarqawi has been a very good thing for the occupation of Iraq. If we are to trust what the government says, many terrorists were rounded up after the raid on al-Zarqawi's safe house.

Who knows what is really going on? Only a handful of people know for sure. One thing I do know with certainty is that it is very unlikely for anyone in the press to pick this story up beyond the blogosphere. We need for a professional to check this out instead of one guy with an internet connection blogging while his toddler is napping.

Rachel at the Sandbox - 4th of July

2006-07-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

Patriotic Rachel

2006-07-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July!

*After this picture was taken, Rachel took out a match and lit the flag on fire. She said she wanted to exercise her 1st Amendment rights as an American citizen.

Whatever floats your boat kid!

Bawk Bawk Chickenhawk!!!

2006-07-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

Wow! There is quite a battle going on in the race for the US Senate seat in Virginia. At this point, George Felix Allen Jr., the incumbent, is 19 points ahead in the latest poll. Senator Allen released a press release detailing Jim Webb's opposition to the bill that Allen introduced and failed to gain the two thirds majority it needed to pass the Senate. Here is link to that press release. Webb Joins Kerry, Kennedy, Schumer in Opposing Flag Amendment.

The response from Jim Webb's campaign was astounding and refreshing. Here it is in it's entirety. If you live in Virginia give this guy some love and help.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jeff Pyatt
jeffpyatt@webbforsenate.com
(703) 778-4080 x202

June 27, 2006
Webb Campaign Blasts Allen Campaign for “Weak-Kneed Attacks” Against Men and Women in Uniform

Arlington—The campaign of U.S. Senate candidate Jim Webb today called the attacks on Webb’s patriotism by Allen’s campaign, “weak-kneed attacks by cowards” and demanded that Allen and his campaign apologize.

“George Felix Allen Jr. and his bush-league lapdog, Dick Wadhams, have not earned the right to challenge Jim Webb’s position on free speech and flag burning. Jim Webb served and fought for our flag and what it stands for, while George Felix Allen Jr. chose to cut and run. When he and his disrespectful campaign puppets attack Jim Webb they are attacking every man and woman who served. Their comments are nothing more than weak-kneed attacks by cowards. George Felix Allen Jr. needs to apologize to Jim Webb and to all men and women who have served our nation,” Webb spokesman Steve Jarding said.

On Tuesday, George Felix Allen Jr. and his campaign issued a press release in which the Allen campaign, through Wadhams, implied that Webb’s position in support of the Free Speech Amendment to the U.S. Constitution amounted to a political act and not a defense of our Constitution, which Webb fought for and for which he was highly decorated. George Felix Allen Jr. did not serve.

“I believe it is precisely because of bush-league attacks like this that John Zogby, a highly respected, independent polling expert just this week said that Dick Wadhams is not fit to serve as a campaign manager and that George Allen should find a new manager,” Jarding said.

“While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.’s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada. People who live in glass dude ranches should not question the patriotism of real soldiers who fought and bled for this country on a real battlefield,” Jarding said.

“Is Dick Wadhams willing to publicly say that Colin Powell, John Glenn and Bob Kerrey are unpatriotic for having the same position on the flag burning amendment that Jim Webb has? Ask him,” Jarding said.

Jarding continued, “The following is why George Felix Allen Jr. has not earned the right to challenge Jim Webb in his support of our Constitution and its free speech provisions:

Jim Webb was first in this class of 243 at the Marine Corps Officer’s Basic School in Quantico, Virginia.
Jim Webb served with the Fifth Marine Regiment in Vietnam, where as a rifle platoon and company commander in the infamous An Hoa Basin west of Danang.
Jim Webb was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals and two Purple Hearts while fighting in Vietnam.
Jim Webb served as a platoon commander and as an instructor in tactics and weapons at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School.
Jim Webb served in the US Congress as counsel to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs from 1977 to 1981, becoming the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full committee counsel in the Congress.
In 1982, Jim Webb first proposed, then led the fight for including an African American soldier in the memorial statue that now graces the Vietnam Veterans memorial on the National Mall.
In 1984, Jim Webb was appointed the inaugural Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, where he traveled extensively in, and worked closely with, our NATO allies. As Assistant Secretary, Webb directed considerable research and analysis of the U.S. military’s mobilization capabilities.
In 1987, Jim Webb was appointed Secretary of the Navy becoming the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and be appointed Secretary of the Navy.
In addition to his wartime medals, Jim Webb has been awarded the following medals and citations:

The Department of Defense distinguished Public Service Medal
The Medal of Honor Society’s Patriot Award
The American Legion National Commander’s Public Service Award
The VFW’s Media Service Award
The Marine Corps League’s Military Order of the Iron Mike Award
The John Russell Leadership Award
The Robert L. Denig Distinguished Service Award.

###
Paid for by Jim Webb for U.S. Senate

Iraq insurgents offer to stop attacks

2006-06-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

I found this article as I was poking around on the web. Looks like good news if 8 of 11 of the insurgent groups in Iraq are willing to stop fighting if we leave.

I wonder why this hasn't been on the news? Is it because the offer includes a "timetable" for US forces to leave? Or is it because the US is building permanent bases in Iraq and have no plans to leave?

Iraq insurgents offer to stop attacks

By STEVEN R. HURST and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press WritersWed Jun 28, 3:20 PM ET

Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered to halt attacks on the U.S.-led military if the Iraqi government and President Bush set a two-year timetable for withdrawing all foreign troops from the country, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The demand is part of a broad offer from the groups, who operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces have become increasingly violent and the attacks there have regularly crippled oil and commerce routes.

The groups do not include the powerful Islamic Army in Iraq, Muhammad Army and the Mujahedeen Shura Council, the umbrella label for eight militant groups including al-Qaida in Iraq. But the new offer comes at a time when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is reaching out to militant Sunnis, including a new amnesty plan for insurgent fighters.

Al-Maliki, in remarks broadcast on national television Wednesday, did not issue an outright rejection of the timetable demand but said it was unrealistic because he could not be certain when the Iraqi army and police would be strong enough to assume full responsibility for the country's security.

Eight of the 11 insurgent groups banded together to approach al-Maliki's government under the name of The 1920 Revolution Brigade. All 11, however, have issued identical demands, said the insurgent representatives and government officials.

The officials spoke on condition of anomymity because of the sensitivity of the information and for fear of retribution.

