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Sarah Palin is the other whom Yoda spoke about.

calendar   Saturday - November 07, 2009

WEEKEND WOMEN

I haven’t followed Country Music since leaving the business many years ago.  In fact, even when I was working in it, I hardly ever listened to the radio.
Still wasn’t hard to keep up of course because I was mostly right there in Nashville.  In fact, I was right here.

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That’s the old Faron Young Bldg. My office lined in red as you see. Over to the left at the other entrance was the offices of Music City News. In it’s day the best paper on the topic in the whole of the USA.  Faron’s offices were on the top floor.  I liked Faron a lot. As a DJ of course I knew who he was and happily played his records cos the guy was damn good.  I think my favorite was, “It’s 4 In The Morning”.  Oh well. This is about Women.  Now then ... This absolutely GOR-JUS creature is a dancer I’m informed, but also a Country Singer. No, I had never heard of her. No, I haven’t heard her sing either.  I’m happy to just look at her. Aren’t you?


JULIANNE HOUGH:

(Born July 20, 1988) is an American professional ballroom dancer and country music singer. She is most-widely known for being a two-time winner of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars.[1] She earned a Creative Arts Primetime Emmy nomination in 2007 for choreography. ABC’s 20/20 called her one of the “very best dancers on the planet."[2] Hough’s brother, Derek, is also on Dancing with the Stars and is a winner himself. Hough was signed to Mercury Nashville Records in December 2007. Her self-titled debut album was released May 20, 2008, debuting at #1 on the Billboard Country Album chart and #3 on the Billboard 200. It sold 67,000 copies its first week, and has sold over 320,000 total copies. On October 12, 2008, she released a holiday album, Sounds of the Season: The Julianne Hough Holiday Collection, which as of January 5, 2009, had sold 157,000 copies.

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MAN WHAT A WELCOME AND FAR CRY FROM THE CARTER FAMILY. Not that I was ever a fan. Yuk.  If it wasn’t for the late Johnny Cash they’d have been consigned to the dustbin of music history.  I never understood their appeal.  APPEAL ... talk about looks.  Tanya Tucker’s sister. LaCosta. W O W! What memories.
Tanya wan’t bad either and neither was Lorie Morgan.
OK, enuff of that.  NEXT.

Because my taste is so well defined (lol) which means you can’t argue with me here.  This woman was not only one hell of an actress.
In the history of beautiful women this lady was, in her youth, the MOST fantastically gorgeous - desirable - beautiful - awesomely beautiful female that nature ever created.  And so say I and I must be right since my taste is better then yours.  (oh boy.  I’m in trouble. Huh?)

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An English beauty rose for certain. You may recall her as the evil mom in, The Manchurian Candidate.  And of course the awful (I think) Murder She Wrote TV series.

AWESOME ANGELA

ANGELA LANSBURY

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Posted by peiper   United States  on 11/07/2009 at 07:55 AM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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Speaking of Obama, Heffer says he is beatable.  The question is, by whom?

There was a small photo in the hard copy of Ronald Reagan.  How I do miss that great man.
Anyway, this is an interesting take from an eminent Brit conservative.  There isn’t anything I care to add.  In fact, I can’t think of anything and it isn’t necessary anyway.
That’s your job.

I wonder, though, whether what has happened to Mickey (Mouse) is a metaphor for St Barack Obama, who perhaps needs an image makeover after an unsuccessful year of kowtowing to his friends in Congress. Finding a “dark side” to show to those who now call the shots in America – notably organised labour and other Leftist lobby groups – could well help his poll rating, as could an enhanced role for Minnie. Are Disney’s top men even now on their way to the White House for urgent talks?

it is quite clear that the rhetoric-filled incumbent is eminently beatable.

Barack Obama is beatable - but by whom?
The Republicans have a fundamental problem: they don’t have a leader to capitalise on Barack Obama’s weakness, says Simon Heffer.

