In the what's not new department of overpaid and testosterone overloaded black athletes, pit bull blood and gore rise once again from the ghost of Michael Vick.
Retired Houston Texan Steve Foley kept a couple of what neighbors called dangerojus pit bulls on his gated property.
The other day when Twana Schulz and the puppy she was holding were picking up her daughter at the bus stop, a neighbor yelled "His dogs are lose!" Twana with the fear of God in her ran to her home but the dogs intercepted her in her front yard.
After suffering several bites to her face and neck (hospitalization and stitches) she gave up the puppy to the pit bulls who gleefully tore it apart in front of her. Probe continues in Fort Bend pit bull attack
This falls under the three things I would most not like to have:
For years, Dave McArdle loved dressing up as Andrew Jackson, and visitors to the Hermitage delighted in McArdle's folksy way of bringing "Old Hickory" to life. McArdle is also the spitting image of Jackson, and we cast him as Jackson in our film. But just after we finished shooting, startling news arrived: McArdle had resigned from the job he loved — the job for which he was seemingly born — because he refused to work for an organization that made Jackson look bad because he owned slaves. Soon after, we found out that McArdle held something close to the majority view in Tennessee. No more Excuses Carl Byker
This is one of the three reasons I am still holding hope for Hillary. Sure Tennessee is part of the Old South which a Democratic Presidential candidate cannot win no matter, but this racism - oops wrong word, there is no racism anymore the GOP has changed the name for it to nativism now - spills over everywhere to various degrees which leads me to sadly believe The Bradley Effect is in full swing in this election. White Americans may say they will vote for an African American, but when they hit the voting booths they won't. My other two issues are that Hillary will do a much better job of the long overdue ass kicking the Republicans are so in need of, and my fear of some unknown issue in the past that will rear its head after the convention and knock Obama out making John W. McBush President. There is nothing new about Hillary, and NEW sells.
If you have been reading this blog over the months I hope you have taken note that I have not attacked either candidate, or any Democats for that matter. The bottom line is that I tend to believe that the so called unlikeable Hillary factor is less a problem than our historic racist nature. Please please prove me wrong come November...
Perhaps white Americans should ask themselves: "What would it have been like to work 365 days a year from sunrise to midnight, with no hope of a better life? And to see my children living exactly the same nightmare."
And perhaps black Americans ought to ask themselves: "If I were a white Southerner before the Civil War, would I have owned slaves if it meant a better life for my family? And would that have made me irredeemably evil?" No more Excuses Carl Byker
And that is the gist of our racist nature. Byker is referring to what is called empathy, or what over the years I have called the POV gene (point of view). Though no Republican possesses the genetic material to put themselves in another's shoes and ask such questions, it too drifts beyond the GOP base.
The story on this video is not so much that for the first time in history the President of the United States was heartily booed throwing out the first pitch of the season at a ball park, but that the sport announcers giving live commentary were AFRAID to mention it. Why is that?
"And at bottom, his economic vision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He’s going to keep the Bush tax cuts, continue our $3-trillion-and-counting war in Iraq and decrease corporate taxes. And how is he going to pay for it? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks. And I am planning to remodel my house by purchasing a tube of Elmer’s glue.
But give the man credit for telling it like he thinks it is. So far, he’s only alienated the homeowners, retirees and vacation-takers."
I don’t see how anybody could deny that John McCain is a straight-talker. The country is terrified of economic collapse and he’s been sounding like Mr. Potter, the banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You can’t get more forthright than that.
McCain, by the way, is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Really. While you were watching Hillary and Barack in the Campaign That Never Ends, the Republicans picked him.
How did this happen so fast? We haven’t even heard from Pennsylvania!
The Republicans, with their unfair but very, very efficient winner-take-all primaries, closed the deal while the Democrats were still trying to count the votes in Texas. (Results are due any minute!) Now, the Democrats are terrified that McCain will have months and months to raise money and ingratiate himself with the American people while their candidates are spending every cent they can get their hands on to make each other less popular. On Friday, Senator Patrick Leahy called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because McCain was getting a “free ride” while Democrats squabble.