Rachel's First Day of School

2006-06-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

Today was Rachel's first day of school. We have enrolled her in a neighborhood pre-school that takes kids who are not potty trained. Most of the pre-schools we looked into have requirements that the child be 3 years old and out of diapers. Angela and I thought that it would be a good idea to put Rachel in school in order to get some socialization with other kids.

It was with great apprehension that I took Ray to the school this morning. I stayed with her in her classroom for 20 minutes before she told me to leave. I came back at the end of the day and got the report that all went well. In fact, Rachel did GREAT!

WHEW!

Here is a picture from today.

Today's Hindu Wisdom

2006-06-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

What is stupidity? It is that vanity
Which dares to declare, "I am wise."

He who pretends to knowledge that he does not possess
Raises doubts as to those things that he really knows.

-Tirukkural 85: 844-845 Excerpted from the Tirukkural, translated by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Copyright Himalayan Academy Publications, www.himalayanacademy.com.

The science of World Cup soccer

2006-06-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a fun article I found on the web. Enjoy!

The science of World Cup soccer

18:35 09 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight

As the soccer World Cup kicks-off in Germany New Scientist presents this round-up of our favourite science stories related to "the beautiful game". For impossible off-sides, perfect soccer boots, and the only colour for winners to be seen in this season, read on.

1. The most exciting sport

A mathematical study published in January 2006 (Surprises make soccer the best sport) confirmed what millions of fans the world over no doubt already suspected: that soccer is not just the world's most popular sport, but also the most exciting. That is, if you measure excitement according to the relative "upset frequency", or the likelihood of an underdog beating a favoured team. If so, soccer is way more exciting than baseball, basketball and hockey.

2. Predicting the winners

If you can't wait five weeks and 64 matches to find out who'll triumph, there are some mathematical formulas that promise to predict the overall winner ahead of time (Formula for World Cup success, Guardian Unlimited). This particular one predicts Brazil has the best chance, followed by France, Germany and Holland. England is only the ninth favourite to win, however, so I think there must be a huge flaw somewhere.

Though perhaps it would be just as well if England did fare poorly. Another statistical study, carried out in 2005 (Winning is great but losing is safer) shows that fans are actually less likely to cause trouble and injure themselves if their team loses than if it wins.

3. Unruly behaviour

Another way to deal with offensive fans could be an ingenious sound system developed by researchers from the Netherlands. They found that adding a slight echo to an unsavoury chant confuses a crowd so much that they become unable to carry on shouting in unison (Hooligan chants silenced by delayed echoes).

4. Red is for winners

Scientific research also promises to help give soccer managers and players a competitive edge over opponents. For example, a report from Durham University in the UK, published in May 2005, concludes that teams that wear red have the best chance of winning (Red is the colour if winning is your game).

5. Perfect boots

When it comes to soccer equipment there are plenty of innovative ideas. A rapid manufacturing process known as "laser sintering" could soon be used to make soccer boots that fit soccer players' feet perfectly (Tailor-printed shoes will offer a perfect fit). And a smart material known as d3o, which is normally flexible but becomes rigid in response to an impact, could be used to make better goal-keeping gloves and other types of protective gear (Skiers get smart armour).

6. Kick in the pants

An even more outlandish idea is for "haptic sports gear" that contains actuators capable of giving players a gentle nudge or push during training. This could tell them when they are practising incorrectly and even let them know which muscles they should be exercising Clothing gives sportsmen a kick up the pants).

7. Eye in the sky

Behind the scenes, this year's tournament will also see several new IT technologies tested out. Surveillance networks will keep track of fans in stadiums while websites will stream live coverage of games, as well as news and discussion for fans at home (Goalfest for IT at the World Cup, ZDNet News).

8. Impossible off-side

But it's not all positive news for soccer fans and players. A study conducted by Dutch researchers in 2000 suggests bungled "off-side" decisions may ultimately be unavoidable. This is because it is impossible for an official to keep an eye on both a player and the ball at the same time (Linesmen just can't help getting it wrong).

9. Spot the (curving) ball

Another study, published by researchers at Queen's University Belfast in March 2006, suggests that the human vision system is simply unable to correctly predict the trajectory of a ball curving through the air. That's too bad for goalies facing free kicks taken by David "Bend it Like" Beckham or Roberto Carlos this tournament Eyes are fooled by spinning, curving balls).

10. Hit on the head

Various scientific studies have also shed light on soccer-specific injuries. Heading the ball has been shown to cause peculiar neck injuries (A head for balls can be a pain in the neck), while the sport has also been linked to an increased risk of motor neuron disease (Soccer link to motor neuron disease).

11. Robot soccer

In the long term, perhaps the solution is to get robots to play the game for us. They already seem to have mastered table football (Robots invade the table football pitch) and some robots are even proving worthy opponents for humans (Robotic Segways play soccer with humans).

Okay, that's the science sorted. Now you can watch the rest of the tournament and amaze your friends with an eloquent explanation of why the World Cup linesmen keep getting it wrong.

Weblinks

A backdoor plan to thwart the electoral college

2006-06-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

This plan is genius! If this works out then the people in the flyover states will have all of the electoral power that they deserve.

June 16, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0616/p01s02-uspo.html

A backdoor plan to thwart the electoral college

Some states try to ensure that the winner of popular vote becomes president.

By Randy Dotinga Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
SAN DIEGO

Picture it: On election day in some future year, a presidential candidate ends up with the most popular votes but not enough electoral votes to win.

It's a repeat of the 2000 election in which one contender, Democrat Al Gore, took the majority of the national popular vote, while the other, Republican George W. Bush, clinched the most electoral college votes and, hence, the presidency.

But this time there's a twist: A bunch of states team up and give all their electoral college votes to the nationwide popular-vote winner, regardless of who won the most votes in their state. Then, the candidate who garners the most citizen votes in the country moves into the White House.

Legislative houses in Colorado and California have recently approved this plan, known as the National Popular Vote proposal, taking it partway to passage. Other states, too, are exploring the idea of a binding compact among states that would oblige each of them to throw its electoral votes behind the national popular-vote winner.

At issue is the nation's presidential election system governed by the electoral college. Established by the US Constitution in 1787, the system has occasionally awarded the presidency to candidates who couldn't muster the most votes nationwide, as happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.

While an amendment to the Constitution could change or eliminate the electoral college, battleground states and small states would probably oppose any change that would leave them with less influence. Indeed, since the system's inception, numerous efforts to amend it have been defeated.