By Simon Heffer

A year on from its meltdown in the Obama landslide, the Republican Party has cause to celebrate. As predicted, it won two state governorships this week – and that was predicted because of the disillusionment with the image machine that is President Obama and his chums. Those victories, in states Mr Obama won last year, Virginia and New Jersey, have caused not just many Republicans, but also their acolytes in the press, to proclaim they are on the road back, and that the spectre of George W Bush no longer hangs over them.
Perhaps they are right: but things don’t look entirely wonderful for them.
Like our Tories, the Republicans are finding it hard to avoid a civil war over ideology. A more significant electoral result, in this respect, came in a congressional by-election in New York state. There were effectively two Republicans on the ballot – a moderate, pro-abortion one called Dede Scozzafava, and one supported by most local Republicans, but running under the banner of the Conservative Party, Doug Hoffman. Last Sunday Miss Scozzafava withdrew from the race and said she would back the Democratic candidate. Her name was already on the ballot, she registered 5 per cent of the vote, and the Democrat won.
Those who have said that this shows the American people don’t want a Reagan-style Republican Party are, however, just plain wrong. Miss Scozzafava did not withdraw because she was popular: she withdrew because she was about to be thrashed out of sight. However, the battle over just how far to the Right the Republicans should be is one that is going to run, and cause problems, right up to the day in the summer of 2012 when their candidate is formally nominated to take on Mr Obama.

The Republicans also have a more fundamental problem: they don’t have a leader. George W Bush is in an outer darkness from which his forthcoming memoirs are unlikely to reclaim him. John McCain is still in the Senate and serving his country, but at 73, and with last year’s defeat on his record, the game is up. And Sarah Palin, who arrived with such a bang, has left with a whimper, weighed down by lawsuits, the towel thrown in in Alaska, and her baroque extended family having become one of America’s favourite soap operas.

In just under a year’s time, Mr Obama and his party will face what threaten to be gruelling mid-term elections. Sensible Republicans argue that anything could happen in that time and that the chances of winning back either the Senate or the House are slim. Despite the anti-Obama feeling in the country, and the unlikelihood of dramatic economic recovery over the next 12 months, they are probably right. However, the Republicans must demonstrate some momentum in those elections or they will never get out of the starting blocks in 2012: and it is quite clear that the rhetoric-filled incumbent is eminently beatable.

With that election almost three years away, nobody wants to be a Republican front-runner and invite early destruction (Sarah Palin, qv). However, media here have already identified two – Tim Pawlenty, the Governor of Minnesota, who strongly supported Mr Hoffman over Miss Scozzafava, and Mitt Romney, the multi-millionaire Mormon who ran for the nomination last year.

Governor Pawlenty sounds like he could be the man to beat – “We cannot send more politicians to Washington who wear the Republican jersey on the campaign trail but then vote like Democrats in Congress,” he said of his desire to back Mr Hoffman. So the fight will be entertaining, and possibly nasty – and that’s before they even take it to Mr Obama.

SOURCE


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/07/2009 at 07:30 AM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsPoliticsUK •  
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A PRO WAR EDITORIAL COMMENT FROM CHARLES MOORE, IN THE FACE OF CALLS TO END IT NOW.

Funny how plans to do one thing get put off by something someone else does.  In this case, our friend Christopher has posted a great cartoon, and one I wish I’d found first. And like most illustrations of that nature, it says a heck of a lot.

Well, I had intended to post my Weekend Women before doing anything else, and they’re all ready to go.  But first there was that cartoon and then what is obviously a negative war cartoon in our morning paper, followed by this pro editorial from Charles Moore.  With all that, I felt I HAD to share this first. In fact, my next will be one from Simon Heffer on defeating Obama.  So a busier Sat. morning then I expected. 

This is a very worthwhile read and I encourage all to do so.  It has been edited for space here so please catch the link for the entire piece. It’s worth it.

