Tuesday - November 03, 2009

A Day Off

Hooray, I’ve got the day off. Which means I’ve got about a million other things I’ve got to do. But I’m going to take a bit of time for myself. Probably have lunch out and go bowling.



Got some time to kill? hur hur hur. Here’s an online shoot ‘em up game for those of us with less than stellar reflexes and/or tired thumbs. It’s actually more of a strategy game, what’s called a Tower Defense game. Build the defenses and sit and watch them slaughter the invaders. In this case the invaders are penguins.

I beat the entire thing, but it takes time. Hours and hours in fact. A couple of hints: it’s hardly worth upgrading the machine gun nests at first. Buy flack guns as soon as you get the money. Trade them in for missile launchers when you can. Block the exits as much as you can and then build mazes around them with the machine gun nests. And you can move your missile launcher by selling it and buying a new one placed where you want it. Just put it far enough ahead of the enemy so that it’s there for a second or two before they get there. Spend your money on upgrading permanent defenses. For extra points at the end of the level, sell off all your weapons before you hit the Continue button.

Ok, first day off task of the morning is running some laundry. Woo hoo!

Posted by Drew458     on 11/03/2009 at 10:31 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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500 officers smash their way into thousands of safety-deposit boxes, could cost txpayers millions

OOPS ... Did someone get something wrong here?

How this story made its way to BMEWS might be a short story itself.

It appeared in our Sunday magazine section of The Sunday Mail on Oct. 25th. The magazine is called “Live.” But I didn’t see it.  The wife did. That evening before going upstairs she handed it to me and said I just HAD to read it. So I did. I put it aside where I could grab it next day and post.  Well, I can’t recall now if I was even on line the next day but things got kind of busy and I forgot it.  But I found it again today and intended to post BUT .... a bunch of my photos went missing after a Kodak EasyShare upgrade. Like 137 of them.  (I have problems after every upgrade Kodak issues) So after spending something like an hour and a half on the phone with Kodak, and NOT a free call as they don’t give away 800 numbers here, and getting NOTHING fixed, the tech guy decided to upgrade my problem and they’re gonna call back.
By that time, I had put the magazine somewhere and forgot about it again and with some frustration I went to check my mail and what do I find but a note from the Bmews Tiger with a link to this story.
So at very long last ... here it is.
It is edited due to its length, there are more photos at the link and I’d encourage everyone to read the entire story.  They make movies out of this sort of thing,
really and truly they do.

H/T Argentium Tiger

More than 500 officers smashed their way into thousands of safety-deposit boxes to retrieve guns, drugs and millions of pounds of criminal assets. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate
By ADRIAN LEVY and CATHY SCOTT-CLARK

The Finchley Road is one of the busiest thoroughfares heading out of London. It leads traffic north past Lord’s Cricket Ground and the multimillion-pound houses of some of the country’s richest hedge-fund managers all the way to the M1. At three in the afternoon it’s always pretty slow going, but on this particular summer Monday the traffic was almost at a standstill.

This was partly because the normal three lanes going north had been cut down to one. But it was also because of drivers slowing down to a crawl so they could gawp at the massive police operation unfolding on a busy corner of the road.

Police vehicles - both cars and menacing armoured trucks - jammed up two lanes. Dozens of armed officers in bulletproof vests were standing ready, waiting to be called inside an anonymous-looking building. From the sheer manpower and weapons on display it looked like the capital was under another terrorist attack.

But while this was the Metropolitan Police’s most ambitious operation in its 180-year history, it had nothing to do with national security. Only hours before, at a special briefing, teams from SCD6 (the Economic And Specialist Crime unit) and C019 (Specialist Firearms Command) hunkered down with technicians armed with angle grinders and drills. Also present were dog handlers, their animals trained to sniff out guns, drugs and explosives.

In all, more than 500 officers had gathered to receive orders to raid smart addresses in well-heeled parts of the capital. The locations included three of Britain’s largest and most well-established safety-deposit box depositories in Edgware, Hampstead and Park Lane as well as an office and the homes of the three directors of Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, which owned the vaults - two in Hampstead and one in Barnet.

For most of those at the briefing, arriving just before 3pm on June 2 last year, this was the first they had heard of the operation. Secrecy had been paramount and, with so many involved, keeping the operation ‘airtight’ had been one of the largest headaches in the pre-planning for what was codenamed ‘Rize’.

The police rolled through London in a convoy: scores of patrol cars, armed-response vehicles, outriders on their bikes, vans with their windows shielded by metal cages. With a Met film unit recording everything, detectives forced their way past startled security guards, demanding receptionists open the secure doors that led to the normally hushed strong rooms, which in the three centres housed 6,717 safety deposit boxes.

Over the next few hours, the three depositories were transformed into makeshift evidence-sorting centres, decked out with tables to bear the contents of the safety-deposit boxes that were soon to be forced open. Within a day, the first stage of the operation was finished but it would take over ten more to complete the next intricate and prolonged phase.

Investigators wearing gas masks and blue overhauls used power tools to chop away at the locked doors that protected the boxes themselves. They had rehearsed this bit for many hours, on mockups, trying numerous methods to get quickly and safely at the deposit boxes.