Instead, reformers have turned to the interstate compact, saying it would be constitutional because agreements between states already exist.
The compact is designed to take effect only if states representing 270 electoral votes approve the compact legislation, giving those states majority control of the electoral college. The result: The "compact" group of states would be able to determine a presidential election.

The plan is supported by electoral reform activists and a bipartisan advisory group including former GOP Rep. John Anderson (a presidential candidate in 1980) and former Sen. Birch Bayh (D).

They say the compact would allow long-ignored states to get attention again in presidential campaigns. The current system has "just taken a lot of states off of the presidential map," complains Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization based in Maryland, which supports the compact.

The compact proposal passed the California Assembly on May 30 with all but one Republican opposing. It awaits a vote in the state Senate and, if it passes, approval or rejection by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), who hasn't publicly expressed an opinion about it.
Colorado's Senate approved the plan in April with bipartisan support, but it has not advanced because the legislative session there has ended.

Five GOP Assembly members are pushing a popular-vote bill in New York, and legislators in Missouri, Louisiana, and Illinois have introduced bills. Advocates hope to put the legislation before every state by 2007, says Mr. Ritchie.

Meanwhile, several newspapers have come out in favor of the plan, including The New York Times, which calls it an "ingenious solution."

But in California, GOP Assemblyman Chuck DeVore derisively refers to the proposal as a way to "amend the Constitution without amending the Constitution."
"It's like cheating," says Mr. DeVore, who predicts that the plan would force candidates to campaign primarily in urban areas with large populations to win the popular vote.
Under the current system "we discourage regional candidacies and basically force people who are running for president to have a message that resonates with the vast middle of America," he says.

DeVore supports a system that would allocate some of a state's electoral votes based on the popular vote in congressional districts, an approach that exists in Nebraska and Maine. All other states and the District of Columbia award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in their state.

It takes 270 electoral votes out of 538 total votes in the college to win the presidency. That total equals the number of members each state has in both houses of Congress, with the District of Columbia getting three of its own.

The electoral college system is "distinctly American," says Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California, Riverside.

In US history, there have been about 700 failed proposals in Congress to change the electoral college system, according to the Office of the Federal Register.
"It's safe to say that there has been no aspect of what the founders worked up in Philadelphia that has received more criticism than the electoral college," says historian Rick Shenkman of George Mason University.

If any state approves this new proposal, legal challenges are inevitable, Bowler says.
But he figures there might be a way to dampen enthusiasm. "You could say the French elect their president directly," he says. "I'm thinking that will get people running away from any support: If the French do it, is it really right for the US?"

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

The truth hurts sometimes

2006-06-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

I think the notes on my fridge are read by more people...

A Love Letter to Anne Coulter

2006-06-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

I love Henry Rollins!

Rachel's First Real Lie

2006-06-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

Rachel's imagination is growing by leaps and bounds the last few weeks. She engages in "dramatic play" with her stuffed animals, cars, and action figures by making up dialog and putting them in situations that they act out. Most of the time we can't make out what the characters are saying but she is definitely running dialog with them.

Recently when we have asked if she has gone to the bathroom in her diaper she says "No, poopoo at Nana's". She is trying to tell us that she has pooped but it was her Grandma's house in the recent past. I guess this could constitute as an untruth but we don't think it was an out and out lie. Rachel seemed to be giving this response to us because we laugh everytime she tells us so I think it is more of a conditioned response than anything. Plus, we have encouraged the response because it is the first real sentence she has put together.

On Wednesday night Rachel told her first whopper. At the end of the evening we have a routine to get Rachel ready for bed. We put her jammies on, give her a cup of milk, brush her teeth. Believe me, she knows when this is coming and she tries to stall for time. When Rachel sees the toothbrush she will ask for food, another drink, another story, or a different TV program. She really does not want these things, she just does not like to have her teeth brushed.

On Wednesday night when Rachel saw the toothbrush she decided to try a new stall tactic, lying. She went to the window and said "Hello bunny!" She kept pointing outside and talking to the bunny that she saw in the grass outside the apartment. Now, there are no wild bunnies running around our apartment complex but there was a rabbit on the video that she was watching. She kept it up for a few minutes saying, "C'mon bunny", "Hello bunny", and "Look, bunny". All the while we were trying to convince her that she needed to brush her teeth.

Rachel eventually dropped the charade and told us that the bunny was asleep ("Sleep, bunny"). We brushed her teeth and sent her to bed with the knowledge that she is one step closer to being smarter than her parents.

What little kids can't do

2006-06-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had a microwave dinner that contained chinese noodles. As usual, Rachel was interested in what I was eating and came over for a look. She was fascinated with the noodles and decided to try some. Rachel stuck her hand in the bowl and fished out a noodle and tried to put it in her mouth. Her initial attempts were unsuccessful, the noodle kept getting away from her.

Now the logical way to eat a long noodle is to stick one end in your mouth and suck the rest into your gullet. I'm not sure why this astonishes me but Rachel has no idea how to do this! I tried to explain how to do it to her several diffrent ways. I modeled it for her. I stuck a noddle in my lips and sucked it into mouth. Rachel didn't get it, she looked at her noodle and tried to stuff the entire thing into her mouth again. It didn't work.

I figured that I would break down the skill into smaller parts. I tried to show her how to suck air into her mouth. She didn't get it. I put her hand on my mouth and showed her how I suck air into it. She giggled because it tickled her hand.

The end result was that Rachel did not learn how to easily eat noodles today. But the good news is that as I sit here I notice that she has mastered the art of spitting water out of her mouth. Oh well, 1 step forward - 2 steps back.

Rachel Fix for Friday

2006-06-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

Here are the latest pictures from the cutest kid in the wo rld.

And the ANTICHRIST is......

2006-06-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

I heard this pastor on the "Don and Mike" show a few weeks back talking about 6/6/06 and it's significance. He predicted that the Antichrist would reveal himself on international TV on 6/6/06. If the Antichrist did not reveal himself then this pastor, who goes by the name "Pastor Harry", would reveal his identity on his website.

Well, I checked in today to see who the Anticrist was and I was a bit disssapointed. I was expecting a full name, social security number, picture, and address so I could avoid this dastardly fellow. Turns out that Pastor Harry on listed one name as the identity of the ANTICHRIST.

And the ANTICHRIST is......

M A I T R E Y A

Who?