If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely. Politicians such as Nick Clegg, who congratulate themselves on asking the necessary, awkward questions, need to be interrogated about what they actually want. Do they want the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs? Do they have any conception of what such a defeat would mean for the world order, for the stability of countries in the region, or for civil peace in every European city? Do they not understand that this fight will be seen all over the world not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that, if our values do not win, they will lose? (Charles Moore)

FOR MOORE, CLICK HERE

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The war in Afghanistan is necessary, so why aren’t we trying harder to win?
The campaign in Afghanistan is being let down by weak leadership, on both sides of the Atlantic, says Charles Moore

By Charles Moore
The Saturday Telegraph
Editorial

Forgive me for starting with a harsh point, but it needs to be said that the fact that 229 British servicemen have been killed in Afghanistan is not an argument for ending the war. There is a tendency at present to exploit people’s admiration for the soldiers’ courage as a means not of advancing the Allied campaign, but of trying to stop it.

Such arguments have much more force with a conscript army, but ours is a professional one. Men volunteer to fight and they know that when you fight, you may die. The death of 229 such professionals over the course of eight years is not, by the standard of most wars, a high number. Tomorrow, the nation remembers wars where that number of dead per day was commonplace. The recent losses are extremely sad, but not shocking or even surprising. In themselves, they tell you nothing about whether the war is right or wrong.

It is, therefore, a bad idea for Gordon Brown’s public interventions on the subject of Afghanistan to be responses to particular deaths. Yesterday, he spoke in the wake of the murder of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman. One feels that his timing, though not his content, was tacitly rebuked by General Nick Parker, the new British commander in theatre, who said: “I hope we don’t make strategic decisions on the basis of this low-level, terrible action.”

The actual words which Mr Brown used supported the Afghan campaign, but their psychological undertow was less encouraging: “Oh dear, oh dear. Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”
Mr Brown is well known for being an intensely political politician, forever calculating electoral advantage, but he does not understand the political effect of wars. His original hope in Afghanistan seems to have been that people somehow would not notice it much. He was not exactly against it, but he has never, as people say nowadays, taken “ownership” of it. This is a war: why has he never set up a war cabinet?


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/07/2009 at 06:53 AM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsUKWar On Terror •  
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More Ft. Hood

See more such political cartoons here.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 11/07/2009 at 05:01 AM   
Filed Under: • HumorMilitary •  
Comments (5) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

calendar   Friday - November 06, 2009

I’m Looking Into It

Every time I load this page today, the masthead and the first post have a white haze over them. I don’t know why. It isn’t any error in the top post, it isn’t a problem with the Cities Online counter over to the right. I will try pulling a couple more bits and seeing if that fixes anything. In the meantime, this post will stay on top, with lots of line breaks in it, so that the links in the posts after this one aren’t obscured.










Huh. I cleared all my recent data from Firefox and it went away. Stupid browser.  Good, that’s one less headache for me today.



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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/06/2009 at 05:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
Comments (1) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Bloggy Stuff

I deleted another 300 or so fake membership applications.

Remember, if you want to join the gang here, you fill out the form and supply a real email. We email you an activation code thingy, get it, click it, and you are good to go. You get 30 days to respond, even though I think it says 2 weeks. Whatever. I go in there and take out the trash whenever I get there. Anything old gets tossed.

And please ... you spambots out there? Please find more realistic dummy names than slextipclkw at gmail dot com, or plwexmiqk7 at wer987 dot ru. It’s beyond lame.  You’re not fooling anyone. Same goes for the sexbot apps. MisoHawny at ruvurontime dot com isn’t going to pass muster.

Christopher - we now have the category “family”. I edited you post so that one will be the first entry. Email me with the categories you think we can do without. Thanks.



Ooooh, look, blog stats!

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Helm reports “Steady as she goes” sir!

What the above graph shows is that BMEWS continues to get about 1000 visits a day. Those of you who allow cookies on your PCs are counted as returning traffic. Those of you, like me, who wipe out cookies on a constant basis are shown as direct traffic. Only about 16% of the visits here are from search engine hits, with a very low percentage of web spiders and other automated gizmos. So this is quite cool actually. It means we have a very regular crowd. Love it. And hey, thanks for stopping by.