Forged passports found in deposit boxes
Diamond drill bits forced down into the locks proved disastrous, potentially damaging evidence inside. Instead, they settled on Makita angle grinders, with which they now effortlessly hacked at the hinges, allowing them to slide out the individual strong boxes, some as small as an A4 pad. Larger ones required a more bullish approach - strong-arm tactics that the police maintained were essential as key-holders would have been unlikely to co-operate.
As the first of the boxes was opened, detectives began probing the contents. Many were spilling over with bank notes and jewellery. Each was given a rough designation - for instance, ‘cash’ or ‘gun’ - and the words scribbled onto labels before they were placed in sealed evidence bags that were loaded into vans and given an armed escort to their final and secret destination, a secure counting house.
Here, every one of the thousands of boxes was to be intimately scrutinised. Not only did detectives have to itemise what they had found but match the contents to a person.
A few of the box-holders’ identities had been acquired through months of police surveillance. Others were revealed in vault registers seized by police during the raid. Some used aliases and would be hard to track down; more still would be identified by scrutinising the vaults’ CCTV cameras. Sixty officers would sift, analyse and count until November 2008 and beyond, racking up £1.4 million in overtime bills alone.

There was a lot at stake. Never before had the British police been granted a warrant as broad as this. The raids had been made possible under a controversial law, the Proceeds Of Crime Act (POCA), which came into being in 2002 and introduced an array of wide-ranging new powers to seek out and confiscate dirty money - the houses, cars and boats bought by criminals.
However, lawyers watching the police operation unfold were quick to warn that the strong-arming of these vaults and the crashing into each and every box was tantamount to the police having obtained permission to smash down the doors of an entire housing estate.

David Sonn, of Sonn Macmillan Walker, one of the largest criminal defence practices in London, says, ‘POCA was never intended for this. No one objects when criminals are caught and their assets seized - but shaking down everyone to get to them is specifically not what lawmakers wanted.’

When vice-squad detectives raided five premises connected to a southeast Asian businesswoman who had more than £100,000 in cash in one box, they found brothels worked by girls who had all potentially been trafficked to the UK, as well as a string of foreign bank transactions showing £800,000 flowing out of the UK. In the months after Rize there were more than 40 arrests and 11 prosecutions.

However, by talking to scores of box-holders, none of whom have spoken before, Live has uncovered a different version of Operation Rize, one that shows how the vast majority of those caught up in the raids were innocent. They have had their lives turned upside down over the past 17 months. Many have struggled to recoup their money and possessions, been forced into legal trench warfare with police lawyers and told they must prove how they came by the contents of their boxes.

This is also a story told through secret legal papers, including confidentiality agreements struck with some vault depositors whose cases threatened to topple the entire operation. Although the police told a judge that ‘nine out of ten’ of all of the thousands of box-holders were probably criminally minded, criminally connected or felons, the paper trail reveals that perhaps only as few as ten per cent of the boxes have any connection to serious crime.

More worryingly, according to eminent lawyers and barristers, Operation Rize has seen the Yard employ unethical tactics, driving a coach and horses through the new POCA legislation, leaving the Met facing a raft of legal actions that could potentially cost taxpayers millions of pounds.

LIVE MAGAZINE/SUNDAY MAIL FOR MORE PLUS PHOTOS

Posted by peiper     on 11/03/2009 at 09:51 AM   
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   Monday - November 02, 2009

OH POOR ME. I WORK SO HARD AND PUT IN SO MANY HOURS AND I’M NOT MAKING ENOUGH.

I doubt much if even the liberals here would have used his example, pc as they are.  I’m particularly PO’d BIG TIME not just because this politician said something dumb.  They manage to do that everyday no matter the party they belong to.  What has me seeing red (again) is my previous and sad post on the death of that brave soldier.  That poor fellow wasn’t making a quarter of what his representatives were making while CHEATING on their expenses.
The bastards were caught red handed and the maddening thing about so much of what they did is, much of it was legal because THEY MADE THE RULES!  Some are refusing to pay back any money, some are paying back a portion, and many are crying the blues claiming they are being picked on.
Not all of them were cheating to be sure. Lets be very clear on that.  But you should hear the excuses and arguments many are making in an attempt to mask what they did or else make what they did appear on the up and up.  But this story today really set me off in light of that soldier’s death.
Maybe he should be sent to fight this war in that benighted place, on the same money the SSgt was making.  Yeah. We can all see that, right?

It is NOT his making a comparison with the Holocaust that set me off to be honest.  I don’t think he meant it the exact way it’s been taken. I think
I understand his theory, while I think he was pretty darn foolish to use that example.  .  No ... what bothers me so much is his complaint with regard to what he was paid as an MP and his gripe about hours worked and pay received being equal to “minimum wages.”

Tell that to the late Sgt., subject of my last post.

Cameron rounds on Tory MP for comparing expenses ‘witch-hunt’ with Nazi persecution of the Jews

By Claire Ellicott
02nd November 2009

The MP who compared the clampdown on expenses with the Holocaust was ordered to say sorry today.

In an astonishing outburst, Tory MP David Wilshire said the “witch-hunt” against cheats was akin to the politics that “led to Hitler’s gas chambers”.