I googled this name and came up with some information on who this mysterious Maitreya is. According to Wikpedia Maitreya is

the future Buddha in Buddhist eschatology. Maitreya is a bodhisattva who some Buddhists believe will eventually appear on earth, achieve complete enlightenment, and teach the pure dharma. Maitreya Bodhisattva will be the successor of the historic Śākyamuni Buddha. He is predicted to be a “world-ruler,” uniting those who he rules over. The prophecy of the arrival of Maitreya is found in the canonical literature of all Buddhist sects (Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Tantrayana, Navayana, Purnayana, Triyana and Vajrayāna) and is accepted by most Buddhists as a statement about an actual event that will take place in the distant future.

So this idea was just stolen from the Buddhist savior myth. Take a religion that most people in the US know nothing about and demonize their prophesy. I guess Pastor Harry looked for the most obscure savior myth and labeled it as the antithesis of the Christian savior. That's pretty creative! A total load of bullshit, but creative nonetheless.

I was dissapointed to learn that Pastor Harry's ANTICHRIST has not been born yet. What a bummer. Also I was dissapointed to learn that Pastor Harry made this announcement on 6/6/06 to coincide with his new book on the subject of the ANTICHRIST and how he found this yet to be born person.

Well two can play at that game! I can predict that a person sometime in the future may or may not become the ANTICHRIST of biblical prophesy. In fact, I will go one step further than Pastor Harry and predict exactly who I thin the ANTICHRIST will be. I think the ANTICHRIST will be James T. Kirk of Iowa and will be born sometime in the 23rd century. I bet you my prediction comes true before yours does. Whaddya think about that Pastor Harry?

Actually I think the BEAST is alive and walking the Earth. It's name is Ann Coulter. Check out the despicable rant she has against (of all people) 9/11 widows. Check out this link

Coulter on 9/11 Widows: ‘I Have Never Seen People Enjoying their Husbands’ Death So Much’

Why is Numerology always wrong?

2006-06-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

Well, it's probably because it is not based on reality. Today is June 6, 2006. For those of you who may not be paying attention (or maybe you have a life) there has been considerable consternation and hand wringing by many "numerologists", religious wackos, and nutjobs of every stripe about the fact that the date is 6/6/06. Or 6/6/6. Which means that today June 6, 2006 is equal to 666 the "Number of the Beast" that is mentioned in Christian prophesy.

There was supposed to be a major event happening today! Some predicted the "Rapture" would happen and all of god's favorite boys and girls would disappear to heaven. Others predicted that the Antichrist himself would announce himself (itself?) on international TV. Well, the only notworthy thing that happened today in connection with 6/6/06 is that "The Omen" premiered in theaters across the country. YAWN!

Here is a letter from toady's Sacramento Bee that highlights the idiocy of this line of superstition.

Re "A Revelation of the Beast?" May 28: There seems to be actual credence given to Revelation's passage where "everyone" must bear a mark so that no one may buy or sell without it. It is "man's number," "666." Biblical manuscripts also mention a different number (616 in some). It seems the Mark of the Beast found in Christian eschatology isn't always precisely 666.
There's been discussion of anagrams of DCLXVI (Roman numerals for 666), anything containing 18 (the sum of 6 + 6 + 6), Ronald Wilson Reagan (6 letters compose the late president's names), Roman emperors Nero or Domitian, etc.
This year, even those without the mark, can "buy and sell" tickets to the remake of "The Omen" (opening 06-06-2006, which is, in fact, only 666 if the millennium is dropped from the date: ditto 06-06-1906, 1806, 1706, etc.) The only real date 666 was way back on June 6, 6 (when Jesus was 6, according to the Gregorian Calendar).
Things get really complicated when we consider that today's calendar was promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The essential dates of the Christianity, however, were written under the Julian calendar, introduced well before even Christ himself.

- Eric Mathias, Sacramento

Pictures from last weekend

2006-06-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from last weekend's Noss family picnic. This is Rachel with her cousin Shane. Enjoy the bonus pics!

Rolling Stone Article about Ohio Voting

2006-06-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine. I have posted the first part of the article here. You can find the rest of the article by following this link. The essay has been meticulously researched and makes the case that the Presidential election was stolen in Ohio. It's a long read but worth it.

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Rollingstone.com

Back to Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)

Next page

--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.

3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June 22, 2005. Page 5

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The Hill, November 4, 2004.

19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,'' Associated Press, December 11, 2004.

Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.

23) Mitofsky International

24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.'' FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.

43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,'' Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.''

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.

66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

Gay Marriage Amendment

2006-06-03T18:45:00.002-07:00

I am quickly becoming a Jack Cafferty fan. For those of you that don't know, Jack was hired by CNN to be their grumpy commentator a few months ago. I think he is trying to model himself after the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" broadcaster from the movie network. His rants are pretty right on and full of common sense. In this rant he mentions the President's "appeal to the hatred, bigotry, or discrimination in some people" with the gay marriage ban amendment that the Senate will ponder on Monday. Enjoy.

Cool Breeze Rachel

2006-06-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

Here is Ray sporting the Terminator look with Dad's glasses. Now if we could only get that binky out of her mouth...

Comic Book News: Lesbians and the Patriot Act

2006-05-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

If you don't care about comic books - TURN BACK NOW!

DC Comics Resurrects Batwoman As Lesbian

Direct Link

Wednesday May 31, 2006 10:01 PM

By LARRY McSHANE

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Years after she first emerged from the Batcave, Batwoman is coming out of the closet. DC Comics is resurrecting the classic comic book character as a lesbian, unveiling the new Batwoman in July as part of an ongoing weekly series that began this year.

The 5-foot-10 superhero comes with flowing red hair, knee-high red boots with spiked heels, and a form-fitting black outfit.

``We decided to give her a different point of view,'' explained Dan DiDio, vice president and executive editor at DC. ``We wanted to make her a more unique personality than others in the Bat-family. That's one of the reasons we went in this direction.''

The original Batwoman was started in 1956, and killed off in 1979. The new character will share the same name as her original alter ego, Kathy Kane. And the new Batwoman arrives with ties to others in the Gotham City world.

``She's a socialite from Gotham high society,'' DiDio said. ``She has some past connection with Bruce Wayne. And she's also had a past love affair with one of our lead characters, Renee Montoya.''

Montoya, in the ``52'' comic book series, is a former police detective. Wayne, of course, is Batman's true identity - but he has disappeared, along with Superman and Wonder Woman, leaving Gotham a more dangerous place.

The ``52'' series is a collaboration of four acclaimed writers, with one episode per week for one year. The comics will introduce other diverse characters as the story plays out.