The spike in that graph in early February ‘09 was for our most popular post ever, the “Obama as ShamWow Guy” graphic that Rancino sent in. That made us famous. Famouser! Seriously, Google up “Shamwow Moonbat”; it goes on for 2 pages! We even got linked by Michelle Malkin, Daily Pundit, and quite a number of other big blogs. We were good in that post, and linked back to the source. The creator of that graphic has emailed me several times, amazed at the traffic it still generates. ShamWow Obama went viral after that, and was put up at many other sites. All thanks to Rancino. You rock, man.

Our #2 post is the one Peiper put up about the guy who makes model cars from beer cans.

And I still get hits for that rant I dropped on the RNC when they called up asking for money ... “Drew at Barking Moonbat Early Warning System was in a foul mood as he took a call from a guy with the Republican party while he was doing his taxes… ...”

So that’s that. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/06/2009 at 05:16 PM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff •  
Comments (6) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

FROM THE …. WTF DEPARTMENT ??????  WATCH AND PLEASE TELL ME THIS ISN’T FOR REAL.

Is this something that was put together and altered somehow?

The reason I ask is ... this thing runs 9 minutes and there’s enough here to make me wanna toss my dinner long,long before the end.
I better be honest with you.  I haven’t been able to watch all of it.  What I saw made me sick.

So ... how come this is the first time I’ve caught this and then only because a former neighbor in CA sent it to me. ???

Or, has it been around awhile and I just missed it?  The screen says CNN but I really don’t recall any big bru-ha-ha over these statements.
Or maybe the many are strung together here and say more then short sound bites.

All this talk about the great contributions of islam.  Yeah?  What contributions in the last 500 years?

I’m taking a Xanax and going to bed ...  Try and have a good wkend. Maybe hold off watching this till Monday?


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/06/2009 at 02:04 PM   
Filed Under: • InsanityObama, The OneOutrageousRoPMA •  
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Parents to be fined if they take their children out of sex lessons. It’s de law.

This is more or less an update and we’ve been through the subject here before.  I still think the starting age is too young but as I’ve noted, I’m not a parent.  Not very fair to parents who’d rather not have their kids in these classes.  Could that argument also be used btw, if a parent didn’t like the way history was taught?  Oh wait a minute.  From what I’ve heard, not much of that being taught anyway.
Recent poll found that a number of school age kids thought Hitler was a German football coach.  Kid ya not.

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‘Attention children. To set the mood Miss Spilsbury will strip off to demonstrate upside-down pole dancing whilst snorting a line of coke...’


Parents to be fined if they take their children out of sex lessons

By Laura Clark
06th November 2009

Parents will face fines if they remove 15-year-old children from sex education lessons as they become part of the national curriculum for the first time.

Lessons in relationships and sex will begin at five, with prescribed content for each age group.

Parents will still be able to withdraw children on moral and religious grounds, but this right - which currently extends until students are 19 - will be lost at 15.

Mothers and fathers risk being fined and prosecuted under anti-truancy laws.

Under current arrangements, secondary schools must teach sex education but can choose the content. Primary schools do not have to offer it at all.

The shake-up, outlined by Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, will affect 600,000 children from September 2011. It drew immediate protests.

Campaigners said sex education in the last year of secondary school - to which all children will now be exposed - is often the most explicit, with pupils taught about how to use a condom and access to contraception and abortion.

Religious leaders said parents would ‘vote with their feet’.

The Government insists that only a ‘tiny minority’ of parents exercised their right to pull their children out of sex education.

Mr Balls said it would not make sense to keep the age limit of 19, because teenagers can vote at 18 and the age of consent is 16.
Enlarge What they will be taught

In a Government-backed poll nearly a third of parents wanted to retain the right regardless of age. But another third said it should end at 11 and 20 per cent said there should be no opt-out at all.

Mr Balls said the aim was for all children to have at least one year of sex education. He said the changes would help tackle teenage pregnancies. But critics said the Government’s strategy of handing out contraceptives and spreading sex education was already failing.

Tahir Alam, education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said: ‘It is not for the state to become a parent.

‘We will be making representations to fight for the right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education.

‘Some parents view exposure of their children to this sort of material as morally objectionable and morally corrupting.’

