Not like that crap Smiffy posts about in Southern Kaliforniya. Going from 50 degrees to 0. Now THAT's weather...
Winter storm on its way
By Tina Shah Tribune reporter
11:08 AM CST, January 29, 2008
What felt like a damp, spring day in the Chicago area Tuesday morning will rapidly turn into a windy, bitterly cold winter storm later in the day.
The area is expected to experience sub-zero temperatures accompanied by gusty winds reaching 50 m.p.h. by tonight, said Edward Fenelon, meteorologist for the National Weather Service. The temperature Tuesday morning was 46 degrees.
A cold front coming from central Missouri will move east and hit Chicago about 3 p.m. Rapidly increasing winds, single-digit temperatures and 1 to 3 inches of snow will follow. High winds will blow snow around, reducing road visibility to a quarter-mile to a half-mile, Fenelon said.
"Hopefully folks who went to work this morning brought a jacket," he said.
The weather service has issued a winter storm warning, which means such weather conditions are expected to take shape, from noon Tuesday until noon Wednesday. The wind chill is expected to reach minus 20 degrees by Wednesday morning.
Flights at O'Hare International Airport were experiencing delays averaging 30 minutes Tuesday morning, said Karen Pride, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Aviation. The airport was also reporting about 150 cancellations, Pride said.
Midway Airport was not reporting any delays or cancellations.
Tribune reporter Jeremy Gorner contributed to this report.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
14.5 minutes and counting
Unless, of course, he did it....
Drew Peterson's old windows on eBay for 99 cents; magazines also up for sale
Though, surprisingly, this wasn't his idea...
Windows from house Drew Peterson LIVED IN
Drew Peterson's old windows on eBay for 99 cents; magazines also up for sale
Though, surprisingly, this wasn't his idea...
Windows from house Drew Peterson LIVED IN
Did he?
Or didn't he? Doesn't matter, vote on it anyway...
Should Obama have snubbed Clinton?
Yes (1541 responses) 48.8%
No (1616 responses) 51.2%
3157 total responses (Results not scientific, but idiotic)
Should Obama have snubbed Clinton?
Yes (1541 responses) 48.8%
No (1616 responses) 51.2%
3157 total responses (Results not scientific, but idiotic)
Not for the squeamish (Smiff that means you)
A. Was stealing and had his dignity stolen instead,
B. Fought a fence and the fence won,
C. Will appear in court once he can walk again,
D. All of the above.
finally, some good news
The bonuses keep coming
The grim toll that the U.S. mortgage crisis has taken on financial markets has been felt worldwide, from traders in Hong Kong to small-town mayors in Europe to pensioners in the American Midwest.
But largely spared have been financiers on Wall Street, a place where brokers, bankers and traders are called into corner offices at the end of each year and told how large a bonus they’ll receive for the year’s work. The size of the figure reflects their value to the company, and many feared — even complained out loud — that the amount would be badly affected by the subprime mess.
They needn’t have worried. Wall Street bonuses totaled $33.2 billion in 2007, down just 2 percent, by the estimates of the New York state comptroller’s office.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Brian Bannister: Genius?
From the quotes on baseballprospectus.com - here's one that sounds more intelligent than ANYTHING that's ever come out of Hank Steinbrenner's mouth - of course that would be true of a fart as well...but you know:
"Secondly, whether you like it or not, baseball is a game of randomness. We play outdoors (mostly) in changing elements and field dimensions, and each pitch results in a series of events that can go in either teams favor. One thing that I have have come to accept is that just because I train hard physically, I practice perfectly, I prepare diligently, and execute a pitch exactly as I wanted, it can still result in a home run. In golf, if you analyze all the variables correctly (lie, distance, slope, wind, etc.) and execute your swing perfectly, it will result in a great shot. Not so for a pitcher or a hitter. A hitter can swing the bat perfectly and it will result in an out more than six times out of ten. Therefore, as a pitcher, I study and play to put the percentages in my favor more than anything because I know that I can't control the outcome in a single game or series of games, but over the course of a season or a career I will be better than average."
--Royals starter Brian Bannister, on the role of chance in baseball. (Tim Dierkes, MLBTradeRumors.com)
"Secondly, whether you like it or not, baseball is a game of randomness. We play outdoors (mostly) in changing elements and field dimensions, and each pitch results in a series of events that can go in either teams favor. One thing that I have have come to accept is that just because I train hard physically, I practice perfectly, I prepare diligently, and execute a pitch exactly as I wanted, it can still result in a home run. In golf, if you analyze all the variables correctly (lie, distance, slope, wind, etc.) and execute your swing perfectly, it will result in a great shot. Not so for a pitcher or a hitter. A hitter can swing the bat perfectly and it will result in an out more than six times out of ten. Therefore, as a pitcher, I study and play to put the percentages in my favor more than anything because I know that I can't control the outcome in a single game or series of games, but over the course of a season or a career I will be better than average."
--Royals starter Brian Bannister, on the role of chance in baseball. (Tim Dierkes, MLBTradeRumors.com)
Pat Gillick:Genius
According to ESPN's Jayson Stark, the Phillies and Pedro Feliz have agreed to a two-year deal.
Why any team felt it had to go to two years to get Feliz is a mystery. He didn't get a multiyear deal last year, and his stock certainly hadn't increased at all. The Phillies should have held firm at one year and tried to do better next winter. Feliz's addition leaves Wes Helms with no role on the team. Perhaps they'll reconsider the Marlins' offer to take on a portion of his salary. Greg Dobbs will return to a reserve role. In Feliz, the Phillies are getting an elite defender and a guy who could hit 25 homers while playing half his games in Citizens Bank Park. He'll have an awful OBP, of course, but that's less of a problem with three guys who can get on base 40 percent of the time in the middle of the order. He'll probably hit seventh between Geoff Jenkins and Carlos Ruiz.
Why any team felt it had to go to two years to get Feliz is a mystery. He didn't get a multiyear deal last year, and his stock certainly hadn't increased at all. The Phillies should have held firm at one year and tried to do better next winter. Feliz's addition leaves Wes Helms with no role on the team. Perhaps they'll reconsider the Marlins' offer to take on a portion of his salary. Greg Dobbs will return to a reserve role. In Feliz, the Phillies are getting an elite defender and a guy who could hit 25 homers while playing half his games in Citizens Bank Park. He'll have an awful OBP, of course, but that's less of a problem with three guys who can get on base 40 percent of the time in the middle of the order. He'll probably hit seventh between Geoff Jenkins and Carlos Ruiz.
Well, I'm starting a "My S#i+ Don't Stink" campaign...
Bush aiming to establish positive legacy
I'm putting one thing in the positive column for now: did not start war with Iran. Of course, this could change by tomorrow. Can't think of anything else. Anyone?
I'm putting one thing in the positive column for now: did not start war with Iran. Of course, this could change by tomorrow. Can't think of anything else. Anyone?
Apparently, there was a golf tournament here and Tigers Woods won! And they're coming back in June!!
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As George Carlin once said, "I'd rather watch flies fuck."
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As George Carlin once said, "I'd rather watch flies fuck."
Looks like bullshit, don't it?
Rain: It's baaaaack....After a brief reprieve, rain is falling around San Diego County again today and forecasters says another storm is moving into the area Tuesday*. Above, mud covers state Route 78, 2½ miles east of San Pasqual Academy on Sunday
Weather forecast Rainfall totals Traffic update
From today's U-T: Storm makes muddy mess
*So what will it be - 3 inches, a foot, or Biblical?
Lies, Damn Lies And
Clemens' agent releases report refuting steroid allegations
NEW YORK - Roger Clemens' agent released an 18,000-word statistical report Monday to refute allegations that the pitcher's career rebounded around the time period he was accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.
"Clemens' longevity was due to his ability to adjust his style of pitching as he got older, incorporating his very effective split-finger fastball to offset the decrease in the speed of his regular fastball caused by aging," said the report, created by Randy Hendricks and two associates at his firm.
Oh yeah. THAT explains it. You know, like Jordan switching from his high flying style to the fadeaway jump shot. Exactly the same thing. Case closed.
I'm sorry, but you can't produce a statistical report that proves no steroid use. You just can't. You can MAYBE show that on average a pitcher's fastball decreases by x MPH as they get older, and Clemens was on target, or something like that, but that doesn't PROVE it. The bottom line is that there was no testing back then, so we will never know for sure. All you can do is say you didn't take steroids, that other guy is lying, and I'm gonna sue his ass. But this bullshit stat report (and I haven't even read it yet) is bullshit.
I'll let the experts of the LoC dissect the report...
Click here for report
NEW YORK - Roger Clemens' agent released an 18,000-word statistical report Monday to refute allegations that the pitcher's career rebounded around the time period he was accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.
"Clemens' longevity was due to his ability to adjust his style of pitching as he got older, incorporating his very effective split-finger fastball to offset the decrease in the speed of his regular fastball caused by aging," said the report, created by Randy Hendricks and two associates at his firm.
Oh yeah. THAT explains it. You know, like Jordan switching from his high flying style to the fadeaway jump shot. Exactly the same thing. Case closed.
I'm sorry, but you can't produce a statistical report that proves no steroid use. You just can't. You can MAYBE show that on average a pitcher's fastball decreases by x MPH as they get older, and Clemens was on target, or something like that, but that doesn't PROVE it. The bottom line is that there was no testing back then, so we will never know for sure. All you can do is say you didn't take steroids, that other guy is lying, and I'm gonna sue his ass. But this bullshit stat report (and I haven't even read it yet) is bullshit.
I'll let the experts of the LoC dissect the report...
Click here for report
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Are you sitting down? Prepare to be shocked...
From the Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol School of Forecasting:
SAN DIEGO – Despite scattered reports of mudslides and minor flooding, the storm rolling through the region Sunday has so far failed to live up to its billing, county officials said. In terms of rainfall and intensity, “the storm turned out to be a lot less than expected,” said Stephen Rea, emergency services coordinator with the county's office of emergency services.
The brunt of the wet weather, though, is expected to come later Sunday and Monday. “We're just beginning,” said Noel Isla, a National Weather Service forecaster.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, go phokk yourself.
SAN DIEGO – Despite scattered reports of mudslides and minor flooding, the storm rolling through the region Sunday has so far failed to live up to its billing, county officials said. In terms of rainfall and intensity, “the storm turned out to be a lot less than expected,” said Stephen Rea, emergency services coordinator with the county's office of emergency services.
The brunt of the wet weather, though, is expected to come later Sunday and Monday. “We're just beginning,” said Noel Isla, a National Weather Service forecaster.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, go phokk yourself.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
It's the end of the world as we know it
Satellite is weeks away from hitting Earth
The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said.
But not to worry, our government is on the ball, as always...
"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said.
But not to worry, our government is on the ball, as always...
"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Next Shocker: A Picture of Fung and Tony Rezko
"Today" show host Matt Lauer asked presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Friday if she has a connection to indicted developer Tony Rezko after flashing an undated photo of the two posing with President Bill Clinton.
"You were attacking Senator Obama, in particular, his work connected to what was a so-called a slumlord in Chicago, a guy named Tony Rezko," Lauer said. "You can't see what I'm going put up on the screen ... but it is a picture of you and your husband Bill Clinton posing with that same man."