His remark was branded “offensive and unacceptable” by Tory leader David Cameron who told the Spelthorne MP to withdraw it.

Mr Wilshire paid a total of £105,000 from his expenses into Moorlands Research Services, a firm owned by him and his girlfriend Ann Palmer.

The MP used his office expenses to write to all his constituents in Spelthorne, Surrey, defending his claims.

The two-page letters were printed on Commons notepaper and sent using taxpayer-funded envelopes funded by his office expenses.

When one constituent wrote back, Mr Wilshire replied: ‘The witch hunt against MPs will undermine democracy.

‘It will weaken parliament, handing yet more power to governments. Branding a whole group of people undesirables led to Hitler’s gas chambers’.

The Commissioner for Standards is expected to investigate whether he broke Commons rules that forbid MPs from entering into arrangements that ‘may give rise to an accusation’ of profiting from public funds.

The MP’s latest controversial comments come less than a month after he infuriated David Cameron by comparing his salary to the minimum wage.

He provoked fury by complaining about his salary and long hours in a Westminster meeting with trainee journalists.

He told them: ‘I work 60 to 70 hours a week some weeks. When you look at what I earn, it comes dangerously close to working out as the minimum wage.’

Mr Wilshire paid £3,250 of his office allowances to his own firm over a period of three years.

He claimed that the money was used to pay other suppliers for posters and office products.

The arrangement was highly unusual. Most MPs submitted receipts for office costs directly from suppliers and claimed them back.

The constituency offices of senior Conservative MP David Wilshire in Staines, Surrey. Mr Wilshire said his company was used to pay ‘suppliers’ for office services such as printing

Moorlands Research Services was never registered with Companies House. Mr Wilshire said the firm closed down last year.

Before that, details of his involvement with the company had been included in his entry for the Regis-ter of Members’ Interests.

Mr Wilshire insisted he had done nothing wrong and had not personally profited, calling the claims against him ‘deeply hurtful and unjustified’.

He said the arrangement had been approved in writing by the House of Commons Fees Office, the body accused of nodding through questionable claims for hundreds of MPs.

SOURCE

btw ....  That’s another thing that I have heard quite a bit of.  The MPs saying when all is said and done, they aren’t making all that much considering the hours they work.  OK. Maybe so.  But is anyone holding a gun to their collective heads and forcing them to become MPs?  Don’t think so.

Posted by peiper     on 11/02/2009 at 12:25 PM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Government • Corruption and Greed • UK •  
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KILLED ON THE VERY LAST DAY OF HIS TOUR IN AFGHANISTAN ….

Bad enough these brave young kids are dying and being maimed. That’s always a damn sad thing.
But somehow, to die on your last day of the tour .... I don’t know.  Something seems extra sad about that. Especially when you consider the lives this one Battling Brit saved.
I truly am nothing but upset and very depressed reading this.  Wish I hadn’t.  But then, hell.  Every time I see the reports I feel bad. Which means almost every day because there isn’t any way to avoid it.  And I shouldn’t avoid it anyway.  Neither should my fellow Americans.  These are the kids dying along side our guys.  Just as brave, just as young, just as sad.

Bomb expert who saved ‘countless lives’ killed in Afghanistan
One of the Army’s most prolific bomb disposal experts who saved “countless lives” has been killed on the last day of his operational tour, the Ministry of Defence has disclosed.

By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent
Published: 2:00PM GMT 02 Nov 2009

Despite “staring death in the face on a daily basis” Staff Sgt Olaf “Oz” Schmid continued to defuse bombs in Sangin, the most lethal town for IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in Helmand province.

The soldier, described as a man of “extreme courage”, was killed instantly as he attempted to make safe a bomb left in the town.

He is the third IED Disposal soldier to be killed in the last year as the Taliban increase their bombing campaign against the British force.

Among the great skill and courage in the ordnance disposal teams S/Sgt Schmid, 30, was marked as the “best of the best” defusing 64 of the estimated 1,200 IEDs found by British troops this year.

As well as taking part in Operation Panther’s Claw, a major assault on a Taliban stronghold, he found 31 IEDs during a single operation to clear a road near Sangin in August.

Following his death on Saturday his wife Christina said her husband had been “cruelly murdered on his last day of a relentless 5 month tour”.

“The pain of losing him is overwhelming. I take comfort knowing he saved countless lives with his hard work.”

Lt Col Robert Thomson, commanding officer of the 2Bn The Rifles, who recently returned from Afghanistan, described S/Sgt Schmid “simply the bravest and most courageous man I have ever met”.

“Under relentless IED and small arms attacks he stood taller than the tallest.

“He saved lives in 2 RIFLES time after time and for that he will retain a very special place in every heart of every Rifleman in our extraordinary battle group.”

In one 24 hour operation clearing possibly the most dangerous route in Afghanistan known as Pharmacy Road, he found 31 IEDs.

Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Bex, the commanding officer of the counter-IED task force, said many soldiers in Helmand owed their lives to S/Sgt Shmid’s “gallant actions”.

“The tag ‘legend’ is frequently bestowed nowadays but in his case it is rightly justified - SSgt Schmid was a legend. His courage was not displayed in a fleeting moment of time; he stared death in the face on a daily basis. His sacrifice will never be forgotten.”