That felt like an overestimation. Not that McCain hasn’t scored some points on the days that he wasn’t getting Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq mixed up. Witness the speed and dexterity with which he’s been distancing himself from the White House. The only withdrawal McCain supports began when he said he was eager to have Bush campaign for him whenever “it fits into his busy schedule,” making it clear that the busyness of said schedule was going to be beyond comprehension.
Then McCain gave a foreign policy speech in which he broke dramatically with the administration by acknowledging that we should probably quit invading other countries in the face of enormous opposition from our allies.
No fair! He got to start first! Why aren’t the Republicans required to use primary rules that allocate delegates in a fair, proportional way that makes it impossible for anybody to actually win? If McCain were still running against Mitt (Available for Vice President) Romney and Fred (Available for “Law & Order” Cameo) Thompson, he would, of course, still be sounding like a divorced-from-reality loon. But once a Republican clinches his party’s nomination, he moves to the middle, stops dropping Ronald Reagan’s name every five seconds and begins describing himself as a “Roosevelt Republican,” hoping that older working-class voters will think he means Franklin.
Fortunately for the quivering Democrats, McCain has also felt compelled to speak about the mortgage crisis. His economic thinking — which is, in any form, a brand-new phenomenon — harks back to the time when Republicans all seemed to be elderly rich guys who muttered a lot about bonded indebtedness. The public’s deep lack of enthusiasm for this worldview was what encouraged Reagan to change the subject to optimism and abortion.
The theme for his mortgage speech this week was basically McCain to Homeowners: Drop Dead. It was, he said sternly, “not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly.” The good news, he noted, was that out of 80 million American homeowners, only 4 million are in the tank, while everybody else is “working a second job, skipping a vacation and managing their budgets” the way Countrywide Financial intended them to.
He did, however, leave the door open for some vague, amorphous, undefined aid to good homeowners, as opposed to irresponsible ones who ... did something irresponsible. Like taking that vacation.
McCain then suggested that the federal government ought to do something about getting regulations off the back of the financial markets and concluded with a call to reduce the corporate tax rate. It was not exactly a rallying cry for the masses.
Imagine what Mitt (Really, Really, Really Available) Romney would have been saying about mortgages if he had the nomination in hand and was repositioning his deeply flexible self for the general election. Can you see the “Wall Street Is Broken” banners? He’d probably have sent a son bearing a certified check to every mortgage defaulter in a swing state.
McCain also favors privatizing parts of the Social Security system, an idea so deeply unpopular with actual people that it never flew in Congress, even when the Republicans were in control and the nation had not yet deduced that the president was permanently out to lunch.
And at bottom, his economic vision makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He’s going to keep the Bush tax cuts, continue our $3-trillion-and-counting war in Iraq and decrease corporate taxes. And how is he going to pay for it? By getting rid of pork-barrel earmarks. And I am planning to remodel my house by purchasing a tube of Elmer’s glue.
But give the man credit for telling it like he thinks it is. So far, he’s only alienated the homeowners, retirees and vacation-takers.
Mandi Hamlin. forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers before she could board an airplane for a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on February 24th, called this Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
Perhaps she seemed like a terrorist threat to the TSA agent, though it's a far stretch. Hamlin passed through the large metal detector without incident. The female agent used a hand held detector which beeped in front of Hamlin's chest. Hamlin explained she was wearing piercings. Apparently this was cause for a pow wow with the male agents who insisted she remove the jewelry. Explaining she could not remove the piercings, an offer to show them to a female agent was turned down.
Taken behind a curtain, she managed to get one bar shaped piercing out, but had great trouble with a ring which had obviously grown into the skin. "Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her," said Hamlin's attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA's Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims."After rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove," Allred said in the letter.
Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring. Male agents snickered as she took the ring out. She was scanned again and allowed to board though she was wearing a belly button ring. Obviously that wasn't the exploding one.
I wouldn't wish this experience upon anyone," Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. "My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way."Hamlin filed a complaint, but the TSA's customer service manager at the Lubbock airport concluded the screening was handled properly. Allred said Hamlin wants an apology from the TSA and an investigation by the agency's civil rights office.Allred said she might consider legal action if the TSA does not apologize. Call me crazy, but an apology seems a small price.
Hamlin was publicly humiliated and has "undergone an enormous amount of physical pain to have the nipple rings reinserted" because of scar tissue, Allred said.Hamlin said her piercings have never set off an airport metal detector."The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary," Allred wrote. "The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon."
There may still be a few glitches which need working out in our airport security practices, though I assume like everything else dealing with our safety, it's being handled by trained professionals. Woman Says TSA Forced Piercings Removal
Beautiful Jenna Walters would seem to have everything she wants. Miss Fayetteville, N.C. 2007,will be making her next public appearance in court.Arrested in November, her volatile nature was frightening for Angela Thomas.
Walters veered recklessly through traffic in Southern Pines, N.C. in order to harass driver Angela Thomas. Walters then cut in front of Thomas blocking her path, got out, and proceeded to scream and taunt the woman. Abruptly she stopped and drove away, returning only moments later from the other direction, bumped Thomas' car and continued screaming. Thomas must have thought her ordeal over, only to be jolted yet again from behind and hearing more yelling. Miss Congeniality loses her temper
Irony anyone? Walters was voted the 2006 Miss Fayetteville Miss Congeniality winner!
We often wonder how some people can be sooooo stupid. In the case of Paul John Vickers of Longmont, Colorado we may have a clue. After a tiff with his wife, 50 year old Vickers shot her cat Bootsie. He then emailed her and other friends and family to brag about it. Someone forwarded the email to the police who arrived and found his house full of pot plants and a stash of 4 more pounds. Paul John went to jail and is being held on $25,000 bond. As of yet, his wife has not dashed down to the Boulder jail to bail him out. Man shoots wife's cat
We do not have the best Health Care system in the world, we have the 28th best.
The major failing with enacting a national single payer health care plan - which the majority of Americans want - is two fold. First that it's presentation is far too complicated for the short attention spans of the average American.
Secondly the Republicans refuse to do anything about the problem other than handing it over to Wall Street. After all, they already have good coverage and don't give a rat's ass about your coverage - which is what makes them Republicans - it is the nature of the Beast.
If Democrats can make the presentation simple enough to get the populace behind it, the GOP will have the choice of either accepting it and trying to make it as meaningless as they can, or getting voted out of office and having no say at all.
So to make it easy Democrats have to knock this issue down into a few simple sound bites.
National Health care should be modeled after Social Security which is cost effective to run, understood, accepted, mandated and successful. The only problem with it was the serendipity of far too many WW2 veterans coming home and going on a 15 year long celebration of unprotected sex.
Next get the numbers down to just one or two. Pick a reasonable number, say $3000 a year deducted from everyone's check to pay for it. This will be offset by two factors.
First, as the plan will replace Medicare, that payment will no longer be deducted creating a big savings on withholding taxes. Secondly, with employers no longer having to pay their workers health care benefits, they WILL give that $3000 a year back to their employees in salaries and wages. So we are close to being even.
Insurance companies will do fine as they will immediately find everything that the national plan does not cover and fill the holes, while the buying power of employers will be able to offer similar plans including the dentist.
Congress will have long debates upon what the benefits will be and how doctors are paid - which is how all things are accomplished - all that is needed is the starting point.
Here are the big four:
Preventative care free across the board.
Basic health care with co pay.
Perscriptions with co-pay.
Catastrophic coverage.
Let's begin this long overdue project January 21, 2009.