"You were attacking Senator Obama, in particular, his work connected to what was a so-called a slumlord in Chicago, a guy named Tony Rezko," Lauer said. "You can't see what I'm going put up on the screen ... but it is a picture of you and your husband Bill Clinton posing with that same man."
Barack-tober is coming!
Barack Obama's Top Ten Campaign Promises
The complete Top Ten List, as read by Obama:
10. To keep the budget balanced, I’ll rent the situation room for sweet sixteens.
9. I will double your tax money at the craps table.
8. Appoint Mitt Romney secretary of lookin’ good.
7. If you bring a gator to the White House, I’ll wrassle it.
6. I’ll put Regis on the nickel.
5. I’ll rename the tenth month of the year “Barack-tober.”
4. I won’t let Apple release the new and improved Ipod the day after you bought the previous model.
3. I’ll find money in the budget to buy Letterman a decent hairpiece.
2. Pronounce the word nuclear, nuclear.
1. Three words: Vice President Oprah.
The complete Top Ten List, as read by Obama:
10. To keep the budget balanced, I’ll rent the situation room for sweet sixteens.
9. I will double your tax money at the craps table.
8. Appoint Mitt Romney secretary of lookin’ good.
7. If you bring a gator to the White House, I’ll wrassle it.
6. I’ll put Regis on the nickel.
5. I’ll rename the tenth month of the year “Barack-tober.”
4. I won’t let Apple release the new and improved Ipod the day after you bought the previous model.
3. I’ll find money in the budget to buy Letterman a decent hairpiece.
2. Pronounce the word nuclear, nuclear.
1. Three words: Vice President Oprah.
dat settles it... i am voting for Barack
Electoral Compass USA
Barack Obama
You are 13% economic left
You are 3% more traditional
You have a substantive agreement of 81%
John Edwards
You are 8% economic left
You are 9% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 74%
Hillary Clinton
You are 3% economic left
You are 14% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 70%
Ron Paul
You are 56% economic left
You are 30% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 46%*
Rudy Giuliani
You are 61% economic left
You are 49% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 39%*
John McCain
You are 53% economic left
You are 63% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 39%*
Mitt Romney
You are 63% economic left
You are 63% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 38%*
Mike Huckabee
You are 58% economic left
You are 69% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 33%*
Fred Thompson (withdrawn)**
You are 61% economic left
You are 78% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 28%*
* holy phokking s#i+
** but folksly
Barack Obama
You are 13% economic left
You are 3% more traditional
You have a substantive agreement of 81%
John Edwards
You are 8% economic left
You are 9% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 74%
Hillary Clinton
You are 3% economic left
You are 14% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 70%
Ron Paul
You are 56% economic left
You are 30% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 46%*
Rudy Giuliani
You are 61% economic left
You are 49% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 39%*
John McCain
You are 53% economic left
You are 63% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 39%*
Mitt Romney
You are 63% economic left
You are 63% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 38%*
Mike Huckabee
You are 58% economic left
You are 69% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 33%*
Fred Thompson (withdrawn)**
You are 61% economic left
You are 78% more progressive
You have a substantive agreement of 28%*
* holy phokking s#i+
** but folksly
they still don't get it... you're a puppet, ok?
News item: With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and hold battlefield detainees, as well as guarantee American troops and civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.
This negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, these officials said.
This negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, these officials said.
when does this model extend to the whole ballpark (cont'd)?
Sell-you-lar Field: Sox auction seats
"There are people who can't afford to pay for season tickets in these areas but they may be willing to win an auction once or twice. It gives people an opportunity to sit in a seat they might not be able to."*
* If you're a plutocrat
"There are people who can't afford to pay for season tickets in these areas but they may be willing to win an auction once or twice. It gives people an opportunity to sit in a seat they might not be able to."*
* If you're a plutocrat
Thursday, January 24, 2008
it was inevitable
I was going to vote for Obama anyway, since i think he'll be fighting an uphill battle out here against Hillary and her lying liar husband, but still...
Kucinich drops out of White House bid
However, he'll get to spend more time with his hot wife, so it ain't all bad for The Martian.
Kucinich drops out of White House bid
However, he'll get to spend more time with his hot wife, so it ain't all bad for The Martian.
what a totally phokked up country we live in
Heath Ledger attacked over Brokeback Mountain role
I know one fucking thing, if i saw this piece-of-shit-talent-free-Fox-Noise-asshole-host John Gibson on the street i would start punching his face in and not stop until there was nothing there.
I know one fucking thing, if i saw this piece-of-shit-talent-free-Fox-Noise-asshole-host John Gibson on the street i would start punching his face in and not stop until there was nothing there.
this is probably nothing to worry about
You could probably get 50,000 scientists to say almost anything.
The Warning From 50,000 Scientists: Earth's Climate Is Unbalanced
The Warning From 50,000 Scientists: Earth's Climate Is Unbalanced
player most likely to be run over by a bus
Nick Johnson has "no remaining physical limitation" after missing all of last season with a broken leg. Johnson, who has been working out in Sacramento, had his recovery slowed by a titanium rod that was inserted in his hip. The rod was causing him pain, but has since been removed, and Johnson is expected to be ready for Opening Day. Whether he wins a starting job over Dmitri Young remains to be seen.
SHOCKING
Bush, before:
“I believe it is the job of a President to confront problems, not pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.”
Bush, now:
The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.
Then there is the fact BushCo put most of the war on the nation's credit card, which we'll all be paying off for decades. Thanks, fuckers.
“I believe it is the job of a President to confront problems, not pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.”
Bush, now:
The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.
Then there is the fact BushCo put most of the war on the nation's credit card, which we'll all be paying off for decades. Thanks, fuckers.
when does this model extend to the whole ballpark?
Sneed has learned the best new seats in the house at Wrigley Field, also known as the 70 new "bullpen box seats" scheduled to be built next to the dugout along the third base line, will be auctioned off to the highest bidder! Exclamation point!
The upshot: "That way, everyone will have an equal shot at purchasing a seat within smelling distance of the chewing tobacco in the dugout,"* a Sneed tipster said.
* If you're a plutocrat
The upshot: "That way, everyone will have an equal shot at purchasing a seat within smelling distance of the chewing tobacco in the dugout,"* a Sneed tipster said.
* If you're a plutocrat
The only thing Rick Majerus has led astray are fat phokks to the buffet table.
Majerus gets heat over pro-choice remark
ST. LOUIS – A Roman Catholic archbishop said yesterday that he will ask officials of Saint Louis University to take “appropriate action” against its basketball coach, who said in a television interview that he supports abortion rights. One of the game's winningest coaches, Rick Majerus made the comment at a weekend rally for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke declined to say what the action against Majerus should be, saying that was a decision for the Jesuit university. “I'm concerned that a leader at a Catholic university made these comments. It can lead Catholics astray,” Burke said by telephone as he attended March for Life anti-abortion events in Washington. “I just believe that it's of the essence for people to understand as a Catholic you just cannot hold these beliefs.”
ST. LOUIS – A Roman Catholic archbishop said yesterday that he will ask officials of Saint Louis University to take “appropriate action” against its basketball coach, who said in a television interview that he supports abortion rights. One of the game's winningest coaches, Rick Majerus made the comment at a weekend rally for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke declined to say what the action against Majerus should be, saying that was a decision for the Jesuit university. “I'm concerned that a leader at a Catholic university made these comments. It can lead Catholics astray,” Burke said by telephone as he attended March for Life anti-abortion events in Washington. “I just believe that it's of the essence for people to understand as a Catholic you just cannot hold these beliefs.”
Create Your Own Caption
But not dis one: "Governor makes hasty exit without answering questions about legal bills"
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Winter is a cruel mistress.
Guess what Smiff had to walk home in tonight? No, not flying monkeys but POURING RAIN. Well, i did hear that rain was in "the forecast," but yesterday when they predicted SLEET and it was sunny all day. So i left the umbrella at home. Not only were my feet wet, but every inch of me was soaked through to the bone! Since they got one right for the first time in months (on July 8th they said it would be sunny), the local weather mafia, led by the brain-dead John Coleman, were seen partying into the night, bar-hopping through the Gaslamp. Well, party on, frauds! You'll got yours (look for my forthcoming class action suit), much like the Bush Administration. After BushCo., there is no group more incompetant or infested with rampant corruption than weather "forecasters."
Who's to blame: Fung, dats who
Zydrunas Ilgauskas hit 10-of-10 shots from the floor on Wednesday for 24 points, six rebounds, four assists and three blocks in an easy win over the Wizards. Big Z was great tonight and was playing through a bruised shin. Obviously, he had no problems with the shin, or Brendan Haywood, tonight.
The Rochester Zeniths would have been reaping the fruits of this labor if i didn't have to sit players because no one, like, oh, Commissioner Fung, told me about the asinine "maximum games" rule until a third of the way through the season (an obvious conspiracy to keep Smiff from finishing in the money in anudder Yahoo league...). So i wasted a bunch of games early in the season on players i shouldn't have been playing. If i do anything in this league it will be to finish ahead of Parcers' Bud Lite, a Zimbabwean used car salesman from Chicago...
The Rochester Zeniths would have been reaping the fruits of this labor if i didn't have to sit players because no one, like, oh, Commissioner Fung, told me about the asinine "maximum games" rule until a third of the way through the season (an obvious conspiracy to keep Smiff from finishing in the money in anudder Yahoo league...). So i wasted a bunch of games early in the season on players i shouldn't have been playing. If i do anything in this league it will be to finish ahead of Parcers' Bud Lite, a Zimbabwean used car salesman from Chicago...
anudder Smiff who's solid, smart, of high character, integrity...don't laugh
Falcons hire Jaguars' defensive coordinator Mike Smith
ATLANTA (AP) -- The Atlanta Falcons hired Jacksonville defensive coordinator Mike Smith as their new head coach Wednesday night. "Mike possesses all of the key qualities we were looking for in a head coach," said general manager Thomas Dimitroff, in his first month on the job. Dimitroff said the 48-year-old Smith, a 26-year NFL coaching veteran, "has strong experience with winning teams, a track record of success, a solid, smart approach to the game, and high character and integrity."
Smith, the Jaguars' defensive coordinator since 2003, had his second interview with the Falcons on Friday. He has never been an NFL head coach, but Falcons quarterback Byron Leftwich, who was with Smith in Jacksonville for four years, says Atlanta made the right choice. "I've played against his defense more than anybody in the world," Leftwich said. "I did it every day in practice for four years. I think he's a great guy for the job. "A lot of people might not know his name, but I've seen the work he puts in every game, how guys were so prepared on Sundays that they knew exactly what teams were going to do."
Smith, a former defensive assistant with Baltimore, had the league's No. 12 defense with Jacksonville this season after ranking second in 2006 and sixth in 2005. Leftwich said Smith would never receive enough credit in Jacksonville because many assumed Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio, a former defensive coordinator, was the real mastermind of the defense.
Jaguars defensive end Marcellus "The Asshole" Wiley confirmed that opinion when he said on ESPN Wednesday, "Jack Del Rio was the defensive coordinator, and if it wasn't him, it was (linebacker) Mike Peterson. "Wiley said Smith "was just a guy who stood at the front of the room when Jack Del Rio was leading the defense." Wiley said the Falcons "really went down low on the totem pole." WHO THE PHOKK IS MARCELLUS WILEY?