He added that the soldier “takes his rightful place” alongside other bomb disposal experts who had been killed - Warrant Officer O’Donnell, who was awarded the George Medal and bar and Capt Dan Shepherd, who died during Operation Panther’s Claw.

The soldier, born in Truro Cornwall, also took part in Operation Panther’s Claw this summer which saw a bloody death told as British troops cleared Taliban strongholds ahead of the flawed presidential elections. S/Sgt Schmid, who worked in a High Threat Operator role sometimes alongside special forces, secured 11 finds of bomb making equipment many of them during the operation.

“SSgt Oz Schmid was a man of extreme courage who revelled in this the most challenging and dangerous of environments,” said his colleague Major Tim Gould.

His actions are likely to make him a strong candidate for a gallantry award, defence experts have said.

The total British lives lost in Afghanistan now stands at 224 with 87 lost this year alone.

SOURCE

Posted by peiper     on 11/02/2009 at 11:47 AM   
Filed Under: • Battling Brits • Heroes • UK • War-Stories •  
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JUST ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF BELONGING TO THE EUROPEEON UNION

Provided of course you’re willing to hand over a bit of national sovereignty.  Which you do if you happen to be England.

At first glance I thought this was going to be a boring story, but I read it and found it to be interesting after all, and frustrating as well.

Meanwhile, construction continues next door on what has to be (when done and paid for) a million pound project.  As in, £1,000,000. I think at today’s rate of exchange, in American dollars it comes to something in the way of $1,600,000. 
Our water supply sits very scarily only a few inches below the surface and at one point is above ground, and runs across the property next door. It’s how they did it when these places were built.  But something happening, or will when they fill in the driveway area in a few weeks time.  Our water pipe will be covered of course BUT .... based on what I see of the area to be covered, that water line is going to be dangerously close to the surface.
Spoke to the foreman this morning who could only shrug and say he didn’t know what was going to happen outside of simply tossing some dirt on top of the line.

So ......  We have called the Water Dept. and they are sending out an inspector on the morning of the fifth.

We’re now 7 or 8 months into probate and still no freekin end to it AND ... the postal service is calling out more strikes while (it is reported) 130 million envelopes are stacking up undelivered.  The service has hired thousands of workers to fill in for the strikers.  But we had mail delivered today.

Notice from our credit card folks we’ve been charged $15 late payment on our USA card for the last statement period.  Not surprised. It arrived at our door only four days before it was due, and the statement showed the payment was only three days late.

Taxpayers give £20m benefits to Polish children - even if they have never stepped foot in Britain

By Andy Dolan
02nd November 2009

Taxpayers are funding child benefit for more than 50,000 children of migrant workers - even though the youngsters still live in their home countries.

Treasury figures show that Poles make up the vast majority of the payments made under a loophole in EU legislation.

Benefits are paid to 37,941 children in the former Eastern Bloc country, who have one or both parents working in the UK.

The cost is estimated at more than £24million a year.

The number of Polish children being subsidised by British taxpayers has jumped by 6,542 in two years despite a slowdown in immigration because of the recession.

Under ‘social responsibility coordinating regulations’ drawn up in Brussels, EU migrant workers who pay taxes in their host country are able to claim benefits and tax credits as soon as they start work, even if they have left their families behind.

The tax credits could produce an additional £100 a week to a migrant with children.

Workers from Poland and seven other Eastern European countries who joined the EU in 2004 are entitled to out-of-work benefits only after 12 months of taxed work.

British handouts are much higher than many other countries’ payments - particularly in Eastern Europe.

In some EU countries, such as Poland and France, child benefit is means-tested.

Migrants living and working in the UK claim the benefit in their home country, but if that works out to be less than the UK allowance, the Treasury tops up the difference.

Where a family is ineligible for child benefit in their homeland - possibly because they earn too much - they can claim the full UK rate of £20 a week for the first child and £13.20 for others.

In Poland, the equivalent of child benefit amounts to between £3 and £5 a week.

The Treasury has refused to put a figure on the total cost of supporting youngsters abroad through child benefit and tax credits.

But even if most of the Polish claimants are not getting the full rate from Britain, the total cost of the payouts to Polish families alone is estimated at more than £24million a year.

The total for all 50,586 EU children would come to around £33million.

Philip Hammond, the Tory Treasury spokesman, said: ‘With Britain facing a debt crisis and the Government’s child poverty strategy in tatters, it beggars belief that Gordon Brown is continuing to send millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to children who don’t even live in this country.

‘It’s yet more evidence that he is completely out of touch with the concerns of ordinary families struggling to make ends meet.’

Ania Heasley, who runs a website which helps Poles settle in Britain, said: ‘Originally people were surprised and said “This is great”, but now there is so much information in Poland about the benefits that they all know about it.

They are so happy about the welfare system.’

SOURCE

Posted by peiper     on 11/02/2009 at 10:20 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • UK •  
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   Sunday - November 01, 2009

durnk blaggin 2

Flashback time ... remember Jan Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine in Airwolf? Vincent played Stringfellow Hawke, which had to be the most bullshit Native American name going, flying his own Cobra attack helicopter to rout the bad guys. Because everybody has access to multi-million dollar miltary hardware, right? With that swishy guy with the designer eye patch and his Nam era flashback dog named “Tet”. Gak. How could you do that to a dog?