DAILY MAIL SOURCE

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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/06/2009 at 01:06 PM   
Filed Under: • EducationSexUK •  
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Judge rules believers in gorbal warming have same protection under religious laws

Think it’s a joke?  Nope.

A few days ago I ran across a story that beggars belief and lost the damn article. Tried to find it in Google and failed but fortunately Richard Littlejohn brings it up here in his column today in the Mail.

I have edited the article to this subject but really do suggest you use the link to read his entire column. This guy is spot on .

GO HERE FOR ALL OF LITTLEJOHN

By Richard Littlejohn
Daily Mail
Nov. 6, 2009

This column has long argued that ‘man-made climate change’ is a new religion. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before that status was conferred upon it by law.

A judge has just ruled that a ‘global warming’ fanatic, made redundant by a property company after refusing to fly on business, can seek unlimited damages for religious discrimination.

Mr Justice Burton said that ‘a philosophical belief which is based on science’ is entitled to receive the same legal protection as a sincerely-held religious conviction.

The trouble with ‘man-made climate change’ is that it isn’t based on settled science, despite what the alarmists and their allies at the BBC would have us believe.

There is a welter of countervailing evidence that, far from warming up to boiling point, the Earth is actually getting cooler and the ice caps thicker.

More than 300 eminent, reputable scientists and research fellows in America have signed a declaration that ‘man-made global warming’ is a myth and dispute the link between carbon emissions and so- called ‘climate change’.

The founder of the Weather Channel says that Al Gore should be sued for fraud over his movie, A Convenient Lie

The founder of the Weather Channel, a meteorologist who can be fairly assumed to have some idea what he is talking about, says that self-righteous hypocrite Al Gore should be sued for fraud over his scaremongering movie, A Convenient Lie, which British judges have already agreed contains a number of obvious distortions of the truth.

(Incidentally, it has just been revealed that Gore is on course to become a billionaire off the back of his stake in a number of eco-related enterprises. It’s an ill wind...)

Look, I don’t know for sure which side is right, maybe neither of them, but my natural inclination is always towards scepticism.

What does seem patently apparent is that when you look at the assorted vested interests lined up on the ‘man-made’ side of the argument, you can’t help concluding that if all these opportunist politicians, madwomen, social engineers, sexual inadequates and quasi-communists agree then they are almost certainly wrong.

Politicians, in particular, love the great ‘climate change’ scare because it takes them a step nearer their fantasy of global government and allows them to impose an exciting array of new taxes, punishments and controls upon the peasants who pay their wages.

It has spawned a vast, self-perpetuating industry worth a fortune, of which the great ‘carbon offset’ scam is the most exploitative and ridiculous incarnation.

Paying someone conscience-money to plant a tree every time you fly? I wish I’d thought of that. .

President Obama back-pedals, China opens another coal-fired power station every day, India pollutes with impunity and tinpot African states demand cynically that the West pays them hundreds of millions of dollars to play ball.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/06/2009 at 12:15 PM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINEEnvironmentJudges-Courts-LawyersReligionStoopid-PeopleUK •  
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This is for Fort Hood

I’m pushing 50. Wonder if they would take me back if I tried to reenlist? My Navy days are 23 years ago.

Almost forgot. H/T Viral Footage

UPDATE: Found the lyrics:

Note: lyrics do not include General Patton’s remarks.

I’ve got the reach and the teeth of a killin’ machine,

with a need to bleed you when the light goes green

best believe, I’m in a zone to be, from my Yin to my Yang to my Yang Tze

put a grin on my chin when you come to me,

‘cuz I’ll win, I’m a one-of-a-kind and I’ll bring death

to the place you’re about to be: another river of blood runnin’ under my feet

forged in a fire lit long ago, stand next to me, you’ll never stand alone

I’m last to leave, but the first to go, Lord, make me dead before you make me old

I feed on the fear of the devil inside of the enemy faces in my sights:

aim with the hand, shoot with the mind, kill with a heart like arctic ice

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

I bask in the glow of the rising war, lay waste to the ground of an enemy shore

wade through the blood spilled on the floor, and if another one stands I’ll kill some more

bullet in the breach and a fire in me, like a cigarette thrown, to gasoline

if death don’t bring you fear, I swear, you’ll fear these marchin’ feet

Come to the nightmare, come to me, deep down in the dark where the devil be

in the maw with the jaws and the razor teeth,

where the brimstone burns and the angel weeps

call to the gods if I cross your path and my silhouette hangs like a body bag

hope is a moment now long past, the shadow of death is the one I cast.