``This is not just about having a gay character,'' DiDio said. ``We're trying for overall diversity in the DC universe. We have strong African-American, Hispanic and Asian characters. We're trying to get a better cross-section of our readership and the world.''

The outing of Batwoman created a furor of opinions on Web sites devoted to DC Comics. Opinions ranged from outrage to approval. Others took a more tongue-in-cheeck approach to the announcement.

``Wouldn't ugly people as heroes be more groundbreaking?'' asked one poster. ``You know, 200-pound woman, man with horseshoe hair loss pattern, people with cold sores, etc.?''

DiDio asked that people wait until the new Batwoman's appearance in the series before they pass judgment.

``You know what? Judge us by the story and character we create,'' he said. ``We are confident that we are telling a great story with a strong, complex character.''

DiDio spent most of the morning fielding phone calls from media intrigued by the Batwoman reinvention.

``It's kind of weird,'' he said. ``We had a feeling it would attract some attention, but we're a little surprised it did this much.''

Re-Post from the myspace blog - Friday, May 05, 2006

Captain America Fugitive

Marvel's new series has your favourite superheroes fighting George Bush and the Patriot Act

GUY DIXON

Direct Link

Captain America is about to battle his most fearsome foe yet: The government of the United States.

Today, Marvel Comics is releasing the first in its miniseries Civil War, which can only be described as a gutsy comic-book series focusing on the whole debate over homeland security and tighter government controls in the name of public safety.

The seven-issue series once again puts superheroes right back in the thick of real-world news, just as DC Comics has Batman battling al-Qaeda in a soon-to-appear comic and Marvel's X-Men continue to explore themes of public intolerance and discrimination.

It also recalls the plotline during the Watergate years when Captain America's alterego, disillusioned by White House politics, stopped donning the patriotic costume.

But with Civil War, hero is pitted against hero in the choice of whether or not to side with the government, as issues ranging from a Guantanamo-like prison camp for superheroes, embedded reporters and the power of media all play in the mix.

The Fantastic Four's elastic Mr. Fantastic has already joined Iron Man to support Washington in earlier editions of Marvel comics leading into the Civil War series. Doctor Strange isn't taking Washington's side.

But what about Spider-Man, that hero of many counterculture kids? Will he side with the Man? Or will the rest of the Fantastic Four? (There's even a rumour that Marvel's Canadian hero Alpha Flight might get into the mix.)

Civil War starts with a clever premise. A number of incidents involving Marvel's rough-and-ready heroes has turned the good guys into targets of U.S. lawmakers: There is, for instance, one accident where a group of novice superheroes gets in over its head, leading to the death of a schoolyard full of children.

The politicians are concerned about public safety. So Congress passes a bill forcing all superheroes to register with the government as human weapons of mass destruction, and to work, in effect, for Washington. Superheroes who don't comply will themselves be branded fugitives.

Washington insider Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, argues that siding with Washington is a way for the heroes to work with lawmakers, not against them, in this moment of trouble. Others see it as a way to gain recognition from the authorities, at long last, or even a way to get government funding to help fight the bad guys.

But other heroes aren't having any of it. In one comic leading up to the series, Doctor Strange gets hopping mad when he first hears about the bill (albeit in his debonair, "master of the mystic arts" kind of way). And Captain America, who couldn't be more all-American if he tried with that costume of his, finds himself leading the fugitive heroes.

In the first issue of Civil War, he brilliantly folds an entire dissertation on security into one succinct dialogue bubble by saying: "Don't play politics with me, lady. Superheroes need to stay above that stuff or Washington starts telling us who the supervillains are."

But Marvel says it isn't trying to take one side or the other.

"We need to present both sides' arguments, both sides of the coin, as fairly and as accurately as possible, and really let the readers make their own decision," said editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "Marvel readers come in all shapes and sizes, and we speak to so many different people, different demographics. It's unfair for us to make this our bully pulpit and sit there and say, 'This bad. That good.'."

The series is also far removed from the era when DC Comics' Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were punching out the Nazis or Japanese during the Second World War.

In Civil War, there is no Iraq war, although George W. Bush is the president in the series. The story, though, focuses on the central issue of public security versus personal freedoms with two factions of superheroes battling among themselves on the question (with comic fanboys living vicariously through them).

But what does it say about us if Captain America and Iron Man start to occupy some readers' attention more than the latest real news?

"One of the best ways to broach these conversations and bring up this discussion is through entertainment and through characters that people are familiar with. And again, for us, it's communicating both sides of the argument," Quesada said.

In the end, one of the cleverest touches in Civil War may be a few panels, a momentary breather in the story, in which the giant figure of The Watcher stands silently in the corner of Doctor Strange's sanctum. As the Strange explains: "He only appears to record moments of great change and enormous upheaval. His presence now does not bode well."

Disturbingly, that could be how many of us feel, watching events unfold.

Sunday at the Zoo and Fairy Tale Town (again)

2006-05-29T00:06:00.000-07:00

We bit the bullet and bought a membership to Fairy Tale Town today. Only $35 for two free adult admissions per day for a year. What a bargain!

Beatle Break

2006-05-28T23:26:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school DC101 used to have a "Beatle Break" a little before 2pm. Young Dave Brown would play 3 or 4 Beatles tunes in a row and we could catch it if we left school exactly when the bell rang at 2pm. Here is a "Beatle Break" for you.

Here Comes the Sun

Two of Us

Rachel Break

2006-05-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

I just looked at the blog and I realized that the first thing you see are images of Hannity, Geraldo, and O'Reilly. I wanted to make the blog prettier so here is a bonus pic of Rachel the rock star. This will tide you over for a few days. We are going to a street festival this Monday, there should be plenty of cute pics after that.

Why does Fox news hate America?

2006-05-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

For the past few months Ive heard from the right wing noise machine that Iraq is really not that bad. They contend that the Main Stream Media is not covering the good news coming out of Iraq. Apparently, there are good things happening in Iraq but the people who control the media are either too liberal or too cowardly to cover these events. The Main Stream Media gets criticized for the news stories involving IEDs, wounded and killed American soldiers, car bombs exploding, beheaded bodies being dumped on city streets, judges being targeted for assassination, and mosques being blown up during afternoon prayers.

Well, I have a simple solution to this problem. If there are truly good things going on in Iraq, go find them and cover them! Fox News is one of the biggest critics of the Main Stream Media, which is ironic to me since they are the highest rated cable news operation in the country. If that does not make you a member of the Main Stream Media, I dont know what does.