Ok. Fine. It wasn’t a Cobra. It was some other helicopter thingy. With missiles. And automatic weapons at least as accurate as those on the A-Team ( 0 hits for 200,000 rounds expended ). Fine. But a Cobra would have been far cooler. And JMV was just the epitome of cool. Until he lost his battle with the bottle. And the series tanked. And he turned into another Hollywood burnout. And McHale Borgnine wound up on late night HSC schlepping his wife’s beauty cream products.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/01/2009 at 09:34 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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drunk bloggin

I had a hankering for cheese fondue the other day. We used to do that all the time when I was a kid, but I don’t think I have had any in 25 years. I don’t own a fondue pot, and the prices are out of this world these days.

So I used a regular pot, and Italian bread since I couldn’t find French bread at the grocery store. But I made as authentic a recipe as I could.

1/2 pound Emmentaler (aka Swiss ) cheese
1/2 pound Gruyere cheese
1 clove garlic
2 cups strongly flavored dry white french wine. I used a 90% Sauvignon Blanc blend from the Loire valley.
1 tbs lemon juice
ground pepper - white pepper if you have it
freshly grated nutmeg to taste
3 tbs or a bit more of Kirschwasser
1/8 cup flour
French bread, cut into slices and the slices halved. Leave them out to stale up a good 3 hours before cooking. Overnight is Ok too.

Cut the cheese into matchsticks. Toss it in a bowl with flour and mix it around until everything is evenly coated.

Rub the bottom of the pot with the garlic clove. Give the clove a bash to break it up, and drop it in the bottom of the pot. If you have a deep no-stick pan, use it.

Heat the wine and the lemon juice. Add the nutmeg and the pepper. Don’t boil the wine, but get it pretty hot.

Add the cheese a little at a time, and stir things constantly. When all the cheese is in, and melted, stir it around for another 5 minutes.

Reduce the heat to very low. Spear a bit of bread and dunk it in. Let it soak up for about 10 seconds, then drop it onto a plate. Serve. Repeat until out of bread or cheese sauce.

Damn that was good. It came out perfect. Stale bread soaked with soured white wine and covered in strongly flavored cheese sauce. You can’t beat that with a fargin’ stick.

So I gave some to my wife, the Italian. She hated it. “It’s too salty. And it has too much wine.” Arrggh. Culinary delicacies that only white people can appreciate.

Fine. So I ate the whole thing over the course of 2 days. And it was fucking fantastic. I ate until I was in pain. It was that good.

And tonight it’s spaghetti sauce. Oh joy. A jar and a half of the Classico brand stuff, mixed with 2 cans of Tuttorosso tomato chunks. And garlic. And onion. And basil and oregano. With browned ground pork and beef. Simmering away. After an antipasto appetizer of giardaneria (pickled veg) and soppresata (dry sausage). And some “naked redhead” red wine. Oh well. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

So I took the extra juice from the tomatoes and made myself a Bloody Mary. We keep a big bottle of Gordon’s gin in the freezer. And some Noilly Prat dry vermouth in the fridge. So I had my Bloody, and added a bit of Kirschwasser to it. Possible fail? Let’s just say that that could be an acquired taste. Not so great. Fine. So I made dirty martinis afterwards. What the hell, I have a fresh bottle of olives. And the sauce will take at least half an hour. Hey, maybe I can use up the last of the Italian bread. I’ll make some melted garlic butter.

I gather this kirschwasser stuff is booze used mainly for cooking. It’s the real thing, not the sugary sweet shit sold by Leroux. Nasty evil bitter orange brandy, from Germany. Actually, I rather like it. But it packs a wallop and takes some getting used to when drunk straight up.

Have to check to see if the sauce needs a stir. I know my martini needs a refill and another olive. CheerS!

Posted by Drew458     on 11/01/2009 at 07:53 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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No More Excuses

Just wondering ... now that Karzai’s opponent Abdullah Abdullah has bowed out bowed out of the runoff runoff, making that event moot ... does this mean that the planes are flying and the ships are sailing, all full of more troops and gear for Afghanistan? That was the hold up, right? Couldn’t Support The Troops until a more stable government was enabled by another round of voting?

But in the end, the Obama administration is likely to stick by the Afghan president. It has few other good options.

Karzai is far from the strong and capable partner that Washington had hoped would emerge from the electoral process that it and Western allies had pushed for in Afghanistan. They hoped the elections would stabilize the country and bleed support from the Taliban.

But the process effectively ended in turmoil Sunday, even as the war with the Taliban intensifies. Karzai’s challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, bowed out only six days before a scheduled runoff, charging that no fair election was possible.

Now the United States, barring other developments, must find a way to work with Karzai, who was widely favored to win the runoff anyway, and encourage him to embrace supporters of Abdullah and other groups opposed to the Taliban.

Unless such groups are brought into the government, the Taliban are likely to grow in strength, capitalizing on widespread public discontent with the ineffectual government.

“The government is more of a headache for us than the Taliban,” said Ahmed Shah Lumar, a businessman in Kandahar in the south, who complains that development plans in his area gather dust waiting for government approval.