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

my eyes are steel and my gaze is long

I am a warrior and this is my song

now I live lean and I mean to inflict the grief,

and the least of me is still out of your reach

the killing machine’s gonna do the deed,

until the river runs dry and my last breath leaves

chin in the air with a head held high,

I’ll stand in the path of the enemy line

feel no fear, know my pride:

for God and Country I’ll end your life

I am a soldier and I’m marching on

I am a warrior and this is my song

my eyes are steel and my gaze is long

I am a warrior and this is my song

©2009 by Echo Sonic, All Rights Reserved



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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 11/06/2009 at 07:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Military •  
Comments (3) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

calendar   Thursday - November 05, 2009

The Return of Daddy

Honestly, if this doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, you are a sociopathic liberal.

But then, using sociopath and liberal in the same sentence is redundant.


The Return from Iraq - Click here for the most popular videos

I’ve posted this under ‘Military’ because, for some reason, BMEWS lacks a ‘Family’ category. Hint.

H/T to Viral Footage

I’ve watched this numerous times, and I always get something in my eyes…


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 11/05/2009 at 11:00 PM   
Filed Under: • Family •  
Comments (4) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

The Cold Hard Truth

Read Between The Lines




Sources Identify Major as Gunman in Deadly Shooting Rampage at Fort Hood Texas



A military doctor who feared an impending war deployment is believed to be the gunman behind a shooting rampage Thursday afternoon at the Army’s Fort Hood in Texas that killed 11 and wounded 31 before the gunman was fatally shot.

Two soldiers were taken into custoy as possible suspects, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone told reporters Thursday evening, though the pair later were released and it isn’t clear whether they they were involved in the violence.

Authorities have not identified the gunman publicly, but official sources have named Major Malik Nadal Hasan, a psychiatrist who reportedly didn’t believe in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and wanted out of the military before he was set to be deployed overseas.





That’s all you really need right there, isn’t it?

WAKE THE HELL UP UNCLE SAM. Do Ask. Do Tell. And then say, “thanks, but no thanks”.

YOU ARE DAMN RIGHT IT’S PROFILING. WE ARE IN A WAR, YOU IDIOTS.

DUH. Didn’t they wise up after that fragging incident back in ‘02?


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/05/2009 at 08:00 PM   
Filed Under: • MilitaryWar On Terror •  
Comments (8) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

It really does exist!

Bun-Vac 6000 based on actual machine



This post may be almost meaningless to those who aren’t Wallace & Gromit fans. Wallace and his dog Gromit star in a series of adorable and funny claymation films. Wallace is this wacky inventor (and cheese lover) who builds devices that always go wrong, and Gromit is his wise and cynical dog who winds up saving the day, often at great peril to himself. Alas, W&G have gone the way of CGI. Their home studio, Aardman Animations, burned down a while back, and I think I’ve heard they were bought out, or at least majorly funded, by one of the big digital animation studios like Pixar. If you’ve never seen one of their films you’re missing out. They’re not just for kids. W&G creator Nick Park also did the Serta mattress commercials with the numbered sheep.

Anyway ... Wallace invented a giant vacuum cleaner called the Bun-Vac 6000 for sucking rabbits out of their holes and into a holding area for later remote release. It was the funniest thing. I laughed so hard watching Curse of the Were-Rabbit, especially the panicked bunnies frantically holding on to their holes as they were being sucked up.