Leftwich said he was aware of the Wiley's comments but said of Smith: "I was with him for four years. Somebody had to be calling those plays in Jacksonville. It was him. "We always said Smitty would be a great head coach because the time he put in and the way he interacted with players and how seriously he took his job."
ATLANTA (AP) -- The Atlanta Falcons hired Jacksonville defensive coordinator Mike Smith as their new head coach Wednesday night. "Mike possesses all of the key qualities we were looking for in a head coach," said general manager Thomas Dimitroff, in his first month on the job. Dimitroff said the 48-year-old Smith, a 26-year NFL coaching veteran, "has strong experience with winning teams, a track record of success, a solid, smart approach to the game, and high character and integrity."
Smith, the Jaguars' defensive coordinator since 2003, had his second interview with the Falcons on Friday. He has never been an NFL head coach, but Falcons quarterback Byron Leftwich, who was with Smith in Jacksonville for four years, says Atlanta made the right choice. "I've played against his defense more than anybody in the world," Leftwich said. "I did it every day in practice for four years. I think he's a great guy for the job. "A lot of people might not know his name, but I've seen the work he puts in every game, how guys were so prepared on Sundays that they knew exactly what teams were going to do."
Smith, a former defensive assistant with Baltimore, had the league's No. 12 defense with Jacksonville this season after ranking second in 2006 and sixth in 2005. Leftwich said Smith would never receive enough credit in Jacksonville because many assumed Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio, a former defensive coordinator, was the real mastermind of the defense.
Jaguars defensive end Marcellus "The Asshole" Wiley confirmed that opinion when he said on ESPN Wednesday, "Jack Del Rio was the defensive coordinator, and if it wasn't him, it was (linebacker) Mike Peterson. "Wiley said Smith "was just a guy who stood at the front of the room when Jack Del Rio was leading the defense." Wiley said the Falcons "really went down low on the totem pole." WHO THE PHOKK IS MARCELLUS WILEY?
Leftwich said he was aware of the Wiley's comments but said of Smith: "I was with him for four years. Somebody had to be calling those plays in Jacksonville. It was him. "We always said Smitty would be a great head coach because the time he put in and the way he interacted with players and how seriously he took his job."
Congressional Republicans sustain Dumbya's message to poor kids: "Why don't you phokkers just die already."
Republicans Sustain Bush’s S-CHIP Veto
The House [debated] the override of the President’s veto of the revised bipartisan SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) bill. The President’s veto on December 12 denied health care to children of hardworking families across America just as the country began experiencing an economic downturn, with families increasingly struggling with the costs of heat, food, gas and health care*.
* Yeah...so? There are plenty of bridges out there for people to live under. Or get that phokker Jimmy Carter to build them one big house in Wyoming or somewhere. What the economy really needs is more give-aways and set-asides for multinational corporations - what don't these phokking poor kids get together and become one of these? Then they would have lots of money, get HYOOOGE tax cuts and wouldn't need "socialized medicine." Phokking kids, while you're at it, get off my damn property!
The House [debated] the override of the President’s veto of the revised bipartisan SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) bill. The President’s veto on December 12 denied health care to children of hardworking families across America just as the country began experiencing an economic downturn, with families increasingly struggling with the costs of heat, food, gas and health care*.
* Yeah...so? There are plenty of bridges out there for people to live under. Or get that phokker Jimmy Carter to build them one big house in Wyoming or somewhere. What the economy really needs is more give-aways and set-asides for multinational corporations - what don't these phokking poor kids get together and become one of these? Then they would have lots of money, get HYOOOGE tax cuts and wouldn't need "socialized medicine." Phokking kids, while you're at it, get off my damn property!
Rezzzidunce Bush has done wonders for the Nation's military (cont'd)
News item: The percentage of new recruits entering the Army with a high school diploma dropped to a new low in 2007, according to a study released yesterday, and Army officials confirmed that they have lowered their standards to meet high recruiting goals in the middle of two ongoing wars.
The study by the National Priorities Project concluded that slightly more than 70 percent of new recruits joining the active-duty Army last year had a high school diploma, nearly 20 percentage points lower than the Army's goal of at least 90 percent.
The National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts-based research group that examines the impact of federal budget policies and has been outspoken against the Iraq war, said the number of high school graduates among new recruits fell from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent last year.
"The trend is clear," said Anita Dancs, the project's research director, who based the report on Defense Department data released via the Freedom of Information Act. "They're missing their benchmarks, and I think it's strongly linked to the impact [of] the Iraq war."
The study also found that the number of "high quality" recruits -- those with both a high school diploma and a score in the upper half on the military's qualification test -- has dropped more than 15 percent from 2004 to 2007. After linking the recruiting data to Zip codes and median incomes, it found that low- and middle-income families are supplying far more Army recruits than families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year...
The study by the National Priorities Project concluded that slightly more than 70 percent of new recruits joining the active-duty Army last year had a high school diploma, nearly 20 percentage points lower than the Army's goal of at least 90 percent.
The National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts-based research group that examines the impact of federal budget policies and has been outspoken against the Iraq war, said the number of high school graduates among new recruits fell from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent last year.
"The trend is clear," said Anita Dancs, the project's research director, who based the report on Defense Department data released via the Freedom of Information Act. "They're missing their benchmarks, and I think it's strongly linked to the impact [of] the Iraq war."
The study also found that the number of "high quality" recruits -- those with both a high school diploma and a score in the upper half on the military's qualification test -- has dropped more than 15 percent from 2004 to 2007. After linking the recruiting data to Zip codes and median incomes, it found that low- and middle-income families are supplying far more Army recruits than families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year...
but didn't Hemingway smoke?
Cigarette Pack-Shaped Books Get British American Tobacco Steamed
"British American Tobacco, however, claims that the book containing the Hemingway classics "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Undefeated" too closely resembles a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. BAT believes the association could threaten the health of its brand."
"British American Tobacco, however, claims that the book containing the Hemingway classics "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Undefeated" too closely resembles a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. BAT believes the association could threaten the health of its brand."
Create the headline!
What would the members of the LoC (and anyone else) come up with for the title for a post that includes the following link:
Hilton: Spears is 'great mother'
Kettle calling the pot black? Dumb and Dumbererererererer? Stooooooooooopid?
Winner gets, er, em, a free guide when they decide to visit Andrew Young's Zimbabwe Rhodesia.
Hilton: Spears is 'great mother'
Kettle calling the pot black? Dumb and Dumbererererererer? Stooooooooooopid?
Winner gets, er, em, a free guide when they decide to visit Andrew Young's Zimbabwe Rhodesia.
How does last night's Dem debate relate to Smiff?
Barack Obama mentioned in Tom Brokaw's new book, Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today, that Hillary Clinton praises Ronald Reagan (Hillary, how could you!?). On the cover of the book, there is a picture of Hillary next to a picture of Andrew Young. On his show tonight, Stephen Colbert told the story of a strike by black nurses in Charleston, South Carolina in 1969. The strike was ended when Andrew Young, representing the nurses, negotiated with a hospital official, Colbert's father James.
Several years later (1974, i think), Young, then a Congressman from Georgia, appeared on The Today Show (w/ Brokaw? don't remember) on Martin Luther King Day with my father (i got to stay home from school to watch it). Young later became the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, where "His greatest contribution was helping end segregation in Zimbabwe Rhodesia." (so says Wikipedia)
Several years later (1974, i think), Young, then a Congressman from Georgia, appeared on The Today Show (w/ Brokaw? don't remember) on Martin Luther King Day with my father (i got to stay home from school to watch it). Young later became the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, where "His greatest contribution was helping end segregation in Zimbabwe Rhodesia." (so says Wikipedia)
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Did someone wake him to let him know he dropped out?
News Item: Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson quit the Republican presidential race on Tuesday, after a string of poor finishes in early primary and caucus states.
Seeya, @sshole.
Seeya, @sshole.
Chicago
Neat looking map, though i'm not sure how accurate it is. Judging by the comments, not very (as usual, da Sout' Side gets short shrifted). Also, read the description for an alternate history of Chicago (nearly everything is wrong here..."striped skunk"?).
$20 by M.I.A. is the best goddamn song ever.
And I think Fung should marry her.
As well, I got an awesome offer on my gmail today: Find where the imperialism already happened...and move there.
As well, I got an awesome offer on my gmail today: Find where the imperialism already happened...and move there.
Monday, January 21, 2008
A Real Holiday
No shopping to help the economy, feeding our faces, fireworks, or whatever happens on Labor Day...
I was curious to find that my father's book it still available out there. I can't tell whether it's still in print but Amazon has a few copies, and someone gave it a five star review.
Snuffy (as he was known to his friends, colleagues, and students) and his two sons (circa 1975):
Can you imagine Smiff wif hair and a tank top? Now you don't have to anymore. I was kinda cute (whatdaphokk happened?). Also, notice how totally baked my brother is (not much has changed there).
I was curious to find that my father's book it still available out there. I can't tell whether it's still in print but Amazon has a few copies, and someone gave it a five star review.
Snuffy (as he was known to his friends, colleagues, and students) and his two sons (circa 1975):
Can you imagine Smiff wif hair and a tank top? Now you don't have to anymore. I was kinda cute (whatdaphokk happened?). Also, notice how totally baked my brother is (not much has changed there).
Rudy, a fucking Asswhole
He could still win, we should remember that:
The Long Run: Crossing Mayor Giuliani Often Had a Price
By MICHAEL POWELL and RUSS BUETTNER
Published: January 22, 2008
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.
“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”
Mr. Giuliani paid careful attention to the art of political payback. When former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr. Giuliani’s foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall. Mr. Koch, who wrote a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” shrugs.
“David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn’t cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily,” Mr. Koch said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani retails his stories of childhood toughness, in standing up to bullies who mocked his love of opera and bridled at his Yankee loyalties. Years after leaving Manhattan College, he held a grudge against a man who beat him in a class election. He urged his commissioners to walk out of City Council hearings when questions turned hostile. But in his 2002 book “Leadership,” he said his instructions owed nothing to his temper.
“It wasn’t my sensitivities I was worried about, but the tone of civility I strived to establish throughout the city,” he wrote. Mr. Giuliani declined requests to be interviewed for this article.
His admirers, not least former Deputy Mayor Randy M. Mastro, said it was unfair to characterize the mayor as vengeful, particularly given the “Herculean task” he faced when he entered office in 1994. Mr. Giuliani’s admirers claimed that the depredations of crack, AIDS, homicide and recession had brought the city to its knees, and that he faced a sclerotic liberal establishment. He wielded intimidation as his mace and wrested cost-savings and savings from powerful unions and politicians.
“The notion that the city needed broad-based change frightened a lot of entrenched groups,” said Fred Siegel, a historian and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.” “He didn’t want to be politic with them.”
He cowed many into silence. Silence ensured the flow of city money.
Andy Humm, a gay activist, worked for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which pushed condom giveaways in public schools. When Mr. Giuliani supported a parental opt-out, the institute’s director counseled silence to avoid losing city funds. “He said, ‘We’re going to say it’s not good, but we’re not going to mention him,’ ” Mr. Humm said.
“We were muzzled, and it was a disgrace.”
Picking His Fights
Mr. Giuliani says he prefers to brawl with imposing opponents. His father, he wrote in “Leadership,” would “always emphasize: never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully.”
As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination, challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd council member. But the mayor’s fist also fell on the less powerful. In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani’s youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.