Karzai enjoyed close ties with President George W. Bush’s administration, which maneuvered him into power when the Taliban first collapsed in 2001.

But he fell out of favor when Barack Obama took the White House. U.S. officials have since been openly critical of Karzai as a weak leader, beholden to warlords whom he cultivated as allies.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration clearly concluded at some point that for all his faults, Karzai was the best it could get, given the ethnic and political realities of this impoverished country.

“We are going to deal with the government that is there,” White House presidential adviser David Axelrod. “And obviously there are issues we need to discuss, such as reducing the high level of corruption. These are issues we’ll take up with President Karzai.”

So I’m expecting to hear the good word on the Monday morning news. Right?

Bleh. Ok, time for me to go to my second Sunday job. Only a little painting left there this week. L8ter.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/01/2009 at 01:50 PM   
Filed Under: • Obama, The One • War On Terror •  
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Weekend funnies

The rest of this post is possibly NSFW. If you find any of these offensive for other reasons, see your psychiatrist.

Computer crash. Thank Allah for airbags!

Rats! I hate rats!

This is just wrong on so many levels…

Is this racist? If so, which way?

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Christopher     on 11/01/2009 at 12:40 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor • Satire •  
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   Saturday - October 31, 2009

Trick or Treat!

Posted by Drew458     on 10/31/2009 at 08:48 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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Doing It Doggy Style

Busy day. I had a whole house window job, a regular sized home with 28 windows. It was unseasonably warm here today, but it was raining most of the day. So it was an inside cleaning job, aided by the Marvin windows they have that unhook easily from the frames and fold inwards. Nice. It’s actually faster to do double hung windows the regular way, outside first then the inside, but at least I stayed dry this way. It just takes a bit longer.

They were referred to me by the Cat Ladies, the two biddies down the road that I do odd jobs for. Thank goodness this client didn’t have a dozen cats and 5 stinky litter boxes like they do. No, she has dogs instead. Lots of dogs. Wall to wall dogs. She’s got an old, nearly blind Springer Spaniel, and half a dozen Welsh Corgis. She used to show them, and has a den full of ribbons and trophies. Oh, and they have one little rescue kitten who right now lives in a carrier. Poor kitteh. Probably psychologically damaged already.

I love dogs. Dogs are great. But while the spaniel is old, and slow, and rheumy, and sleeps a lot, the corgis are high energy animals. She kept 5 of them in a little room so they be out of my way, and the one running around was fairly mellow and quite friendly. Actually all the dogs were nice. But 7 dogs is a pack, and they act that way. So whenever I moved from room to room, put something down or did anything that made a small noise, they started barking. And when one starts the others chime in, and nobody wants to be the first to stop barking.

Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof.  Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! Woof. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark! meow?

Posted by Drew458     on 10/31/2009 at 07:49 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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WEEKEND WOMAN ….. not to mention real Eye Candy …

Well, I don’t know about you folks but when I was very young and exposed to grand opera (as opposed to The Grand Ole Opry), the stars of the day looked nothing like this Welsh babe.  There are so many GREAT photos of Katherine Jenkins, it’s hard to know where to stop picking for this post.
While I confess I do not want to hear her sing because after a youth of almost enforced listening to people sing in un-natural voices, I rejected most of this musical form.  Not all of it. Just most of it.  Always made me think when hearing them, that they had serious tummy aches.  I’d hear them and then presto, my stomach would start to hurt.  Hmm. Might that fall under ‘child abuse’ today?  My mother loved opera and listened to it a lot, and of course every weekend there was the MET on the radio.  Mom loved Caruso but my high priest was Benny Goodman.  My church disciples were Bix, Artie Shaw, Harry James and a list too long for here.  So anyway .... Here’s my choice for this weekend’s ...
WEEKEND WOMAN:

KATHERINE JENKINS

Occupation, Mezzo-soprano
Years active 1998 – present
Labels
Universal
Warner Music

An award-winning British classical crossover mezzo-soprano.[1] [2] Her first album Premiere made her the fastest-selling mezzo-soprano to date[3] and she later became the first British classical crossover artist to have two number one albums in the same year.[4] She also stands as the first female artist to win two consecutive Classical BRIT Awards.
Jenkins has released five classical crossover number one studio albums to date selling 4,000,000 copies. Her sixth album, Sacred Arias, was released on 20 October 2008. Her albums feature arias, popular songs, hymns and classical crossover music and she has performed in a large number of concerts around the United Kingdom and other countries, including the United States and Australia.

In another far away time even before radio, during the Edwardian age, the Brit music hall flourished like a bright flame and there were many stars of that period, all but forgotten today, who would certainly pass for eye candy even by our standards as to that term.

Posted by peiper     on 10/31/2009 at 09:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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It’s Burkh-ingham Palace: if one mad muslim and his group of loopy loony tunes had their way.

Interesting and glad to see some muslims are openly against this nut case.  Or is he? A nut case? At the rate white Brits are caving in to everything PC, he may one day have his dream become reality.  Probably not in my lifetime but who knows.