Richard Widmark was always one of my favorites because like James Cagney he could do both good guys and bad guys equally well. The Kiss of Death from 1947, his first movie, got him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination as the giggling killer, Tommy Udo. This is the scene that made him famous.
Long famous for her super-sized hooters, big wigs, smile and voice, Dolly Parton quipped when receiving a songwriters award last year that she's been known for two things throughout her career. "I'm talking about my music and my lyrics."
Parton, 62, announced Monday that she would postpone her upcoming North American tour after doctors told her to take it easy for six to eight weeks to rest her sore back. "Hey, you try wagging these puppies around a while and see if you don't have back problems," the sassy singer-songwriter said in a statement. The tour, was to begin on February 28 in Minneapolis, two days after the release of her first album of mainstream country music in 17 years titled "Backwoods Barbie". Dolly now plans to start the tour in April.
Parton has been enjoying a renewed popularity since releasing the first of a trio of bluegrass-tinged albums in 1999. Dolly delved back into her musical roots in bluegrass after finding she was no longer welcome in country radio, much like other widely acclaimed veterans Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. She has garnered critical acclaim, and an appreciation of her 40 year career. Dolly Parton postpones tour, blames breasts
"I haven't had that in years, Ninety-three is kind of old." Frank Milio explained that he was only flirting.
Manatee County Prosecuters have gone ahead with indicting 93 year old Frank Milio for soliciting sex from a police officer pretending to be a prostitute. After the buxom woman gave Milos the eye, which he had not experienced in close to 50 years, he began flirting and offered her $20. About $3980 less than the going rate in New York, a sweat deal for a wrinkly old man with the prospect of sex with a beautiful young woman. Brings to mind the old adage that if something seems too good to be true it is.
If Milio for some reason will not, or cannot offset his Social Security check to pay the few hundred dollar fine, he could get 6 months in the pokey which could very well be a life sentence for trying to get laid with a $20 bill.
"All I was going to do was talk, it wasn't for sex. I am 93, you know." Carlos Underhill
John number two, Carlos Underhill will not be charged even though he had a prior fine of $150 for the same thing in 1990 when he was just a kid of 75. The rate went up for Carlos to a hefty $30, so he had to put his high speed tennis balls on the front of his walker and dash back to the nursing home to get his portable nebulizer and that extra $10 at the bottom of his hard candy bowl. Prosecutors have let Carlos off because they left the sting and do not know if he ever came back with the money. But they would like to prosecute if they could.
This is that same crazyass Rule of Law crap that in 1998 put a BJ on the front page of every newspaper, magazine and TV news program in the world for a year. The UBA, United Buffoons of America...
On the bright side of this story, I would guess both Frank and Carlos are in high demand with the ladies back at nursing home.
While the photo here may exaggerate a tad, I'm sure the chaos and terror which ensued Friday afternoon to three children at home must have seemed like destruction and noise on this scale.Two young boys were at home in their Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago on Friday afternoon. Their older sister was preparing a meal, and a parolee named Anthony Smith 24 was in the home.When the older sister heated the oven she had no reason to expect surprises. Suddenly she heard loud noises coming from the oven, followed by screams of her bleeding 4-year old brother who was shot in a leg. A 12 year-old boy was struck in the forehead by debris caused by the gunshots from the gun Smith wasn't allowed to have legally, and had decided to hide in the oven. He apparently forgot to share that information with the residents of the home, or perhaps saw no reason for concern when gun powder is heated to high temperatures. The younger boy is in stable condition in Corner Childrens Hospital, the 12 -year old was treated and released. Smith was recently paroled Feb. 22 from the Downstate Vienna prison, where he had been serving a one-year sentence on a drug conviction. His relationship to the boys - if any, was not disclosed.
Smith obviously hasn't read Hints from Heloise for storing your gun. An oven is an absolute no no. The genius who allegedly hid the gun was charged early Saturday with two counts of endangering the life of a child and one count of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, police said.
Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign.
First, Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects. Obama still holds a tiny lead among Democrats nationally in the Gallup tracking poll, just as he did before this whole affair blew up.
Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.
Third, as Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has reported, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination. Instead of lining up behind Clinton, they’re drifting away. Her lead among them has shrunk by about 60 in the past month, according to Avi Zenilman of Politico.com.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent.
Let’s take a look at what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. For another three months, we’ll have the Carvilles likening the Obamaites to Judas and former generals accusing Clintonites of McCarthyism. For three months, we’ll have the daily round of résumé padding and sulfurous conference calls. We’ll have campaign aides blurting “blue dress” and only-because-he’s-black references as they let slip their private contempt.
For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.
If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.
While you may wonder how many James Earl Rays' there may be in America, down here in Texas I wonder how many are on my street. An unpopular sentence that should never be a deciding factor in either the Obama's choice to run or a voters choice to pull a lever, but... If Obama becomes President of the United States there will be hell to pay, and it will be loud and violent. It is the Nature of the Beast. RJ
How will the next president deal with the terrorist crisis of 2010-11? No, not those terrorists. I mean the domestic extremists who, history suggests, are due for a resurgence.
Forecasting a wave of political extremism might sound like apocalyptic prophecy, but it has a sound basis in American political history. In November, it is possible that a liberal Democratic administration will be elected to replace the long-established conservative Republican leadership. Such a transition has occurred three times in the past 80 years, in 1932, 1960 and 1992. (For various reasons, the defeat of Gerald Ford in 1976 does not fit the model.) In each period, within two to three years, the nation had a frightening upsurge of radical right-wing, paramilitary movements.
In each case, these angry movements spun off terrorist cells that plotted assassinations and bombings. Significantly, these upsurges characterize only the shift from conservative to liberal administrations. Paramilitaries remain few in number and marginal under GOP administrations.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, an array of far-right movements borrowed the styles and imagery of European fascism. The most influential group was the Silver Shirts, which mixed violent anti-Semitism with New Age-style occultism. By the end of the decade, the pro-Nazi Christian Front was arming for a coup d'etat in which it planned to assassinate New Deal politicians, bomb East Coast cities and massacre Jews.
Paramilitary movements again flourished after the election of John F. Kennedy, when the far right was convinced that the administration was under thorough communist influence and some militants formed an armed insurgent movement that pledged to overthrow a Red federal regime. These militants, who adopted the historic name "Minutemen," built up arsenals on a terrifying scale, and their propaganda sheets listed politicians whose heads were "in the cross hairs" of a sniper's rifle. Some Minutemen funded their operations by bank robberies; others allied with a booming Ku Klux Klan that boasted tens of thousands of active members.
If these older movements never succeeded in putting their most extreme plans into action, the militia movement of the Clinton years left a stronger mark. By 1994, an estimated quarter of a million Americans were affiliated with "patriot" militias that armed and trained to resist a left-liberal "new world order." As before, some activists drifted into dangerous extremism. Some linked up with racist and anti-Jewish movements. When terrorists struck the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, no doubt remained as to just how perilous such links could be. Some fanatics had even further-reaching ambitions, seeking to obtain biological weapons. The Turner Diaries, the novel that became the era's manual of the ultraright, ends with the hero piloting a nuclear-armed suicide flight against the Pentagon.
It's not mysterious historical cycles but perceived dangers, and government responses, that explain these recurrent upsurges of extremism. Over the last century, conservative administrations have presented themselves as standing firm against external threats. Incoming liberal governments may believe that such threats are exaggerated, or at least choose to focus on domestic priorities.
In the 1930s, as in the 1960s and 1990s, conservative critiques painted liberal administrations as not just naive or weak but actively treacherous, plotting to sell out the country to its enemies. Facing such a threat — however imaginary — radicals resorted to the age-old American tradition of taking up arms to resist tyranny. Witness the very name of the Minutemen.