At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani’s press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.
“My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption” Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.
None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy’s professional life was wrecked.
“I was soiled merchandise — the taint just lingers,” Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.
Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation — a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization — and the prospective job disappeared.
“He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge,” Mr. Murphy said.
This theme repeats. Two private employers in New York City, neither of which wanted to be identified because they feared retaliation should Mr. Giuliani be elected president, said the mayor’s office exerted pressure not to hire former Dinkins officials. When Mr. Giuliani battled schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, he demanded that Mr. Cortines prove his loyalty by firing the press spokesman, John Beckman.
Mr. Beckman’s offense? He had worked in the Dinkins administration. “I found it,” Mr. Beckman said in an interview, “a really unfortunate example of how to govern.”
Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel’s office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.
In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Giuliani’s record on police brutality. A week later, a city official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school’s clinical programs and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship, according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.
“It was ridiculously petty,” Mr. Berger said.
N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after that semester. ‘Culture of Retaliation’
The Citizens Budget Commission has driven mayors of various ideological stripes to distraction since it was founded in 1932. The business-backed group bird-dogs the city’s fiscal management with an unsparing eye. But its analysts are fonts of creative thinking, and Mr. Giuliani asked Raymond Horton, the group’s president, to serve on his transition committee in 1993.
That comity was long gone by the autumn of 1997, when Mr. Giuliani faced re-election. Ruth Messinger, the mayor’s Democratic opponent, cited the commission’s work, and the mayor denounced the group, which had issued critical reports on welfare reform, police inefficiency and the city budget.
So far, so typical for mayors and their relationship with the commission. Mr. Koch once banned his officials from attending the group’s annual retreat. Another time, he attended and gave a speech excoriating the commission.
But one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Joseph Lhota, took an unprecedented step. He called major securities firms that underwrite city bonds and discouraged them from buying seats at the commission’s annual fund-raising dinner. Because Mr. Lhota played a key role in selecting the investment firms that underwrote the bonds, his calls raised an ethical tempest.
Apologizing struck Mr. Giuliani as silly.
“We are sending exactly the right message,” he said. “Their reports are pretty useless; they are a dilettante organization.”
Still, that dinner was a rousing success. “All mayors have thin skins, but Rudy has the thinnest skin of all,” Mr. Horton said.
Mr. Giuliani’s war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic. Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group’s members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city’s homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had obtained that contract.
“That possibility could have happened,” Mr. Oesterreich told a federal judge.
The mayor’s fingerprints could not be found on every decision. But his enemies were widely known.
“The culture of retaliation was really quite remarkable,” said Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, the lawyer who represented Housing Works. “Up and down the food chain, everyone knew what this guy demanded.”
The Charter Fight
The mayor’s wartime style of governance reached an exhaustion point in the late 1990s. His poll numbers dipped, and the courts routinely ruled against the city, upholding the New York Civil Liberties Union in 23 of its 27 free-speech challenges during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty. After he left office, the city agreed to pay $327,000 to a black police officer who was fired because he had testified before the City Council about police brutality toward blacks. The city also agreed to rescind the firing of the caseworker who talked about a child’s death.
In 1999, Mr. Giuliani explored a run for the United States Senate. If he won that seat, he would leave the mayor’s office a year early. The City Charter dictated that Mark Green, the public advocate, would succeed him.
That prospect was intolerable to Mr. Giuliani. Few politicians crawled under the mayor’s skin as skillfully as Mr. Green. “Idiotic” and “inane” were some of the kinder words that Mr. Giuliani sent winging toward the public advocate, who delighted in verbally tweaking the mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani announced in June 1999 that a Charter Revision Commission, stocked with his loyalists, would explore changing the line of mayoral succession. Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Magazine that he might not have initiated the charter review campaign if Mr. Green were not the public advocate. Three former mayors declared themselves appalled; Mr. Koch fired the loudest cannonade. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Mayor,” he said during a news conference.
Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., chairman of a Charter Revision Commission a decade earlier, wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani warning that “targeting a particular person” would “smack of personal politics and predilections.
“All this is not worthy of you, or our city,” Mr. Schwarz wrote.
Mr. Mastro, who had left the administration, agreed to serve as the commission chairman. He eventually announced that a proposal requiring a special election within 60 days of a mayor’s early departure would not take effect until 2002, after both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Green had left office. A civic group estimated that the commission spent more than a million dollars of taxpayer money on commercials before a citywide referendum on the proposal that was held in November 1999.
Voters defeated the measure, 76 percent to 24 percent. (In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advocated a similar charter revision that passed with little controversy.)
Mr. Green had warned the mayor that rejection loomed.
“It was simple,” Mr. Green said. “It was the mayor vindictively going after an institutional critic for doing his job.”
None of this left the mayor chastened. In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.
The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was. (Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)
James Schillaci, the Bronx whistle-blower, recalled reading those comments and shuddering at the memory. “The mayor tarred me up; you know what that feels like?” he said. “I still have nightmares.”
The Long Run: Crossing Mayor Giuliani Often Had a Price
By MICHAEL POWELL and RUSS BUETTNER
Published: January 22, 2008
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.
“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”
Mr. Giuliani paid careful attention to the art of political payback. When former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr. Giuliani’s foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall. Mr. Koch, who wrote a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” shrugs.
“David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn’t cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily,” Mr. Koch said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani retails his stories of childhood toughness, in standing up to bullies who mocked his love of opera and bridled at his Yankee loyalties. Years after leaving Manhattan College, he held a grudge against a man who beat him in a class election. He urged his commissioners to walk out of City Council hearings when questions turned hostile. But in his 2002 book “Leadership,” he said his instructions owed nothing to his temper.
“It wasn’t my sensitivities I was worried about, but the tone of civility I strived to establish throughout the city,” he wrote. Mr. Giuliani declined requests to be interviewed for this article.
His admirers, not least former Deputy Mayor Randy M. Mastro, said it was unfair to characterize the mayor as vengeful, particularly given the “Herculean task” he faced when he entered office in 1994. Mr. Giuliani’s admirers claimed that the depredations of crack, AIDS, homicide and recession had brought the city to its knees, and that he faced a sclerotic liberal establishment. He wielded intimidation as his mace and wrested cost-savings and savings from powerful unions and politicians.
“The notion that the city needed broad-based change frightened a lot of entrenched groups,” said Fred Siegel, a historian and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.” “He didn’t want to be politic with them.”
He cowed many into silence. Silence ensured the flow of city money.
Andy Humm, a gay activist, worked for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which pushed condom giveaways in public schools. When Mr. Giuliani supported a parental opt-out, the institute’s director counseled silence to avoid losing city funds. “He said, ‘We’re going to say it’s not good, but we’re not going to mention him,’ ” Mr. Humm said.
“We were muzzled, and it was a disgrace.”
Picking His Fights
Mr. Giuliani says he prefers to brawl with imposing opponents. His father, he wrote in “Leadership,” would “always emphasize: never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully.”
As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination, challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd council member. But the mayor’s fist also fell on the less powerful. In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani’s youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.
At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani’s press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.
“My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption” Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.
None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy’s professional life was wrecked.
“I was soiled merchandise — the taint just lingers,” Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.
Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation — a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization — and the prospective job disappeared.
“He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge,” Mr. Murphy said.
This theme repeats. Two private employers in New York City, neither of which wanted to be identified because they feared retaliation should Mr. Giuliani be elected president, said the mayor’s office exerted pressure not to hire former Dinkins officials. When Mr. Giuliani battled schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, he demanded that Mr. Cortines prove his loyalty by firing the press spokesman, John Beckman.
Mr. Beckman’s offense? He had worked in the Dinkins administration. “I found it,” Mr. Beckman said in an interview, “a really unfortunate example of how to govern.”
Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel’s office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.
In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Giuliani’s record on police brutality. A week later, a city official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school’s clinical programs and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship, according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.
“It was ridiculously petty,” Mr. Berger said.
N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after that semester. ‘Culture of Retaliation’
The Citizens Budget Commission has driven mayors of various ideological stripes to distraction since it was founded in 1932. The business-backed group bird-dogs the city’s fiscal management with an unsparing eye. But its analysts are fonts of creative thinking, and Mr. Giuliani asked Raymond Horton, the group’s president, to serve on his transition committee in 1993.
That comity was long gone by the autumn of 1997, when Mr. Giuliani faced re-election. Ruth Messinger, the mayor’s Democratic opponent, cited the commission’s work, and the mayor denounced the group, which had issued critical reports on welfare reform, police inefficiency and the city budget.
So far, so typical for mayors and their relationship with the commission. Mr. Koch once banned his officials from attending the group’s annual retreat. Another time, he attended and gave a speech excoriating the commission.
But one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Joseph Lhota, took an unprecedented step. He called major securities firms that underwrite city bonds and discouraged them from buying seats at the commission’s annual fund-raising dinner. Because Mr. Lhota played a key role in selecting the investment firms that underwrote the bonds, his calls raised an ethical tempest.
Apologizing struck Mr. Giuliani as silly.
“We are sending exactly the right message,” he said. “Their reports are pretty useless; they are a dilettante organization.”
Still, that dinner was a rousing success. “All mayors have thin skins, but Rudy has the thinnest skin of all,” Mr. Horton said.
Mr. Giuliani’s war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic. Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group’s members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city’s homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had obtained that contract.
“That possibility could have happened,” Mr. Oesterreich told a federal judge.
The mayor’s fingerprints could not be found on every decision. But his enemies were widely known.
“The culture of retaliation was really quite remarkable,” said Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, the lawyer who represented Housing Works. “Up and down the food chain, everyone knew what this guy demanded.”
The Charter Fight
The mayor’s wartime style of governance reached an exhaustion point in the late 1990s. His poll numbers dipped, and the courts routinely ruled against the city, upholding the New York Civil Liberties Union in 23 of its 27 free-speech challenges during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty. After he left office, the city agreed to pay $327,000 to a black police officer who was fired because he had testified before the City Council about police brutality toward blacks. The city also agreed to rescind the firing of the caseworker who talked about a child’s death.
In 1999, Mr. Giuliani explored a run for the United States Senate. If he won that seat, he would leave the mayor’s office a year early. The City Charter dictated that Mark Green, the public advocate, would succeed him.
That prospect was intolerable to Mr. Giuliani. Few politicians crawled under the mayor’s skin as skillfully as Mr. Green. “Idiotic” and “inane” were some of the kinder words that Mr. Giuliani sent winging toward the public advocate, who delighted in verbally tweaking the mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani announced in June 1999 that a Charter Revision Commission, stocked with his loyalists, would explore changing the line of mayoral succession. Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Magazine that he might not have initiated the charter review campaign if Mr. Green were not the public advocate. Three former mayors declared themselves appalled; Mr. Koch fired the loudest cannonade. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Mayor,” he said during a news conference.
Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., chairman of a Charter Revision Commission a decade earlier, wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani warning that “targeting a particular person” would “smack of personal politics and predilections.
“All this is not worthy of you, or our city,” Mr. Schwarz wrote.
Mr. Mastro, who had left the administration, agreed to serve as the commission chairman. He eventually announced that a proposal requiring a special election within 60 days of a mayor’s early departure would not take effect until 2002, after both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Green had left office. A civic group estimated that the commission spent more than a million dollars of taxpayer money on commercials before a citywide referendum on the proposal that was held in November 1999.