What even more interesting is the lack (so far) of total outrage from the left who organized the phony outrage at the appearance of the BNP head on radio a week ago.  Good grief, you’d have thought the sky was falling and all because Nick Griffin was invited on to a major TV interview program.

It’s Burkh-ingham Palace: Hate preacher calls for the Queen to wear full Muslim dress

By Sam Greenhill
Last updated at 12:03 PM on 31st October 2009

The Queen forced to wear a burkha and Buckingham Palace turned into a mosque - that was the vision of Britain under Sharia law proposed by a Muslim firebrand yesterday.

Preacher of hate Anjem Choudary even showed mocked-up photographs of the palace sporting a golden dome and Nelson’s Column as a minaret.

He was speaking ahead of a central London demonstration that was planned for today. However the event was today cancelled amid fears it would have descended into violence.

A poster from Muslim group Al-Muhajiroun showing how they would change Buckingham Palace into a mosque
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Scotland Yard said it would now be contacting organisers of a wave of counter-protests in central London and Leeds, West Yorkshire, to inform them of the decision.

Choudary, leader of the radical Islamic sect Al Muhajiroun, said organisers Islam4UK had been forced to cancel the planned march from the House of Commons to Trafalgar Square because of security concerns.

But he added a meeting of supporters of sharia law would still take place at an undisclosed location later today.

The Islamic Society of Britain, which was planning to join other organisations in staging a ‘dignified, non-violent’ counter-demonstration at Piccadilly Circus, said it would not now take place.

A spokesman said: ‘There’s no protest so we won’t be holding a counter-demonstration. It’s a great success that pressure from all sections of the community, including Muslims, has resulted in the Muhajiroun and the hot-heads rethinking their position. They realised very few people would turn up to support them and they would attract only very negative publicity. Old-fashioned pressure has worked.’

The Islamic Society of Britain said of Choudary and Al Muhajiroun, : ‘99.999 per cent of Muslims despise these people.’

Police had worked avoid a clash between moderate Muslim groups and far-right mobs who have organised rival demonstrations.

Choudary,a cleric and self-styled judge of the Sharia court of the UK, claimed: ‘The amount of threats we have received has been phenomenal. Bomb threats, death threats, we have received hundreds of them from people saying they are going to come and confront us.’

He said: ‘We hope to eradicate man-made law from Britain and the world. We call upon Gordon Brown to implement Sharia law and we call upon the Queen to give up playing God. There is only one supreme being. When Sharia law is implemented, maybe in 10 or 15 years’ time, she would be expected like all women in Britain to be covered from head to toe, only revealing her face and hands.’

If Her Majesty refused, he said she would be ‘punished’ according to Sharia law.

Choudary’s sidekick Abu Rumaysahl added: ‘Buckingham Palace would become a mosque and play a central role in society.’

At a press conference yesterday to outline their vision, Choudary brought in fellow hate cleric Omar Bakri to preach by speaker phone from his exile in Lebanon.

Bakri, banned from Britain four years ago, launched an astonishing diatribe lasting half an hour in which he called for jihad, saying: ‘We do not want ourselves to be judged by a man-made law. The struggle for Islam is a struggle worth dying for. Islam must be defended by the sword.’

Choudary and his extremist group want a legal system in which adulterers and homosexuals would be stoned to death and thieves have their hands chopped off.

He said: ‘Thieves would have various warnings first, and only in cases where he has stolen more than £20 of non-perishable goods from a private house would his hand be chopped off.

‘We are being realistic, we know it could take time to implement, but it is a fact that in Britain Muslims are predicted to outnumber practising Christians, in terms of going to places of worship, by 2015.’

Choudary, who was not wearing a Remembrance Day poppy, said he did not support the sacrifices of British soldiers. He said: ‘We are not allowed to feel sorry for those wars fought for land which served no purpose. Only wars in defence of Allah or your family or property are just wars.’

But moderate Muslim groups accused Choudary of running scared of engaging with them. Tehmina Kazi, director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, said: ‘It sounds like pure cowardice. He is afraid of engaging with ordinary patriotic British Muslims who have a sense of tolerance and fair play.

‘We stand up for mainstream Muslims who see no conflict between their religion and being British. Anjem Choudary tries to be as provocative as possible, and everything he says undermines community cohesion and is a slap in the face to every patriotic British person.’

Although Choudary refused to say so, penalties under Sharia law for not wearing a burqa include a woman being repeatedly lashed with a stick or a cable.

Tory MP Patrick Mercer branded Choudary’s plans ‘extremely distasteful’ and added: ‘If anyone thinks those views are a step forward they are seriously deluded. They are repellent and repulsive.’

SOURCE AND PHOTOS

Posted by peiper     on 10/31/2009 at 08:56 AM   
Filed Under: • Insanity • RoPMA • UK •  
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THE STATE OF THE LAW AND THE WORLD ….. NOT SO GOOD!

Drew’s very disturbing post yesterday with regard to the gang rape and ppl taking pictures, shows just how far the left has carried us as a culture.
With hand wringing libs, the aclu and every other ‘rights’ group that scream “RACE” whenever a favored minority is injured or arrested, nothing surprises us anymore.  We’re all disgusted, of that there is no doubt.  But surprised?  Not likely.