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But who knew this device was not only for real, but has been in operation for almost two decades? Ok, the real one doesn’t suck up rabbits. Not yet. It sucks up prairie dogs. By the hundreds. And is making the inventors/operators Dave Honaker and Gay Balfour a tidy pile of cash. Prairie dogs are quite a nuisance out West, and their towns can have thousands of the little rodents. But for $150/hr Dog-Gone Prairie Dog Control of Cortez CO can get rid of hundreds of the pests in a day, without any worries about any stray bullets flying around from the traditional hunting solution.

DENVER—Like a doctor feeling for a pulse, Dave Honaker lays his hands on the wide, plastic hose. It begins to vibrate as pebbles and dirt rush through. It shudders a bit, then is still.

Honaker smiles. The furry body of a prairie dog, still in its subterranean hole, is plugging the end of the hose. It’s only a matter of time now.

“You can feel when he’s fighting back,” Honaker yells over the roar of the powerful suction. “He’s got a good hold, and then he loses it.” Just then, the hose jolts, and with a rumbling whoosh, the rodent shoots up the hose. “One!” Honaker mouths, his eyes gleaming with excitement. A moment later, another whoosh. “Two!” “It’s like playing the violin,” Honaker says modestly. “After five years, you get a little better.” Honaker is a master of the latest in rodent-control technology—the prairie dog vacuum.

Aptly named Dog-Gone, it was invented by Honaker’s partner, Gay Balfour, who literally dreamed up this Rube Goldberg-like contraption. It came to him one night five years ago in his Cortez, Colo., home. Balfour first needed a truck. On the way home, he stopped by his local sewer district office and was astonished to learn a truck used for cleaning out sewer lines and manholes was for sale. It was yellow. Next, he went to the industrial supply store and there, hanging on the wall, were four-inch hoses. They were green. “I don’t know what you believe in,” Balfour said, “but I believe it’s supposed to happen that way.”

He modified the truck, attached the hose and, within three days, was back at the Indian reservation sucking up prairie dogs. At 300 mph, the critters hurtled through a four-inch plastic hose. Like cannonballs, they shot out the end into a big tank on the back of the truck, first slamming into a wall of thick foam rubber, then toppling onto a foam and dirt-covered floor. It all made for a wild ride for the squirrel-like rodents. And, for the most part, they fared well—a little dazed and confused at first, but scampering around almost immediately. In the first 45 minutes, Balfour caught 23 prairie dogs. The tribe was so impressed, it gave him a $6,000 contract. He caught 1,000 prairie dogs. Balfour was in business. Since then, he and Honaker have been traveling to prairie dog towns across the Southwest. Balfour drives the yellow truck, and Honaker tows an old trailer they live in at job sites. Depending on the job, they either relocate, exterminate or sell the prairie dogs for pets or meat.

“We kind of like these guys ... We’re animal lovers,” Dave explains.

It’s a matter of responsible ecology, Gay says.

On a good day, Dave and Gay can suck hundreds of the 3-pound rodents out of their burrows.

Gay and Dave try to find private landowners willing to give the dogs new homes in places far from cities or ranches. Many are sold as food for endangered eagles, hawks and ferrets.

The truck stays busy spring and summer, but can only capture a few thousand prairie dogs in a given year. Countless other dogs are still in the way of ranchers, farmers and developers, and suffice to say, they don’t all get a free ride on a yellow truck out of prairie dog town.

image

I guess they really are pesky little suckers after all!




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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/05/2009 at 12:54 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-StuffNeat Inventions •  
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Smoke and Mirrors and Bombs

The pointy end of the stick, where diplomacy fails and government statements try to hide the truth.




Israel Seizes Ship Full of Weapons



Was Too!!

Israel’s navy has seized a container ship originating in Iran and loaded with arms, including rockets, destined for Syria and Lebanon’s Shia group Hizbollah, the Israeli military said on Wednesday.

The pre-dawn interception was used by Israeli government officials to underscore their argument that their arch-foe was supplying weapons to militant groups targeting the Jewish state. Israel has warned that Hizbollah has been rearming since the group launched more than 4,000 rockets into its territory during a 34-day war in mid-2006.