Voters defeated the measure, 76 percent to 24 percent. (In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advocated a similar charter revision that passed with little controversy.)
Mr. Green had warned the mayor that rejection loomed.
“It was simple,” Mr. Green said. “It was the mayor vindictively going after an institutional critic for doing his job.”
None of this left the mayor chastened. In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.
The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was. (Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)
James Schillaci, the Bronx whistle-blower, recalled reading those comments and shuddering at the memory. “The mayor tarred me up; you know what that feels like?” he said. “I still have nightmares.”
Is this an act of desperation, or what?
On stage with Rudy 9/11 in Florida today: Johnny Damon and Jon Voight.
Jon Voight!! That should get, what, two, maybe three votes?
Was Gene Hackman unavailable?
Jon Voight!! That should get, what, two, maybe three votes?
Was Gene Hackman unavailable?
Smiff Early Warning System
Rambo opens Friday.
Twenty years after the last film in the series, John J. Rambo has retreated to northern Thailand, where he's running a longboat on the Salween River. Shit starts blowing up. With Julie Benz and Ken "The White Shadow" Howard. Rated R for strong graphic, bloody violence (FUCKING AWESOME!!) sexual assaults (Cool!), grisly images (Yeah!), language ("FUCKING [noun]!"), and Sylvester Stallone's script, direction and acting. Decker will go see it.
Twenty years after the last film in the series, John J. Rambo has retreated to northern Thailand, where he's running a longboat on the Salween River. Shit starts blowing up. With Julie Benz and Ken "The White Shadow" Howard. Rated R for strong graphic, bloody violence (FUCKING AWESOME!!) sexual assaults (Cool!), grisly images (Yeah!), language ("FUCKING [noun]!"), and Sylvester Stallone's script, direction and acting. Decker will go see it.
Blowheim Brickfest in DC
After blowing a 5 point lead late in regulation, the bricks started to fly in overtime. Cuse lose 64-62 :(
1:32 Syracuse - Jonny Flynn misses a three-pointer
2:18 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
2:18 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
3:39 Syracuse - Jonny Flynn misses a jumper
4:06 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
4:06 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
4:06 Georgetown - Personal foul on DaJuan Summers
4:09 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a layup
4:09 Syracuse - Donte Greene misses a hook shot
4:44 Syracuse - Antonio (Scoop) Jardine misses a three-pointer
1:32 Syracuse - Jonny Flynn misses a three-pointer
2:18 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
2:18 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
3:39 Syracuse - Jonny Flynn misses a jumper
4:06 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
4:06 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a free throw
4:06 Georgetown - Personal foul on DaJuan Summers
4:09 Syracuse - Arinze Onuaku misses a layup
4:09 Syracuse - Donte Greene misses a hook shot
4:44 Syracuse - Antonio (Scoop) Jardine misses a three-pointer
Beating a dead horse
If you thought we were the only ones who did not do their homework, and ignored what we didn't want to hear, you think wrong...
Guys, I'm afraid we haven't got a clue ...
On November 19 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a rare attempt to seek out expert views beyond the circle of his official advisers. Six distinguished academics were invited to Downing Street: three specialists on Iraq, and three on international security.
Guys, I'm afraid we haven't got a clue ...
On November 19 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a rare attempt to seek out expert views beyond the circle of his official advisers. Six distinguished academics were invited to Downing Street: three specialists on Iraq, and three on international security.
So... New England wins another game they should have lost?
Yawn.
Add 18-0 football teams to the list of things that ain't what they used to be.
Tom Brady? They won despite "Mr. Interception" today. They're always covering for this guy. But what do you expect from a 2nd stringer from Michigan?
And i have to root for the Giants now? Fuck that - i'm going to go to a movie or sumfting. Man alive, Green Bay SUCKS. Two losses to the Bears and now this? That's one shitty season right there.
Add 18-0 football teams to the list of things that ain't what they used to be.
Tom Brady? They won despite "Mr. Interception" today. They're always covering for this guy. But what do you expect from a 2nd stringer from Michigan?
And i have to root for the Giants now? Fuck that - i'm going to go to a movie or sumfting. Man alive, Green Bay SUCKS. Two losses to the Bears and now this? That's one shitty season right there.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Cold deres? Suckers...
If it's any consolation, the "forecast" here for Tuesday is "predicting" "possible" "sleet". Of course, it's more likely monkeys will fly outta my butt, but if it does happen look for reports of people in San Diego running through the streets trying to put out their heads that are on fire.
Forecast from National Weather Service As of 3:26 PM CST on January 19, 2008
Tonight... Clear. Bitterly cold. Suckers! Lows 5 to 9 below...except 3 below to 1 above zero downtown. Wind chills as low as 20 below to 30 below zero. West winds 10 to 15 mph.
Sunday... Mostly sunny. Highs 10 to 14. Lowest wind chill readings 20 below to 30 below zero in the morning. West winds 10 to 15 mph. Are your testicles frozen?
Sunday Night... Mostly cloudy with light snow likely...mainly after midnight. Minor accumulation possible. Lows 5 to 9 above. Wind chills as low as zero to 10 below zero. West winds around 10 mph in the evening becoming light and variable...then becoming southeast around 10 mph during the predawn hours. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. You guys SUCK.
Global warming? Jimmy Carter's fucking ass...
Forecast from National Weather Service As of 3:26 PM CST on January 19, 2008
Tonight... Clear. Bitterly cold. Suckers! Lows 5 to 9 below...except 3 below to 1 above zero downtown. Wind chills as low as 20 below to 30 below zero. West winds 10 to 15 mph.
Sunday... Mostly sunny. Highs 10 to 14. Lowest wind chill readings 20 below to 30 below zero in the morning. West winds 10 to 15 mph. Are your testicles frozen?
Sunday Night... Mostly cloudy with light snow likely...mainly after midnight. Minor accumulation possible. Lows 5 to 9 above. Wind chills as low as zero to 10 below zero. West winds around 10 mph in the evening becoming light and variable...then becoming southeast around 10 mph during the predawn hours. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. You guys SUCK.
Global warming? Jimmy Carter's fucking ass...
Saturday, January 19, 2008
You tell 'em, Jimmy
Opinion: I Got What America Needs Right Here by Jimmy Carter
Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight. Maybe you can help me understand one fucking thing right now, America, and explain to me what in the Christ is going on here. 'Cause, unless I'm missing something, this country is in the middle of a motherfucking shitstorm, and I have no fucking idea what you're gonna do to get out of it. I mean, are you seriously considering voting for one of these shitbags you got here in '08? Fat fucking chance....
Oh, what's that I hear? The weather's all screwy? You got a global warming problem? Boo-fucking-hoo! I was telling you morons to turn off your lights and unplug all your shit at night to conserve energy in 19-fuckin'-75, for chrissake. Gee, I wonder what woulda happened if we'd all switched to solar power like I fucking did back when we had a fucking chance to do something about it....
You had your chance with Jimmy Carter, and you fucking blew it. So get fucked. Fucking country.
Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight. Maybe you can help me understand one fucking thing right now, America, and explain to me what in the Christ is going on here. 'Cause, unless I'm missing something, this country is in the middle of a motherfucking shitstorm, and I have no fucking idea what you're gonna do to get out of it. I mean, are you seriously considering voting for one of these shitbags you got here in '08? Fat fucking chance....
Oh, what's that I hear? The weather's all screwy? You got a global warming problem? Boo-fucking-hoo! I was telling you morons to turn off your lights and unplug all your shit at night to conserve energy in 19-fuckin'-75, for chrissake. Gee, I wonder what woulda happened if we'd all switched to solar power like I fucking did back when we had a fucking chance to do something about it....
You had your chance with Jimmy Carter, and you fucking blew it. So get fucked. Fucking country.
Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, Geovany!
While losing 25 pounds helped, Geovany Soto [MONK!] attributed his breakthrough 2007 to the power of positive thinking. "At one point, I just started breaking boundaries," Soto said. "It’s good to hit .260, .270, .280 but why just that? Why not .350, .360? I was believing and working hard. You would be amazed at what kind of stuff you can do." Soto, long viewed as a future backup at best, is set to enter this year as the Cubs' starting catcher. "No doubt. I feel ready," he said. "I think I’m prepared to play in the major leagues. You have to work hard and never sit back on your achievements to be the best player you can be."
Yeah, why not .360? and why not 35 homers??
Yeah, why not .360? and why not 35 homers??
Friday, January 18, 2008
Morgellons? Sounds like a Horror middle reliever
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in conjunction with Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California Division of Research launched a study to learn about an unexplained skin condition known as Morgellons. Persons who suffer from this condition report a range of symptoms including non-healing skin lesions associated with the emergence of fibers or solid material from the skin, abnormal skin sensations (such as stinging and biting or pins and needles) and non-cutaneous symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and short-term memory loss. Researchers hope to learn more about who might be affected, what symptoms they experience, and factors that may contribute to their illness...Interested persons are encouraged to visit the CDC’s Unexplained Dermopathy/Morgellons web site."
ShinGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Field of Dreams II?
The Cubs have reportedly agreed to terms with former White Sox closer Shingo Takatsu.
Even the Chad Fox signing was more likely that this. Mr. Zero had a terrific 2004 in his first year in the U.S., but he was a bust in 2005 and he spent the last two years back in Japan, finishing with ERAs of 2.74 in 42 2/3 IP in 2006 and 6.17 in 23 1/3 IP last season. It's unlikely his assortment of soft stuff will allow him to succeed in the majors at age 39.
The Cubs have reportedly agreed to terms with former White Sox closer Shingo Takatsu.
Even the Chad Fox signing was more likely that this. Mr. Zero had a terrific 2004 in his first year in the U.S., but he was a bust in 2005 and he spent the last two years back in Japan, finishing with ERAs of 2.74 in 42 2/3 IP in 2006 and 6.17 in 23 1/3 IP last season. It's unlikely his assortment of soft stuff will allow him to succeed in the majors at age 39.
Look at it this way: at least humans aren't the only ones being totally phokked up the @ss by BushCo.
Die Whales, Die!!!!
President Bush exempted the Navy from an environmental law so it can continue using sonar in its anti-submarine warfare training off the California coast — a practice critics say is harmful to whales and other marine mammals.
President Bush exempted the Navy from an environmental law so it can continue using sonar in its anti-submarine warfare training off the California coast — a practice critics say is harmful to whales and other marine mammals.
Phokking Canucks
Wait until we get a hold of some of these yella newfies and stuff hockey pucks down their stinking throats...
Canada puts US on 'torture list'
The United States has been listed as a country where prisoners are at risk of torture in a training document produced by the Canadian foreign ministry. It also classifies some US interrogation techniques as torture. The manual - part of a training course on torture awareness for diplomats - also includes Israel, China, Iran and Afghanistan on its watch list.
Canada puts US on 'torture list'
The United States has been listed as a country where prisoners are at risk of torture in a training document produced by the Canadian foreign ministry. It also classifies some US interrogation techniques as torture. The manual - part of a training course on torture awareness for diplomats - also includes Israel, China, Iran and Afghanistan on its watch list.
I am shocked--SHOCKED!
I think this is just playing on a loop now...
Bush's $145 billion plan
President Bush calls for $145 billion in tax relief to let "Americans* keep more of their money."