This past week two 10 year old boys were arrested for the rape of an eight year old girl.  Outraged? Sure. Surprised? Nope.  And worst of it is those boys will learn nothing and receive NO retribution.  You can bet they’ll do it again at some point in the future.

Yet another man with a record of crime and who was supposed to have been watched, somehow managed to entice a young and very foolish girl of 17 to meet him. They met of course on the net. He killed her.  He should have been in jail long ago and never released.  His victim would still be foolish but perhaps alive.  And how often have you heard that line?  But they say the prisons here are crowded to overfilling, many have been let loose but the authorities say they don’t represent a danger to the public.  HA!  How often have we heard that in the past?

This past week the story about a man killing his cheating wife came to light.  And this is one of two cases like it.
Married 21 years, he had problems (don’t they all?) and after putting up with him for a long time, his wife said she wanted a divorce and that she no longer loved him.  Meanwhile, he somehow found a note or email that she sent to another man who she claimed she was in love with.
So, using more then one knife he repeatedly stabbed her, something like thirty times, in front of the kids.

The courts here accept the “driven to it by adultery excuse) and so there is no murder charge.  It’s manslaughter and he’ll be out in three years.
He also claimed (as has the other guy in another case) diminished responsibility.  Bullshit!  The bastard knew exactly what he was doing 30 times.
Adultery is not a reason to take away another person’s future.  Any court that accepts that is mad.  But the age we live in makes all sorts of excuses for bad behavior.  And not just capital crimes.  And here’s another example and while not a capital crime, the reaction of the criminal’s friends and apologists is yet another sign of these sorry assed times.  There is hardly any reason at all for the gremlins to be fearful unless it’s fear of an armed citizenry.  And that would not have been an option in the gang rape case of a 15 year old girl in California.

Premier League star jailed for punching girl in face ‘will find another club when he is released’

By Sam Greenhill

Disgraced millionaire footballer Marlon King will be signed by another club when his jail sentence is finished, his agent insisted today.

The player was sacked by Wigan yesterday after being jailed for 18 months for groping a woman and then smashing her in the face after she rejected him.

But today his agent Tony Finnigan said that prison would change King for the better and that he would have good career prospects on release.

Oh right. This fugitive from a jungle where he belongs, is gonna change and be Mr. Nice Guy.  He claims a case of mistaken identity in spite of the fact that dozens of folks on the scene saw and identified him including, A MEMBER OF HIS OWN FREEKIN TEAM!
Let’s take a quick peek at Mr. Nice Guy’s past to see where he’s come from.

If you have any trouble reading this here, see the link below the story.

In a criminal career that ran parallel to his sporting one, the 29-year-old was given a succession of fines and community service orders - but only once was he actually jailed.

Yesterday he lost both his liberty and his job as a soccer player after a Southwark Crown Court jury found him guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and sexual assault by touching.

Within minutes of the verdict, he was sacked by his club Wigan Athletic.

Chairman Dave Whelan, who said he learned details of the trial only days ago, said: ‘He is absolutely sacked.

‘We will not tolerate football players who get sent to jail for 18 months.’

But the £40,000-a-week star will still earn earn another £228,000 from behind bars during a 40-day notice period.

King is now a convicted sex attacker who must sign the Sex Offenders Register.

That means that if the Jamaican international ever returned to football in Britain he would have to notify police of any intention to travel abroad for matches.

King had been on a boozy night out with friends in December last year to celebrate news that his wife was expecting their third child and to mark scoring a winning goal for Hull City, where he was on loan.

Just two days earlier he had been banned from driving for eight weeks after speeding at 106mph on a 60mph road.

Onlookers said he appeared to be drunk or on drugs as he tried to force his attentions on girls in the Soho Revue Bar in London’s West End.

When a 20-year- old student objected to him touching her bottom, King sneered: ‘Don’t you know who I am? I’m a millionaire.

‘You’re not even in my league.’

Minutes later, after the slightly-built woman tried to stop him touching her hair, he swung his fist and knocked her to the ground, breaking her nose.

The blow was so hard that two of her friends were knocked to the floor with her.

Yesterday, after the jury brought in 10-2 guilty verdicts, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith told King to pay his victim £3,125 compensation and £1,600 prosecution costs.

The player showed no reaction as he was convicted but sat open-mouthed as the judge told him: ‘You have shown not a hint of shame for your disgraceful and arrogant behaviour’.

As King’s victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, sat holding the hand of an aunt, the judge continued: ‘You broke her nose, and that can still be seen, and you cut her lip.

‘You are 29, you are just over six feet and you are a professional footballer.

‘She is a comparatively slight woman, just over five feet tall.’

As the sentence was delivered , several of King’s supporters stormed from court, swearing at the judge.

One screamed: ‘This is a clear case of institutional racism.

‘You should not be up there… Up the National Front. Heil Hitler.’

SOURCE WITH PHOTOS

And of course it isn’t the 6ft. bully boy buck who is guilty of anything. It’s all those white folks and a racist judge.  No mention of the jury here altho how two of them didn’t see what ten others did may speak volumes as well.

Posted by peiper     on 10/31/2009 at 07:36 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Daily Life • Racism and race relations • Typical White People: Stupid AND Evil • UK •  
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