I propose that Fox News devote a half hour of its 24 hour broadcast day to covering the good news in Iraq. Please show us where these stories are happening and tell us about them. They can even put the show on at 3am when they dont have to pre-empt their highly rated personality scream fests that are on in primetime.

I personally would like to see the good work that our troops are doing in getting Iraq back on its feet and forming a government. I think it would be good for us to see if there progress is truly being made towards building a viable society with some democratic values. Until Fox News gets off of their collective asses and tells me about it then I am going to assume that there are no good stories to cover and that the real situation on the ground in Iraq has to do with the chaos of civilians and Iraqi government officials being butchered in a civil war.

Send Sean Hannity or Geraldo Rivera or Bill OReilly to Baghdad to tell us the good news. I bet if they did go, they would not venture beyond the hotel bar.

Well Fox what are you waiting for? Are you pussies or do you just hate America?

The saga of Grandpa Badass

2006-05-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

From March 20, 2006

This morning my wife woke me up by saying, "They stole our car from in front of my parent's house!" Not a nice way to start the day. But it was still better than my brother barging into my room naked and screaming "Len Bias is Dead!!!" when I was in high school. Still neither is my preferred way to start the day. At least this time I did not have to see my brother's penis when the bad news was delivered.

Angela was going to drive to Lake Tahoe today to check on a conference center/hotel her company is using for a meeting next month. She wanted to scout the place and meet the people she will be dealing with from the hotel to make sure that all her ducks were in a row for the meeting. Since we only have small, fuel efficient, 2 wheel drive cars our in-laws graciously gave their big bad 4 wheel drive to Angela so she could drive to the mountains. We all felt safer knowing that she had a big hunk of Detroit steel to back her up if she ran into bad weather. Turns out it was a good idea, it was snowing in the pass and Angela had to eventually turn around.

Now, a word about my in-laws. They happily gave Angela their truck to use because that is the type of people they are. Whatever they have is yours if they know it will help you out. They even let Angela and I stay at their house for a year when we moved out here. They would gladly loan you money they do not have or give you a car if you need it. Whatever. It does not matter, if you need it and they have it, it's yours. Angela and I are eternally grateful for all that they have done for us and all that they continue to do for us.

OK, back to the car.

Since Bud and Dot loaned us their truck for Angela to use, we gave them our 94 Honda Civic to tool around in if they needed it. The car was parked in front of their house, in their driveway last night. Sometime between 10pm and 7:15am the car was taken. We think it was around 3am because their dogs went nuts around then. When Bud opened the garage door to put air in the Civic's tires at 7:15 he saw that it was gone.

At this point he changed from being Bud to our superhero, Grandpa Badass. Grandpa Badass is a relatively new creation. He was just plain Mr. Badass until our baby was born two years ago. At that point he graduated to Grandpa Badass status. In Grandpa Badass' career he has kicked in doors, saved people from burning buildings, been shot at (more than once), rescued drowning children, and served two tours in Korea. He is an avid bow hunter and has a plan to shoot any intruder that crosses his threshold. Just ask him and he will tell you which gun he will use at which door or window the intruder chooses to breach.

When Grandpa Badass sees the car is gone, what is the first thing he does? Does he call the cops? NOOOOOOOOOO. Grandpa Badass grabs his .22 pistol and a cell phone and jumps in the car to LOOK FOR THE STOLEN CIVIC.

Bud walks his two dogs every day. He has noticed on their route that there was some suspicious activity going on at a certain house next to the neighborhood park. He saw that lots of different cars were coming and going with the same drivers parking the cars in the backyard or the garage. He has always suspected that there are one or two stolen vehicle fences or chop shops in the area and he has kept his eye on them.

Well, Grandpa Badass immediately goes to the house that he suspects of being the base of a nefarious car theft ring. Surprise, surprise he sees my Civic parked outside the house next to the park. He then calls the cops and tells them his story. His story goes something like this:

1. A car was stolen in front of my house
2. I found the car.
3. I'm looking at the car right now.
4. I am going to stay here until you arrive.
5. Oh yeah, I HAVE A GUN.

Grandpa Badass backs off to the end of the block and sits and waits for the cops to come. The car thieves start to get suspicious of this dude sitting in a car at the end of the block. They send a car to scout him out. The car drives by a few times and stare at him. While this is happening the thieves take a new Toyota from their garage and speed away.

Bud decides that discretion is the better part of valor and drives home instead of confronting these jerks with such limited firepower. I met him at his house at 8:45am. The police still had not shown up. As I was calling the police to check up on the status of our original call, they called Bud's cell phone and alerted him that they had arrived at the scene and the car was still there. By the way, total waiting time from the first call until the police's arrival on scene, 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Bud and I hopped in the car and met the police. The Civic was in decent shape. It was hotwired so the steering column was trashed. The radio was gone (there was no faceplate on it) and the speakers were stolen. Other than that it was no worse for wear. I am just glad to have it back. Oh yeah, the most interesting thing about this part of the story was that the car was running when the police found it. I'm not sure if the thieves ever turned it off or were just about to make a getaway when Grandpa Badass was staking out their operation.

The rest of the day dealt with the mundane tasks of calling the insurance company, renting a car, and getting estimates to fix the damage.

All of this of course, was made possible by the efforts of our hero Grandpa Badass. Grandpa Badass, a man who did all this to fulfill his role as patriarch and protector of the family. But mostly he did it because he was pissed that someone would dare steal a car from in front of his house.

A guy at the car dealership asked Bud if he was worried that the thieves knew where he lived since they had stolen the car from his house. He just chuckled and smiled and said, "No, they should be worried that I know where they live!"

You said it Grandpa Badass.

Do you like the blues?

2006-05-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

My buddy John has a radio show called the "Lonesome
Johnnie Blues Show" devoted to, you guessed it, the blues and all things bluesical. It airs on Wednesday from 7pm-10pm EDT in Richmond VA on WCLM 1450 AM. For those of you who are not in Richmond you can hear the show on a stream at www.wclmradio.com.

He also has a web store called "It's All About The Grooves" at www.thegrooves.biz. This store specializes in all kinds of music both digital and vinyl. You can really score some cool vintage LPs and 45s there.