It appears to be working already:
Stocks fall after Bush announces stimulus plan
*code for "the very wealthy" and "corporations"
Bush's $145 billion plan
President Bush calls for $145 billion in tax relief to let "Americans* keep more of their money."
It appears to be working already:
Stocks fall after Bush announces stimulus plan
*code for "the very wealthy" and "corporations"
suddenly, there's hope...
I'm gonna let Fung check this out first...
Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner. From a leading expert in artificial intelligence comes an eye-opening, superbly argued book that explores a new level of human intimacy and relationships—with robots.
Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
Love, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner. From a leading expert in artificial intelligence comes an eye-opening, superbly argued book that explores a new level of human intimacy and relationships—with robots.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
What hope is there for us?
Eddie Murphy is getting a divorce after being married for TWO WEEKS.
(Did she just see Norbit?)
(Did she just see Norbit?)
a hair malfunction might be all that stands in the way
Senate joins House in passing transit bill
(AP) — The General Assembly on Thursday approved Gov. Rod Blagojevich's changes to legislation that will prevent deep service cuts at Chicago-area transit systems. The measure passed the House 61-47 Thursday and the Senate 32-19.
(AP) — The General Assembly on Thursday approved Gov. Rod Blagojevich's changes to legislation that will prevent deep service cuts at Chicago-area transit systems. The measure passed the House 61-47 Thursday and the Senate 32-19.
How to be a total failure and yet profit immensely...
...lie, too. Something for George W. Bush to consider (say, baseball will need a new commissioner in 2013, unless Bud lies again and signs for another extension).
Bud Selig [click at own risk] on Thursday was given a three-year extension as baseball commissioner through the 2012 season. Financial terms weren't released, of course, but Selig received $14.5 million in the 12 months ending Oct. 31, 2005, according to MLB's last available tax return. Selig insisted when his last extension was done that he'd be retiring after it expired following the 2009 season. This sets him up as commissioner through age 78.
Bud Selig [click at own risk] on Thursday was given a three-year extension as baseball commissioner through the 2012 season. Financial terms weren't released, of course, but Selig received $14.5 million in the 12 months ending Oct. 31, 2005, according to MLB's last available tax return. Selig insisted when his last extension was done that he'd be retiring after it expired following the 2009 season. This sets him up as commissioner through age 78.
Drugs are bad, mkay
Effects Of Drugs And Alcohol On Spider Webs
If you can't watch video, well, then you're missing out...
If you can't watch video, well, then you're missing out...
Funny Stuff
Don't forget to check out 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. Haven't been thru the whole thing, but my favorites so far...
10. Electronic voting machines
Election officials in Florida promptly order 5,000 units Diebold tightens security after it is revealed that a simple virus can hack its electronic voting machines. Months later a hacker uses a picture of a key from the company website to make a real key that can open the company's machines.
Election officials in Florida promptly order 5,000 units Diebold tightens security after it is revealed that a simple virus can hack its electronic voting machines. Months later a hacker uses a picture of a key from the company website to make a real key that can open the company's machines.
13. DisneylandIt's a fat world, after all
Disneyland announces plans to close the "It's a Small World" attraction to deepen its water channel after the ride's boats start getting stuck under loads of heavy passengers. Employees ask larger passengers to disembark - and compensate them with coupons for free food.
Is this an editorial or a a Swift Boat-style smear email?
Hard to tell...
Obama's Church
Election 2008: Since we first drew attention to Barack Obama's Afrocentric church a full 12 months ago, other media have weighed in. And additional disturbing information has come to light....
Investor's Business Daily? Never read it, but apparently they're trying to make the Wall Street Journal seem like Pravda.
Obama's Church
Election 2008: Since we first drew attention to Barack Obama's Afrocentric church a full 12 months ago, other media have weighed in. And additional disturbing information has come to light....
Investor's Business Daily? Never read it, but apparently they're trying to make the Wall Street Journal seem like Pravda.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Nothing Else Needs To Be Said - Except We Need This Leader. Now.
Franklin Roosevelt's Address Announcing the Second New Deal
October 31, 1936
Senator Wagner, Governor Lehman, ladies and gentlemen:
On the eve of a national election, it is well for us to stop for a moment and analyze calmly and without prejudice the effect on our Nation of a victory by either of the major political parties.
The problem of the electorate is far deeper, far more vital than the continuance in the Presidency of any individual. For the greater issue goes beyond units of humanity--it goes to humanity itself.
In 1932 the issue was the restoration of American democracy; and the American people were in a mood to win. They did win. In 1936 the issue is the preservation of their victory. Again they are in a mood to win. Again they will win.
More than four years ago in accepting the Democratic nomination in Chicago, I said: "Give me your help not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people."
The banners of that crusade still fly in the van of a Nation that is on the march.
It is needless to repeat the details of the program which this Administration has been hammering out on the anvils of experience. No amount of misrepresentation or statistical contortion can conceal or blur or smear that record. Neither the attacks of unscrupulous enemies nor the exaggerations of over-zealous friends will serve to mislead the American people.
What was our hope in 1932? Above all other things the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.
First, they sought escape from the personal terror which had stalked them for three years. They wanted the peace that comes from security in their homes: safety for their savings, permanence in their jobs, a fair profit from their enterprise.
Next, they wanted peace in the community, the peace that springs from the ability to meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways--those things which are expected of solvent local government. They sought escape from disintegration and bankruptcy in local and state affairs.
They also sought peace within the Nation: protection of their currency, fairer wages, the ending of long hours of toil, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of wild-cat speculation, the safety of their children from kidnappers.
And, finally, they sought peace with other Nations--peace in a world of unrest. The Nation knows that I hate war, and I know that the Nation hates war.
I submit to you a record of peace; and on that record a well-founded expectation for future peace--peace for the individual, peace for the community, peace for the Nation, and peace with the world.
Tonight I call the roll--the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 and still stand with us today.
Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance --men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.
Written on it are the names of those who despaired, young men and young women for whom opportunity had become a will-o'-the-wisp.
Written on it are the names of farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, business men whose books were portents of disaster, home owners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure.
Written there in large letters are the names of countless other Americans of all parties and all faiths, Americans who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, whose consciences were burdened because too many of their fellows were burdened, who looked on these things four years ago and said, "This can be changed. We will change it."
We still lead that army in 1936. They stood with us then because in 1932 they believed. They stand with us today because in 1936 they know. And with them stand millions of new recruits who have come to know.
Their hopes have become our record.
We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House--by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.
Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America's working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.
Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.
Every message in a pay envelope, even if it is the truth, is a command to vote according to the will of the employer. But this propaganda is worse- it is deceit.
They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit.
They carefully conceal from him the fact that under the federal law, he receives another insurance policy to help him if he loses his job, and that the premium of that policy is paid 100 percent by the employer and not one cent by the worker. They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit.
They imply to him that he pays all the cost of both forms of insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar put up by him his employer puts up three dollars three for one. And that omission is deceit.
But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.
The fraudulent nature of this attempt is well shown by the record of votes on the passage of the Social Security Act. In addition to an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses, seventy-seven Republican Representatives voted for it and only eighteen against it and fifteen Republican Senators voted for it and only five against it. Where does this last-minute drive of the Republican leadership leave these Republican Representatives and Senators who helped enact this law?
I am sure the vast majority of law-abiding businessmen who are not parties to this propaganda fully appreciate the extent of the threat to honest business contained in this coercion.
I have expressed indignation at this form of campaigning and I am confident that the overwhelming majority of employers, workers and the general public share that indignation and will show it at the polls on Tuesday next.
Aside from this phase of it, I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but only as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.
It is because I have sought to think in terms of the whole Nation that I am confident that today, just as four years ago, the people want more than promises.
Our vision for the future contains more than promises.
This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.
Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America--to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America, for better and cheaper transportation, for low interest rates, for sounder home financing, for better banking, for the regulation of security issues, for reciprocal trade among nations, for the wiping out of slums. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America. With their continued cooperation we will do all in our power to end the piling up of huge surpluses which spelled ruinous prices for their crops. We will persist in successful action for better land use, for reforestation, for the conservation of water all the way from its source to the sea, for drought and flood control, for better marketing facilities for farm commodities, for a definite reduction of farm tenancy, for encouragement of farmer cooperatives, for crop insurance and a stable food supply. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.
Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless--that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief--to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.
You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.
Again -- what of our objectives?
Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.
For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight.
All this--all these objectives--spell peace at home. All our actions, all our ideals, spell also peace with other nations.
Today there is war and rumor of war. We want none of it. But while we guard our shores against threats of war, we will continue to remove the causes of unrest and antagonism at home which might make our people easier victims to those for whom foreign war is profitable. You know well that those who stand to profit by war are not on our side in this campaign.
"Peace on earth, good will toward men"--democracy must cling to that message. For it is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose. Above our political forums, above our market places stand the altars of our faith-altars on which burn the fires of devotion that maintain all that is best in us and all that is best in our Nation.
We have need of that devotion today. It is that which makes it possible for government to persuade those who are mentally prepared to fight each other to go on instead, to work for and to sacrifice for each other. That is why we need to say with the Prophet: "What doth the Lord require of thee -- but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." That is why the recovery we seek, the recovery we are winning, is more than economic. In it are included justice and love and humility, not for ourselves as individuals alone, but for our Nation.
That is the road to peace.
October 31, 1936
Senator Wagner, Governor Lehman, ladies and gentlemen:
On the eve of a national election, it is well for us to stop for a moment and analyze calmly and without prejudice the effect on our Nation of a victory by either of the major political parties.
The problem of the electorate is far deeper, far more vital than the continuance in the Presidency of any individual. For the greater issue goes beyond units of humanity--it goes to humanity itself.
In 1932 the issue was the restoration of American democracy; and the American people were in a mood to win. They did win. In 1936 the issue is the preservation of their victory. Again they are in a mood to win. Again they will win.
More than four years ago in accepting the Democratic nomination in Chicago, I said: "Give me your help not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people."
The banners of that crusade still fly in the van of a Nation that is on the march.
It is needless to repeat the details of the program which this Administration has been hammering out on the anvils of experience. No amount of misrepresentation or statistical contortion can conceal or blur or smear that record. Neither the attacks of unscrupulous enemies nor the exaggerations of over-zealous friends will serve to mislead the American people.
What was our hope in 1932? Above all other things the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.
First, they sought escape from the personal terror which had stalked them for three years. They wanted the peace that comes from security in their homes: safety for their savings, permanence in their jobs, a fair profit from their enterprise.
Next, they wanted peace in the community, the peace that springs from the ability to meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways--those things which are expected of solvent local government. They sought escape from disintegration and bankruptcy in local and state affairs.
They also sought peace within the Nation: protection of their currency, fairer wages, the ending of long hours of toil, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of wild-cat speculation, the safety of their children from kidnappers.
And, finally, they sought peace with other Nations--peace in a world of unrest. The Nation knows that I hate war, and I know that the Nation hates war.
I submit to you a record of peace; and on that record a well-founded expectation for future peace--peace for the individual, peace for the community, peace for the Nation, and peace with the world.
Tonight I call the roll--the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 and still stand with us today.
Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance --men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.
Written on it are the names of those who despaired, young men and young women for whom opportunity had become a will-o'-the-wisp.
Written on it are the names of farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, business men whose books were portents of disaster, home owners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure.