Israel’s military said a navy force boarded the ship, which was flying the flag of Antigua, about 100 miles west of Israel’s coast. Following an inspection that showed the ship carried a variety of weapons hidden behind what appeared to be civilian cargo, it was towed to an Israeli port.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, said during a visit to a military base: “The army successfully captured a ship that seems to have come from Iran and was heading to Syria and to Hizbollah. . .  Iran and Syria are arming terror organisations, especially Hizbollah and Hamas, and are clearly acting to undermine peace in the Middle East.”

image image

JERUSALEM – Israeli commandos seized a ship Wednesday that defense officials said was carrying hundreds of tons of weapons from Iran bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas – the largest arms shipment Israel has ever commandeered.

The Israeli military said an Iranian document was found on board, showing that the arms shipment originated from Iran, although the paper was not shown to reporters.

“We found dozens of containers, with hundreds of tonnes of arms bound for Hezbollah from Iran,” deputy naval commander Rani Ben Yehuda told reporters.

At Ashdod port, soldiers pulled hundreds of olive-green ammunition crates from the shipping containers, many of them surrounded by sacks of cement meant to disguise the contents. They were then divided into huge stacks of rockets of various sizes, mortar shells, hand grenades and ammunition for AK-47 rifles. Many of the weapons crates had inscriptions in Spanish, Chinese and English.
No anti-aircraft or anti-tank missiles have been found on the ship, Ben-Yehuda said, but he added that soldiers were still unpacking containers.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that the ship set out from Iran and later docked in Yemen and Sudan before passing through the Suez Canal en route to either Syria or Lebanon.

Stopped in Sudan and Yemen first? Supplying the rebels in both places? Sounds like a floating arms bazaar! Oh, if only International Law could close that bothersome Arms Ship Loophole!

Was Not!!

In Tehran, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem dismissed the Israeli allegations that the ship carried arms. His remarks were carried by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station and other Lebanese local stations.

“Unfortunately, some official pirates in the seas, sometimes in the name of the navy, sometimes in the name of inspection, obstruct trade movement between Syria and Iran,” al-Moallem said at a joint news conference with his Iranian counterpart.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Wednesday that the cargo ship seized by Israel was not carrying weapons, the official IRNA news agency reported. Mottaki made the remarks in a joint press conference with his visiting Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem on Wednesday.

Asked about the reports over the seizure of an Iranian cargo ship on the coasts of Israel, Muallem said, “Such a thing is not correct and the ship was moving from Syria to Iran and was not carrying any weapons nor the equipment to construct weapons.”

“Since the Israeli leadership and society are not ready for peace, they are using any pretext to shun peace obligations, and one is the issue of the Iranian shipment,” said Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the West Bank-based Palestinian government.

Hezbollah on Thursday denied the weapons were for them. There was no comment from Lebanese officials.

“Hezbollah categorically denies it has any connection with the weapons which the Zionist enemy claims it seized aboard the Francop ship,” Hezbollah said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press in Beirut.




The Bigger Picture

The arms shipment underscored the dangerous tensions between Israel and the Islamic Republic. Israel considers Iran a strategic threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missile development, and says Tehran is lying when it denies it is building atomic arms.

Iran has never acknowledged giving weapons to Hezbollah, which fought a monthlong war with Israel in 2006. Proof of large-scale Iranian weapons shipments to its proxy forces on Israel’s borders could reinforce Israeli demands for tough action — possibly even a pre-emptive strike — against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israeli defense officials said the weapons haul consisted of arms already in Hezbollah’s possession [ huh? WTF? translation error? ], and would have given the Lebanese guerrilla group the ability to fight a full month longer in the event of a clash with Israel on the scale of the 2006 war.

The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the military has yet to formally comment on the potential value of the shipment’s contents to militants.

The presence of Iranian proxies in the Mideast, combined with worries over Tehran’s nuclear program and arsenal of long-range missiles, have made Iran the Jewish state’s most formidable foe.

Neutralizing Iran’s bomb-making ability remains Netanyahu’s top priority — and Israel has not ruled out a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/05/2009 at 11:07 AM   
Filed Under: • IsraelMiddle-EastTerrorists •  
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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