Could it happen again? Imagine a scenario in which a Democratic administration withdrew from Iraq, and conservatives denounced the betrayal of sacrifices made by the armed forces. Then consider all the personnel who have cycled through private security companies in Iraq and elsewhere, whose knowledge of military organization and weaponry could make them an effective nucleus of a new militia movement. If a disintegrating economy were fueling popular fear and unrest, the elements would be in place.
Those are a lot of ifs. But anti-government activism may be less worrisome than the means that could be used to combat it. Democratic administrations repeatedly used the paramilitary threat to justify the expansion of law enforcement powers. And today, the government's long experience of intrusive surveillance powers and questionable interrogation techniques easily could be turned against domestic as well as foreign enemies. Who is prepared to criticize official excesses during a terrorism panic?
History may or may not repeat itself following the 2008 election. But we should not be surprised when debates over terrorism and civil liberties start, quite literally, to come home.
Jenkins is the author of "Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America" and "God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis." This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The lies, deceit and stupidity aside, the political horror of George W Bush's war in Iraq is that in following GOP ideology, he put the cost of the blood and money upon the least of us while he cut taxes for the wealthy and unearned income crowd who have sacrificed absolutely nothing. No President or political party in American history was ever been so bold.
The Iraq war is now going better than expected, for a change. Most critics of the war, myself included, blew it: we didn’t anticipate the improvements in security that are partly the result of last year’s “surge.”
The improvement is real but fragile and limited. Here’s what it amounts to: We’ve cut our casualty rates to the unacceptable levels that plagued us back in 2005, and we still don’t have any exit plan for years to come — all for a bill that is accumulating at the rate of almost $5,000 every second!
More important, while casualties in Baghdad are down, we’re beginning to take losses in Florida and California. The United States seems to have slipped into recession; Americans are losing their homes, jobs and health insurance; banks are struggling — and the Iraq war appears to have aggravated all these domestic woes.
“The present economic mess is very much related to the Iraq war,” says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “It was at least partially responsible for soaring oil prices. ...Moreover, money spent on Iraq did not stimulate the economy as much as the same dollars spent at home would have done. To cover up these weaknesses in the American economy, the Fed let forth a flood of liquidity; that, together with lax regulations, led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom.”
Not everyone agrees that the connection between Iraq and our economic hardships is so strong. Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International and author of a book on how America pays for wars, argues that the Iraq war is a negative for the economy but still only a minor factor in the present crisis.
“Is it a significant cause of the present downturn?” Mr. Hormats asked. “I’d say no, but could the money have been better utilized to strengthen our economy? The answer is yes.”
For all the disagreement, there appears to be at least a modest connection between spending in Iraq and the economic difficulties at home. So as we debate whether to bring our troops home, one central question should be whether Iraq is really the best place to invest $411 million every day in present spending alone.
I’ve argued that staying in Iraq indefinitely undermines our national security by empowering jihadis — just as we now know that our military presence in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s was, in fact, counterproductive by empowering Al Qaeda in its early days. On the other hand, supporters of the war argue that a withdrawal from Iraq would signal weakness and leave a vacuum that extremists would fill, and those are legitimate concerns.
But if you believe that staying in Iraq does more good than harm, you must answer the next question: Is that presence so valuable that it is worth undermining our economy?
Granted, the cost estimates are squishy and controversial, partly because the $12.5 billion a month that we’re now paying for Iraq is only a down payment. We’ll still be making disability payments to Iraq war veterans 50 years from now.
Professor Stiglitz calculates in a new book, written with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, that the total costs, including the long-term bills we’re incurring, amount to about $25 billion a month. That’s $330 a month for a family of four.
A Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college. Or if we’re sure we want to invest in security, then a day’s Iraq spending would finance another 11,000 border patrol agents or 9,000 police officers.
Imagine the possibilities. We could hire more police and border patrol agents, expand Head Start and rehabilitate America’s image in the world by underwriting a global drive to slash maternal mortality, eradicate malaria and deworm every child in Africa.