Written there in large letters are the names of countless other Americans of all parties and all faiths, Americans who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, whose consciences were burdened because too many of their fellows were burdened, who looked on these things four years ago and said, "This can be changed. We will change it."
We still lead that army in 1936. They stood with us then because in 1932 they believed. They stand with us today because in 1936 they know. And with them stand millions of new recruits who have come to know.
Their hopes have become our record.
We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House--by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.
Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America's working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.
Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.
Every message in a pay envelope, even if it is the truth, is a command to vote according to the will of the employer. But this propaganda is worse- it is deceit.
They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit.
They carefully conceal from him the fact that under the federal law, he receives another insurance policy to help him if he loses his job, and that the premium of that policy is paid 100 percent by the employer and not one cent by the worker. They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit.
They imply to him that he pays all the cost of both forms of insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar put up by him his employer puts up three dollars three for one. And that omission is deceit.
But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.
The fraudulent nature of this attempt is well shown by the record of votes on the passage of the Social Security Act. In addition to an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses, seventy-seven Republican Representatives voted for it and only eighteen against it and fifteen Republican Senators voted for it and only five against it. Where does this last-minute drive of the Republican leadership leave these Republican Representatives and Senators who helped enact this law?
I am sure the vast majority of law-abiding businessmen who are not parties to this propaganda fully appreciate the extent of the threat to honest business contained in this coercion.
I have expressed indignation at this form of campaigning and I am confident that the overwhelming majority of employers, workers and the general public share that indignation and will show it at the polls on Tuesday next.
Aside from this phase of it, I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but only as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.
It is because I have sought to think in terms of the whole Nation that I am confident that today, just as four years ago, the people want more than promises.
Our vision for the future contains more than promises.
This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.
Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America--to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America, for better and cheaper transportation, for low interest rates, for sounder home financing, for better banking, for the regulation of security issues, for reciprocal trade among nations, for the wiping out of slums. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America. With their continued cooperation we will do all in our power to end the piling up of huge surpluses which spelled ruinous prices for their crops. We will persist in successful action for better land use, for reforestation, for the conservation of water all the way from its source to the sea, for drought and flood control, for better marketing facilities for farm commodities, for a definite reduction of farm tenancy, for encouragement of farmer cooperatives, for crop insurance and a stable food supply. For all these we have only just begun to fight.
Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.
Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless--that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief--to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.
You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.
Again -- what of our objectives?
Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.
For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight.
All this--all these objectives--spell peace at home. All our actions, all our ideals, spell also peace with other nations.
Today there is war and rumor of war. We want none of it. But while we guard our shores against threats of war, we will continue to remove the causes of unrest and antagonism at home which might make our people easier victims to those for whom foreign war is profitable. You know well that those who stand to profit by war are not on our side in this campaign.
"Peace on earth, good will toward men"--democracy must cling to that message. For it is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose. Above our political forums, above our market places stand the altars of our faith-altars on which burn the fires of devotion that maintain all that is best in us and all that is best in our Nation.
We have need of that devotion today. It is that which makes it possible for government to persuade those who are mentally prepared to fight each other to go on instead, to work for and to sacrifice for each other. That is why we need to say with the Prophet: "What doth the Lord require of thee -- but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." That is why the recovery we seek, the recovery we are winning, is more than economic. In it are included justice and love and humility, not for ourselves as individuals alone, but for our Nation.
That is the road to peace.
just anudder bump on the End Times highway
Of course, these are probably the same dopes who said it was going to snow in Philly last Sunday night, so dere's a good chance of either nothing happening or the world coming to an end without warning... and anudder reason not to get a cell phone.
From NOAA via "GIM International" newsletter:
http://www.gim-international.com/news/id2773-NOAA_Forthcoming_Solar_Cycle_Could_Disrupt_GPS,_Communications.html
Source: NOAA Website: http://www.noaa.gov
NOAA: Forthcoming Solar Cycle Could Disrupt GPS, Communications
10/01/2008
A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for military and civilian communications, including GPS signals, showed signs it was on it its way with the appearance of the cycle's first sunspot, NOAA scientists said.
The sunspot appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "This sunspot is like the first robin of spring," said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of Nova's Space Weather Prediction Center. "In this case, it's an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years."
A sunspot is an area of highly organized magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. The new 11-year cycle, called solar cycle 24, is expected to build gradually, with the number of sunspots and solar storms reaching a maximum by 2011 or 2012, though devastating storms can occur at any time, according to NOAA.
During a solar storm, highly charged material ejected from the sun may head toward Earth, where it can bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications, and threaten astronauts with harmful radiation. Storms can also knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp GPS signals. Routine activities such as talking on a cell phone or getting money from an ATM could suddenly halt over a large part of the globe, NOAA warned.
"Our growing dependence on highly sophisticated, space-based technologies means we are far more vulnerable to space weather today than in the past," said Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "[NOAA's] space weather monitoring and forecasts are critical for the nation's ability to function smoothly during solar disturbances."
Last April, in coordination with an international panel of solar experts, NOAA issued a forecast that solar cycle 24 would start in March 2008, plus or minus six months. The panel was evenly split between those predicting a strong or weak cycle. Both camps agree that the sooner the new cycle takes over the waning previous cycle, the more likely that it will be a strong season with many sunspots and major storms, said Biesecker. Many more sunspots with solar cycle 24 traits must emerge before scientists consider the new cycle dominant, with the potential for more frequent storms, NOAA said.
The new sunspot, identified as #10,981, is the latest visible spot to appear since NOAA began numbering them on January 5, 1972. Its high-latitude location at 27 degrees North, and its negative polarity leading to the right in the Northern Hemisphere are clear-cut signs of a new solar cycle, according to NOAA experts. The first active regions and sunspots of a new solar cycle can emerge at high latitudes while those from the previous cycle continue to form closer to the equator.
From NOAA via "GIM International" newsletter:
http://www.gim-international.com/news/id2773-NOAA_Forthcoming_Solar_Cycle_Could_Disrupt_GPS,_Communications.html
Source: NOAA Website: http://www.noaa.gov
NOAA: Forthcoming Solar Cycle Could Disrupt GPS, Communications
10/01/2008
A new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity, bringing with it increased risks for military and civilian communications, including GPS signals, showed signs it was on it its way with the appearance of the cycle's first sunspot, NOAA scientists said.
The sunspot appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "This sunspot is like the first robin of spring," said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of Nova's Space Weather Prediction Center. "In this case, it's an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years."
A sunspot is an area of highly organized magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. The new 11-year cycle, called solar cycle 24, is expected to build gradually, with the number of sunspots and solar storms reaching a maximum by 2011 or 2012, though devastating storms can occur at any time, according to NOAA.
During a solar storm, highly charged material ejected from the sun may head toward Earth, where it can bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications, and threaten astronauts with harmful radiation. Storms can also knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp GPS signals. Routine activities such as talking on a cell phone or getting money from an ATM could suddenly halt over a large part of the globe, NOAA warned.
"Our growing dependence on highly sophisticated, space-based technologies means we are far more vulnerable to space weather today than in the past," said Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "[NOAA's] space weather monitoring and forecasts are critical for the nation's ability to function smoothly during solar disturbances."
Last April, in coordination with an international panel of solar experts, NOAA issued a forecast that solar cycle 24 would start in March 2008, plus or minus six months. The panel was evenly split between those predicting a strong or weak cycle. Both camps agree that the sooner the new cycle takes over the waning previous cycle, the more likely that it will be a strong season with many sunspots and major storms, said Biesecker. Many more sunspots with solar cycle 24 traits must emerge before scientists consider the new cycle dominant, with the potential for more frequent storms, NOAA said.
The new sunspot, identified as #10,981, is the latest visible spot to appear since NOAA began numbering them on January 5, 1972. Its high-latitude location at 27 degrees North, and its negative polarity leading to the right in the Northern Hemisphere are clear-cut signs of a new solar cycle, according to NOAA experts. The first active regions and sunspots of a new solar cycle can emerge at high latitudes while those from the previous cycle continue to form closer to the equator.
Potty mouth good?
I nominate Smiff to do some "empirical testing"...
Swearing at work can 'cut stress'
Swearing at work helps employees cope with stress, academics at a Norfolk university have said.
A study by Norwich's University of East Anglia (UEA) into leadership styles found the use of "taboo language" boosted team spirit.
Professor Yehuda Baruch, professor of management, warned that attempts to prevent workers from swearing could have a negative impact.
But Professor Baruch discouraged swearing in front of customers.
'Maintaining solidarity'
He said: "In most scenarios, in particular in the presence of customers or senior staff, profanity must be seriously discouraged or banned.
"However, our study suggested that, in many cases, taboo language serves the needs of people for developing and maintaining solidarity, and as a mechanism to cope with stress. Banning it could backfire.
"Managers need to understand how their staff feel about swearing.
"The challenge is to master the art of knowing when to turn a blind eye to communication that does not meet with their own standards."
Swearing at work can 'cut stress'
Swearing at work helps employees cope with stress, academics at a Norfolk university have said.
A study by Norwich's University of East Anglia (UEA) into leadership styles found the use of "taboo language" boosted team spirit.
Professor Yehuda Baruch, professor of management, warned that attempts to prevent workers from swearing could have a negative impact.
But Professor Baruch discouraged swearing in front of customers.
'Maintaining solidarity'
He said: "In most scenarios, in particular in the presence of customers or senior staff, profanity must be seriously discouraged or banned.
"However, our study suggested that, in many cases, taboo language serves the needs of people for developing and maintaining solidarity, and as a mechanism to cope with stress. Banning it could backfire.
"Managers need to understand how their staff feel about swearing.
"The challenge is to master the art of knowing when to turn a blind eye to communication that does not meet with their own standards."
McDonald's counters...
McDonald's adds chicken to breakfast menu
Chicken for breakfast?Starting this spring at McDonald's, yes. Oak Brook-based McDonald's Corp. will offer a chicken biscuit breakfast sandwich in its nearly 14,000 U.S. stores in a few months, the company told analysts today at a Cowen & Co. conference in New York.
The new breakfast sandwich, which consists of a small fried chicken filet in a sliced biscuit, has been test marketed for over a year and is one of several new menu offerings from McDonald's. Late last year, it launched the McSkillet Burrito, its first new breakfast sandwich since the McGriddle came out in 2003. A new burger, the Angus Third Pounder, is expected to be rolled out nationwide this year. Currently, it's available in test markets, including in California and New York.
hey clowns, phokk you
Smiff headed back to Chicago?
Cubs invited C J.D. Closser, LHP Ed Campusano, LHP Geoff Jones, LHP Les Walrond, RHP Esmailin Caridad, RHP Jose Ceda, RHP Chad Fox, RHP Mike Smith, C Welington Castillo, C Josh Donaldson, C Koyie Hill, INF Andres Blanco, INF Luis Figueroa, INF Micah Hoffpauir, INF Casey McGehee, INF Bobby Scales, OF Tyler Colvin, OF Josh Kroeger and OF Andres Torres to spring training.
You know what da answer to dis is, don't you?