AZTLAN is used by nutjobs to scare ignorant people

2006-05-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

This "theory" that there is a movement among Mexicans or Mexican Americans to overwhelm or change the southwestern US into a province of Mexico is ridiculous. The notion of AZTLAN came from a group of Chicano activists in the late 60's and early 70's. Nobody has mentioned it since until right wing nutjobs like Michele "The internment of the Japanese in WWII was a great idea!" Malkin dredged it up to scare white people. That is nobody except the white supremacists who believe in all sorts of twisted rhetoric. Whenever you see AZTLAN in the news or Mexico taking back land it lost in the Mexican War, don't believe the hype.

Here is the link to the story.

http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/052106.htm#052306

More info on the Council of Conservative Citizens (I really like the Abe Lincoln Wanted poster, CLASSY) http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/CCCitizens.asp?xpicked=3&item=12

May 23, 2006 PERMALINK
CNN Cites White Supremacist Group As Source
(posted May 23 7:45 PM ET)

Today on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," CNN ran a graphic sourced to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group deemed to have a "white supremacy" ideology according to the Anti-Defamation League.

During a piece about illegal immigrants in Utah, reporter Casey Wian said, "Utah is also part of the territory some militant Latino activists refer to as Aztlan, the portion of the southwest United States they claim rightfully belongs to Mexico."

As he said that, CNN ran the following map graphic:

As you can see in the right hand corner, the source of the map is the Council of Conservative Citizens.

For more background on the CCC outside of the ADL report, check out this 1999 W. Post piece and this from The Nation's' John Nichols about Trent Lott's CCC ties

CNN should apologize to its viewers and reprimand those involved in the report.

Our Day at the Zoo

2006-05-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

Rachel and I made our weekly journey to the Zoo. I bought a membeship at the beginning of the spring and it has paid off BIG TIME. The membership was $35 and it costs $7 to get in on a single visit. I think we have been to the zoo 8-10 times this year and the membership has definitely been worth it.

Rachel wasn't very interested in the animals today. She was interested in finding little boys and following them around the park. I think she just uses me to take her places to flirt with guys. I thought I had 10 more years before I has to deal with this behavior. Oh well.

AT&T lets NSA Monitor the Internet

2006-05-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

This is important because basically AT&T owns the pipeline that the internet (and phone lines) runs on in this country. If AT&T is giving someone access to it's infrastructure then they are giving access to everyone's web activity, not just AT&T customers.

When the federal government broke up "ma bell" in the 1980's part of the law was that they had to sell access to their infastructure to other companies at a government mandated rate. The monopoloy was broken up this way because it would be impossible for a new company to catch AT&T in terms of physical assets because AT&T has been in business since the late 1800's. In order to level the playing field the government decided to force AT&T to rent their "pipeline" to anyone.

Whistle-Blower's Evidence, Uncut

From wired.com
02:00 AM May, 22, 2006

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA's visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.

Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure" and a second "Cut-In and Test Procedure" dated Jan. 24, 2003.

Here we present Klein's statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here (pdf). The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.

More can be found here at wired.com

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70944-2.html

Super Best Friends

2006-05-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago South Park ran into some controversy about showing the Prophet Mohammed in one of their episodes. The creators of the show ended up not showing his image and claimed that Comedy Central had censored it. Personally, I think they are yanking our chains to generate some heat around the show. Here is a clip from a few years ago that had the Prophet Mohammed in it.

I always enjoyed the Super Friends on Saturday morning TV when I was a kid. This spoof still makes me chuckle.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

2006-05-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was amazing! If you have never been there, make it a point to go especially if you have kids. They have activities geared towards children from 6 months to 18 years old.

Rachel's First Ice Cream

2006-05-21T22:28:00.000-07:00

Here are the pictures from Rachel's first experience with vanilla ice cream. She is a big fan.

Park Pictures and Fairy Tale Town

2006-05-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures from the park and Fairy Tale town. You can see that at the park she is holding an actual baseball bat (yay!) and she is flying a kite all by herself. What a kid.

These pictures were taken in April (park) and May (Fairy Tale Town).

Hall of Fame Pics - Year 3 (so far)

2006-05-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Hall of Fame Pics - Year 2

2006-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Hall of Fame Pics - Year 1

2006-05-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Were the Exit Polls Right in 2004?

2006-05-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

Just read this. It may take a while and will take some thought but slog through to the end, it's worth it. Here is the link

A Corrupted Election
Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right
By Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.
The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the Ã¢ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.Ã¢ Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.

Grasping at explanations
Last November in the United States, as in Ukraine, the discrepancy between the presidential exit polls and the tallied count was far beyond the margin for error. At the time, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the National Election Pool (a consortium of the nationÃ¢s five major broadcasters and the Associated Press), didnÃ¢t provide an explanation for how this happened. They promised, however, that a full explanation would be forthcoming.

On Jan. 19, on the eve of the inauguration, Edison and Mitofsky released their report, "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004", which generated headlines such as MSNBC's Exit Polls Prove That Bush Won. But, the report does nothing of the sort. It restates a thesis that the pollsters previously intimatedÃ¢that the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."But the body of the report offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, data presented in the report serve to rebut the thesis, and bolster suspicions that the official vote count was way, way off.

The report states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by chance ("sampling error"), and that a systematic bias is implicated.
With that statement the pollsters confirm the discrepancy we initially documented. The exit polls were based on more than 70,000 confidential questionnaires completed by randomly selected voters as they exited the polling place. The overall margin of error should have been under 1 percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than 5 percent a statistical impossibility.

The pollsters report that the precincts were appropriately chosen for sampling, in that the aggregated official results from the sampled precincts accurately reflected the official statewide ballot counts.

In saying this, Mitofsky and Edison vindicate a key piece of their methodologyÃ¢the representativeness of their samples. If the fault indeed lies with the exit polls, the range of possibilities for error is therefore narrowed.

Finally, they report that the source of error is, in fact, within-precinct error (WPE), the difference between official precinct tallies and the exit poll samples from those same precincts. On average, across the country, the President did 6.5 percent better in the official vote count, relative to Kerry, than the exit polls projected.

This admission further narrows the range of possibilities. If the polling data are accurate, the only remaining possibilities are "non-response" bias (i.e., Bush voters disproportionately did not participate in the exit polls) and/or errors in the official tally.

However, having gotten to this point in their argument, Mitofsky and Edison summarily dismiss the possibility that the official count was wrong. They reject the election fraud hypothesis because, they say, Ã¢precincts with touch screen and optical voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch-card systems.