All that would consume less than one month’s spending on the Iraq war.
Moreover, the Bush administration has financed this war in a way that undermines our national security — by borrowing. Forty percent of the increased debt will be held by China and other foreign countries.
“This is the first major war in American history where all the additional cost was paid for by borrowing,” Mr. Hormats notes. If the war backers believe that the Iraq war is so essential, then they should be willing to pay for it partly with taxes rather than charging it.
One way or another, now or later, we’ll have to pay the bill. Professor Stiglitz calculates that the eventual total cost of the war will be about $3 trillion. For a family of five like mine, that amounts to a bill of almost $50,000.
If you doubt that crap personality is the driving force behind conservative politics, look back to your childhood. I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that every one of your friends and acquaintances who was an asshole then, is a conservative today.
As I grow older and watch my very different children reach adulthood, I find myself moving more to the idea of genetic disposition than I do environment for how we turn out. This is not to say the "wheres" and "hows" of growing up are not important, but that certain traits are often inborn.
Researching this over the years I notice more and more studies and statistics finding that such things as propensity to violence, being unable to stand in another's shoes (empathy), forgiveness, vengeance and even religious belief are more genetic in nature than previously though. Such stories of course are very unpopular and usually hard to find because without saying it or even meaning to do so, they point out that conservatives are born rather than parents piping The Rush Limbaugh Show through crib monitors for their first 5 years.
An example is while this story tugs hard at my heartstrings when i brought it up to my conservative friend Bubba, his immediate response was "Tough shit".
The story is about an average 14 year old boy in Fayetteville, Ark - a conservative Southern town of 60,000 - who has been beat up and bullied at school consistently over the past seven years without anyone but his parents giving a rat's ass.
And if that were not enough, this is the very thing that has caused most of the school shootings we seem to hear more and more of as time passes.
In the what's not new department of overpaid and testosterone overloaded black athletes, pit bull blood and gore rise once again from the ghost of Michael Vick. 
Mandi Hamlin. forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers before she could board an airplane for a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on February 24th, called this Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
Beautiful Jenna Walters would seem to have everything she wants. Miss Fayetteville, N.C. 2007,will be making her next public appearance in court.Arrested in November, her volatile nature was frightening for Angela Thomas.
We often wonder how some people can be sooooo stupid. In the case of Paul John Vickers of Longmont, Colorado we may have a clue. After a tiff with his wife, 50 year old Vickers shot her cat Bootsie. He then emailed her and other friends and family to brag about it. Someone forwarded the email to the police who arrived and found his house full of pot plants and a stash of 4 more pounds. Paul John went to jail and is being held on $25,000 bond. As of yet, his wife has not dashed down to the Boulder jail to bail him out. 
Manatee County Prosecuters have gone ahead with indicting 93 year old Frank Milio for soliciting sex from a police officer pretending to be a prostitute. After the buxom woman gave Milos the eye, which he had not experienced in close to 50 years, he began flirting and offered her $20. About $3980 less than the going rate in New York, a sweat deal for a wrinkly old man with the prospect of sex with a beautiful young woman. Brings to mind the old adage that if something seems too good to be true it is. 
John number two, Carlos Underhill will not be charged even though he had a prior fine of $150 for the same thing in 1990 when he was just a kid of 75. The rate went up for Carlos to a hefty $30, so he had to put his high speed tennis balls on the front of his walker and dash back to the nursing home to get his portable nebulizer and that extra $10 at the bottom of his hard candy bowl. Prosecutors have let Carlos off because they left the sting and do not know if he ever came back with the money. But they would like to prosecute if they could. 
As I grow older and watch my very different children reach adulthood, I find myself moving more to the idea of genetic disposition than I do environment for how we turn out. This is not to say the "wheres" and "hows" of growing up are not important, but that certain traits are often inborn. 
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