2007 Inflation Rate: Up 4.1%
2007 Real Wages Rate: Down 0.9%
Now, you might think: raise salaries for workers and cut them for phokking fat-cat CEOs. Hah, good one! The real answer is: cut taxes for the very weathly. That way, they might invest in new ventures and hire you for that second job you need since you lost 5% of your money last year. Or, they might buy a yacht and help out the yacht makers. And if you're thinking, why not cut taxes on workers 5%? Hah, anudder good one! Uh, where da phokk have you been since Jan. 2001? Probably working 3 jobs and not paying attention. Also, 9/11 changed everything. So, oh yeah, let me speak for Fred Thompson et al. here: go phokk yourselves.
In related news:
QT Trickle-On Economics Update:
The average CEO in this country, as of today, has been paid so far this year what the average worker earns in seven years.
2007 Real Wages Rate: Down 0.9%
Now, you might think: raise salaries for workers and cut them for phokking fat-cat CEOs. Hah, good one! The real answer is: cut taxes for the very weathly. That way, they might invest in new ventures and hire you for that second job you need since you lost 5% of your money last year. Or, they might buy a yacht and help out the yacht makers. And if you're thinking, why not cut taxes on workers 5%? Hah, anudder good one! Uh, where da phokk have you been since Jan. 2001? Probably working 3 jobs and not paying attention. Also, 9/11 changed everything. So, oh yeah, let me speak for Fred Thompson et al. here: go phokk yourselves.
In related news:
QT Trickle-On Economics Update:
The average CEO in this country, as of today, has been paid so far this year what the average worker earns in seven years.
finally, some good news
The latest salvo in the fast food coffee wars? Chicago Dunkin Donuts stores are test marketing dark roast coffee and it's free on Mondays. Hmmm. Now where have we seen that marketing strategy before? Oh, right. At McDonald's, where they've been giving away premium Joe on Mondays since they introduced the stuff.
but the important thing is, socialized medicine isn't encroaching on our God-given freedom
ER waits dangerously long in U.S.: study
One-Quarter of Heart Attack Patients Wait 50 Minutes or Longer
One-Quarter of Heart Attack Patients Wait 50 Minutes or Longer
Whitey keeping darky down (cont)
Police: College Students Lied About Attack
Roommate Hit Girl With Lacrosse Stick To Fake Assault
Investigators said that Trista Sturdivant claimed that she had been attacked by a black man who jumped out of the woods.
OK whitey, we know your lives are all stressed out now because things ain't what they used to be. You used to be able to get all the cushy jobs, now you have to compete with darky and they have "affirmative action" to help them (cheat). But please, when you do something stupid, like claim you were assaulted or kidnapped or something, don't blame us for it. It's not our fault (OK, it is, but you started it), so pick one of your own to blame. Please.
Roommate Hit Girl With Lacrosse Stick To Fake Assault
Investigators said that Trista Sturdivant claimed that she had been attacked by a black man who jumped out of the woods.
OK whitey, we know your lives are all stressed out now because things ain't what they used to be. You used to be able to get all the cushy jobs, now you have to compete with darky and they have "affirmative action" to help them (cheat). But please, when you do something stupid, like claim you were assaulted or kidnapped or something, don't blame us for it. It's not our fault (OK, it is, but you started it), so pick one of your own to blame. Please.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
here's a shocker
News item: Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.
the democratic process
Dear MoveOn member,
In the last year, the major TV networks asked the presidential candidates 2,679 questions. Pop quiz: How many were about global warming?
A) 514 — after all, it's one of the top issues facing the country
B) 165 — as many as were asked about illegal immigration
C) 3 — the same number asked about UFOs
In the last year, the major TV networks asked the presidential candidates 2,679 questions. Pop quiz: How many were about global warming?
A) 514 — after all, it's one of the top issues facing the country
B) 165 — as many as were asked about illegal immigration
C) 3 — the same number asked about UFOs
poll finds shocking idiocy rate of 32%
POLL: A New Low in Approval Starts Bush's Final Year
Beset by growing economic concerns on top of the long unpopular war in Iraq, President Bush starts the last year of his presidency with the worst approval rating of his career.
Just 32 percent of Americans now approve of the way Bush is handling his job, while 66 percent disapprove. Bush's work on the economy has likewise reached a new low. And he shows no gain on Iraq; despite reduced violence there, 64 percent say the war was not worth fighting, 2 points from its high.
Beset by growing economic concerns on top of the long unpopular war in Iraq, President Bush starts the last year of his presidency with the worst approval rating of his career.
Just 32 percent of Americans now approve of the way Bush is handling his job, while 66 percent disapprove. Bush's work on the economy has likewise reached a new low. And he shows no gain on Iraq; despite reduced violence there, 64 percent say the war was not worth fighting, 2 points from its high.
Misplaced Priorities (cont)
Missing dogs found safe
While untold people are suffering all over this city, state, nation, continent, hemisphere and globe (once we meet the Vulcans I'll add solar system, galaxy and universe to the list), we're concerned about whitey's pooches..
While untold people are suffering all over this city, state, nation, continent, hemisphere and globe (once we meet the Vulcans I'll add solar system, galaxy and universe to the list), we're concerned about whitey's pooches.
but he's da gubnor -- he can do whatever he wants, or, dere is yet annudder YOOOGE delay directly behind dis one
Free rides offer could delay transit funding
CHICAGO - Gov. Rod Blagojevich never discussed a plan to offer free rides for senior citizens with the head of the Chicago Transit Authority before making the idea public last week, the CTA chief said Monday.
CTA President Ron Huberman said he was concerned Blagojevich's proposal could scuttle final approval of a mass-transit funding bill.
CHICAGO - Gov. Rod Blagojevich never discussed a plan to offer free rides for senior citizens with the head of the Chicago Transit Authority before making the idea public last week, the CTA chief said Monday.
CTA President Ron Huberman said he was concerned Blagojevich's proposal could scuttle final approval of a mass-transit funding bill.
@SSHOLE Revisted
Dis guy changes his story with each bowel movement...
Yankees VP Hank Steinbrenner said his team was still in the hunt for Johan Santana. Steinbrenner said ESPN's report that the Yankees pulled their offer was untrue. "There wasn't an official offer anyway. You can't withdraw something that wasn't there," Steinbrenner said. "There was no official offer on the table at this time." According to Steinbrenner, there has been some dialogue between his club and the Twins. "It's still in the deciding process," he said. "We're still discussing it. There's still a little talk back and forth."
Yankees VP Hank Steinbrenner said his team was still in the hunt for Johan Santana. Steinbrenner said ESPN's report that the Yankees pulled their offer was untrue. "There wasn't an official offer anyway. You can't withdraw something that wasn't there," Steinbrenner said. "There was no official offer on the table at this time." According to Steinbrenner, there has been some dialogue between his club and the Twins. "It's still in the deciding process," he said. "We're still discussing it. There's still a little talk back and forth."
Monday, January 14, 2008
philly skilly phlubs da phorecast
Snow? No!
By Lea Sitton Stanley
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
So, where is it, that snow we steeled ourselves for?
"It didn't happen."
k-mad, reporting from da philly aeroport...
By Lea Sitton Stanley
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
So, where is it, that snow we steeled ourselves for?
"It didn't happen."
k-mad, reporting from da philly aeroport...
News Grouping
So I looked at the Trib's home page today, and I realised they grouped the stories all wrong. They use Nation, Local, Sports, Entertainment, Travel, etc. I propose a more logical, if slightly more wordy, grouping arrangement:
Why the phokk is this news?
7 people charged in weekend marijuana bust on Near South Side
No sign of Britney Spears at custody hearing
Eva Longoria gives Jessica Simpson advice
Stories you wouldn't normally care about, so we added something to the headline explain why you should care...
Dolphin dies at Brookfield Zoo
Naperville driver, 88, killed in car crash
'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter arrested
The whole story is in the headline, so keep moving...
Why the phokk is this news?
7 people charged in weekend marijuana bust on Near South Side
No sign of Britney Spears at custody hearing
Eva Longoria gives Jessica Simpson advice
Stories you wouldn't normally care about, so we added something to the headline explain why you should care...
Dolphin dies at Brookfield Zoo
Naperville driver, 88, killed in car crash
'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter arrested
The whole story is in the headline, so keep moving...
Amtrak cop loses part of thumb in door at Union Station
Chicken manure spill covers a mile of road in Iowa
We had to make the headline snappy to make you read this otherwise boring story...
Health Club: My favorite drug? Exercise
Why even bother?
Tom Skilling: Snow, frigid blast to whip Chicago area
New chief development officer named at WTTW parent
Brevity is key with voice mail
Early voting begins in Illinois
I could go on, but it makes my head hurt on this slow news day we have.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Poor Little Rich People
People I'm least concerned about:
"Violence in Kenya raises questions for those seeking safari trips"
- headline from the New York Times today.
American travelers were very concerned about the various tribal angers that seem to be boiling over as a result of a presidential election that was stolen and expressed solidarity with the oppressed of any nation at any time, as noted in the article below:
After seeing such images, Andrea Macari, a clinical psychologist from Great Neck, N.Y., rerouted her $30,000 two-week trip to Africa to avoid traveling in Kenya. Originally, Ms. Macari and her husband, Dylan Mitchell, were scheduled to use Nairobi as a jumping-off place to Rwanda for gorilla tracking before heading back to Kenya for a safari. Now the couple is bypassing Kenya completely by flying into Uganda, connecting to Rwanda and taking charter flights to get around. They have replaced their Kenyan safari with a stay at a tented camp in the Serengeti in Tanzania.
“I’m not going on a vacation to be anxious all the time for my safety,” said Ms. Macari, who departed for her trip without knowing if she would get a refund for the canceled Kenya safari.
Lisa Gramlich, a pediatric anesthesiologist from Chicago, who left for Kenya with three friends on Jan. 7, also took precautions. Two of the travelers who planned to take a public bus to Kilimanjaro will now fly there. And instead of shopping and sightseeing in Nairobi, Ms. Gramlich plans to stay on the grounds of her resort while she is in the capital. In a situation like this, she said, “the likelihood of becoming a victim of robbery or something becomes just a little more heightened.”
for the whole story go here.
"Violence in Kenya raises questions for those seeking safari trips"
- headline from the New York Times today.
American travelers were very concerned about the various tribal angers that seem to be boiling over as a result of a presidential election that was stolen and expressed solidarity with the oppressed of any nation at any time, as noted in the article below:
After seeing such images, Andrea Macari, a clinical psychologist from Great Neck, N.Y., rerouted her $30,000 two-week trip to Africa to avoid traveling in Kenya. Originally, Ms. Macari and her husband, Dylan Mitchell, were scheduled to use Nairobi as a jumping-off place to Rwanda for gorilla tracking before heading back to Kenya for a safari. Now the couple is bypassing Kenya completely by flying into Uganda, connecting to Rwanda and taking charter flights to get around. They have replaced their Kenyan safari with a stay at a tented camp in the Serengeti in Tanzania.
“I’m not going on a vacation to be anxious all the time for my safety,” said Ms. Macari, who departed for her trip without knowing if she would get a refund for the canceled Kenya safari.
Lisa Gramlich, a pediatric anesthesiologist from Chicago, who left for Kenya with three friends on Jan. 7, also took precautions. Two of the travelers who planned to take a public bus to Kilimanjaro will now fly there. And instead of shopping and sightseeing in Nairobi, Ms. Gramlich plans to stay on the grounds of her resort while she is in the capital. In a situation like this, she said, “the likelihood of becoming a victim of robbery or something becomes just a little more heightened.”
for the whole story go here.
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