Indeed, they do. But this fact merely suggests that all three of these systems may have been corrupted. Indeed, there is little question about problems associated with both punch card systems (recall the Florida debacle in 2000) and mechanical voting machines, which are generally unreliable, vulnerable to tinkering and leave no paper trail. ThatÃ¢s why both systems have been slated for termination under the Helping America Vote Act of 2002.
Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.

Further, data that are underplayed in the report provide support for the hypothesis that the election was stolen.

First, the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while that fact is consistent with allegations of fraud (if you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed), Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.

Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the presidentÃ¢s men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0Ã¢the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).

Other report data undermine the argument that Kerry voters were more likely to complete the exit poll interview than Bush voters. If this were the case, then one would expect that in precincts where Kerry voters predominated, the cooperation rate would be higher than in pro-Bush precincts. But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds.

Corollary evidence
The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election. Moreover, the exit poll discrepancy must be interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities during Election Day 2004. For many Americans, if not most, mass-scale fraud in a U.S. presidential election is an unthinkable possibility. But taken together, the allegations, the subsequently documented irregularities, systematic vulnerabilities, and implausible numbers suggest a coherent story of fraud and deceit.

What's more, the exit poll disparity doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't count those voters who were disenfranchised before they even got to the polls. The voting machine shortages in Democratic districts, the fraudulent felony purges of voter rolls, the barriers to registration, and the unmailed, lost, or cavalierly rejected absentee ballots all represent distortions to the vote count above and beyond what is measured by the exit poll disparity. The exit polls, by design, sample only those voters who have already overcome these hurdles.
The thesis of the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll report and the headlines that it generated are curiously detached from the numbers in the report itself. Statisticians who have studied the exit polls find substantial evidence to support the thesis that the vote counts, not the exit polls, were inaccurate.

Apparently, the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy. Unfortunately, their patrons in the media find it correspondingly preferable to latch onto a non-confrontational thesis, however implausible, than to even suggest the possibility of foul play.

A comprehensive analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky report has been posted here.

It's OK when Bush sings in Spanish

2006-05-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

I guess it's OK when he sings the national anthem in Spanish to get elected.
Here's the link http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/02/bush-sing-spanish/

President Bush, 4/28/06
I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.

But in his book American Dynasty, Kevin Phillips notes that during Bush's first presidential campaign, he would often sing the national anthem in Spanish. From pg. 142:

When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, he would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parties, sometimes joining in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, sometimes partying with a "Viva Bush" mariachi band flown in from Texas.

This will go down on your permanent record!!!!

2006-05-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 01, 2006

I'm sitting here in my computer class. Thank god it is the last class for this semester. As a part of our teacher preparation program we have to purchase a subscription to Taskstream.com so we can post our lesson plans and our professors can review our work. The subscription is for one year and it is for around $40. Not too onerous considering the price of actual textbooks we are forced to buy and read.

We need to take a technology class in order to get our certification. They teach things like how to cut and paste in Word, how to set up a formula in Excel, and how to compress and email a PowerPoint presentation. All useful stuff, but all stuff that I already know. I was able to test out of all of the general computer stuff and the Microsoft program sessions because of my stellar computer skills.

I did have to show up to the classes learn how to use Taskstream.com. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out. For me it is a clear, easy to use program and I like it a lot. That did not get me out of showing up to 5 of these classes to learn how to use it.

My instructor is talking about assembling our online portfolio that employers can look at once we get our credential. She is really selling this feature of the website. I think it is neat that we can put all of our reflections, lessons, and units in one place for someone to look at if they like. The problem is that NOBODY is going to look at this once I graduate from Sac State.

It reminds me of the time when I was a sophomore in college and a professor swore to me that future employers would care if I got a B or a C in my second semester of Spanish. Other professors during my undergrad experience stressed the importance of GPA to prospective employers.

Well, turns out it was all bullshit. Nobody cares if I had a 3.0 in college. All the jobs I have acquired were either by nepotism, a good reference, a clear resume and a good series of interviews. More often than not, getting a job usually boils down to being in the right place at the right time.

If you are out of high school and someone tells you hat something is going to go down on your permanent record, tell them to go pound sand. Usually people who have spent their life in academia have no idea what it takes to get a job in the real world.

Phil Collins Still Sucks

2006-05-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

Let me preface this by saying that I am not a big music guy. All the tunes that I listen to are on my radio when I am driving around town. I have not bought a new CD in two years and the only current "music" that I pay attention to is on American Idol.

I have old man's disease. Most of the new stuff I hear all sounds the same to me. I do not have the time or the energy to figure out what is cool and listen to it. I used to watch MTV to stay current, but they stopped playing videos a while ago. I guess that is when I stopped paying attention.

The music that I do listen to is old and familiar. The radio stations that I listen to play music from 1964 to 1995 in a variety of formats. There is the 80's station, the top hits station, the ROCK station, and Jack (or Howard or Phil or whatever). Even if you do not live in Sacramento I'm sure you have these stations where you live. Radio is the same all over the country.

These stations like to play music that is nostalgic, I can dig it. After all, that is why I listen. Hearing songs from my past can connect me to college, high school or different times of my life. Sometimes I hear songs that I have not heard in years and I appreciate them for what they are. Good solid tunes that I enjoyed when it was out. Hearing songs like, "Joey" by Concrete Blonde or "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo

I have a message for all of you younglings that did not grow up with the music of the 70's and 80's. Much of it really sucked. It was bad when it was first released and it is still terrible today. Now, I understand that there is a certain campiness to some songs from that era. They are so bad that they are good. Songs like "YMCA" or "Ice, Ice Baby" that were reviled when they came out are kinda fun to hear again when you least expect it.

The price we pay for hearing the music that we like or that we can make fun of is dear. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to hear Phil Collins or Genesis again. Or Mike and the Mechanics. Or Styx. Why oh why do radio programmers feel the need to play anything from Peter Gabriel's "So" album. Why on earth did I hear "We Built This City (on rock and roll)" by Starship when I was driving downtown yesterday?

This music was shoved down my throat when I was young. I survived hearing "Teacher, Teacher" by .38 Special three times a day for six months when I was delivering newspapers in High School. Yes I survived this music, but as you can see it has permanently scarred me.

Why am I forced to relive the trauma? Are people really clamoring to hear Ace of Base or Pat Benatar

I know what you are saying, "If you don't like it why don't you just turn the channel?" To you I say, "What the hell else am I going to listen to while my favorite AM talk shows are playing commercials?"

Pictures of Ray

2006-05-19T21:15:00.000-07:00