The sign of "coercion"

The picture shows that this soldier has been thru Survival School and learned his lessons well. He's giving the sign of "coercion" with his left hand. These hand signs are taught in survival school to be used by POW's as a method of posing messages back to our intelligence services who may view the photo or video. This guy was obviously being coerced into shaking hands with Hillary Clinton. It's ironic how little she knew that he would so inform us about the photo---perhaps because she's never understood our military to begin with.

Comment: Sent to me by Pastor Doug Wise of Airport Road Baptist, Aurora, CO

Pro-Life speaker banned from St Thomas

Did St. Thomas reject a group, a speaker - or range of ideas?

Excerpts:

Star Parker is a bestselling author who travels the country speaking to young audiences about the harmful impact of abortion, especially in minority communities. What better place than the University of St. Thomas -- an urban, Catholic campus -- for this dynamic African-American woman to bring her prolife message?

For almost two months, St. Thomas' Students for Human Life organization looked forward to sponsoring Parker's planned appearance on campus April 21. Her fee was to be split by the St. Thomas Standard, a conservative student newspaper, and the Young America's Foundation, a Herndon, Va., group that brings conservative speakers and ideas to college campuses.

Students for Human Life applied to the university's Student Life Committee for a campus site where Parker could speak. But the committee turned thumbs down. Star Parker, it seems, was not welcome at St. Thomas.

...
St. Thomas seems comfortable with speakers from the liberal side of the political spectrum. In 2007, for example, the school hosted DFL senatorial candidate and satirist Al Franken, who is known for harsh attacks and raised eyebrows in January at Carleton College for mocking the speech and gestures of a conservative student. Last year, the university also showcased transgender activist Debra Davis, a former male high school librarian who "transitioned," as she says on her website, to the female gender and now speaks nationally about the experience.

In 2006, James Fetzer, a University of Minnesota Duluth professor and 9/11 conspiracy theorist, spoke to a standing-room-only crowd under the auspices of the St. Thomas Justice and Peace Studies program. "The attacks of September 11 were orchestrated on the American people by their own government," he told the audience, according to the Aquin newspaper at the university.

St. Thomas opens its arms to folks like these but appears to have serious qualms about YAF speakers. YAF works with more than 100 prominent conservative figures, including William Bennett, Harvard Prof. Harvey Mansfield, and commentators John Stossel and Michael Medved. According to Kieffer, differential treatment of YAF and its speakers by St. Thomas would cripple students' ability to bring big-name conservatives such as these to campus.

"This 'clarification' by Doug Hennes is not sufficient," she said. "It suggests broad and vague restrictions that impose special rules for conservative students. We need written assurance of equal treatment."

In 2007, St. Thomas got egg on its face when it rejected an opportunity to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak on grounds that his appearance would offend the Twin Cities Jewish community. Later, the university reversed itself, but Tutu spurned its offer. Instead, he spoke here last week under the auspices of Metropolitan State University.

Parker won't be so easily dissuaded. "I've got St. Thomas on my calendar, and I plan to come on April 21," she said. "If they won't let me on campus, I'm willing to talk out on the street."


Comment: So much for a Catholic-values education!

Goodbye South St. Paul stockyards

Silence Replaces Bids and Moos at Stockyards in Suburbs

Excerpt:

The stockyards of South St. Paul say goodbye.

The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years; by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world; by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer’s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.

Times have overtaken the stockyards, for reasons too obvious to dispute. Higher costs. Farms lost to suburban sprawl. The increasingly awkward presence of livestock in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, accustomed now to more sophisticated aromas than what wafts from the pens


Comment: For whatever reason, I have to read the NYTimes to get a local story like this (not found in the Star Tribune) (Upon further review ... it was in the East edition!) South St. Paul stockyards are going, going, gone

Petition to save XP

Windows XP fans don’t want it to XPire

Excerpt:

A petition to “Save Windows XP” has drawn more than 111,000 supporters — and continued shots across the Microsoft XP vs. Vista bow, a battle that began with Vista’s release last year.

The operating system succeeded XP, which came on the market in October 2001. Despite Vista’s much-improved security measures, it has met with criticism and some reluctance by consumers and businesses that don’t want to make the switch. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Among the concerns about Vista are the amount of computer memory and space it requires, its seemingly slower speed and frustration over the fact that third-party drivers for some printers and other devices are still not available from the companies that make those devices.

Comment: Sign the petition here.

TIZA flies the flag

Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time

Messages throughout the world are constantly lost to cyber black holes

Excerpt:

Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for these strange Internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before. To make sure the black holes they detect are not simply due to a problem with the end user or the host server, they look for computers that can be reached from some, but not all, of the Internet, meaning the issue must be occurring en route.

Official site: Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time

Comment: I really, really did send my report by email ...

Calling a "redneck" a "redneck"

Obama on small-town PA: Clinging religion, guns, xenophobia

Excerpt:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.


Comment: I feel like he is talking about me!

Paranoid about being "chewed out"!

Paranoia!



Chewed out at work!

"the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church"

Marriage and the Glory of God

Excerpt:

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony; which is an honorable state, instituted by God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church."


Comment: Good read!

Should BJU Apologize?

Ignore, Defend, Forget, or Apologize?

Answer: They should apologize!

Feeling undertaxed?

The Tax Me More Act

Excerpt:

We recently suggested that if Bill and Hillary Clinton are eager to pay more taxes, they should write a personal check to the U.S. Treasury to compensate for the lower tax rates they so frequently decry. And lo, here comes legislation to make it easier for the former first lady and other pseudo-populists to do just that.

California Republican John Campbell yesterday introduced in the House his "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is Act," which would amend the tax code to allow individuals to make voluntary donations to the federal government above their normal tax liability. The bill would place a new line on IRS tax forms to make this easy.

Mr. Campbell says he has heard the "cries" of those wealthy Americans – Mrs. Clinton, Warren Buffett, Barbra Streisand – who reject the lower tax rates passed in 2001 and 2003 and complain that they and their fellow rich don't pay enough. "It's a great injustice that citizens wishing to fulfill their dream of paying more taxes cannot simply check a box on their 1040 form to make a donation," he says. His bill would give liberals a chance to salve their consciences without having to raise taxes on millions of Americans who already feel overtaxed as it is.

Also:

Congress raises limit again as U.S. debt nears $10 trillion

Until the early 1960s, people couldn't donate money to the federal government with a specific use in mind. When a Texas woman wanted to contribute money specifically to lower the debt, she got Congress to pass a law creating a special fund for gifts. Since then, thousands of Americans have contributed, donating $1.6 million last year alone. In 2006, a 98-year-old Ohio woman donated her $1.1 million estate.

Pete Hollenbach, the bureau’s spokesman, said the names and addresses of donors are kept secret because of privacy concerns. Most of the donations are modest, with people sending checks of $25 to $50 as they express a desire to both reduce the debt and give a little something back to their country. Hollenbach said donations usually peak during tax season.

If you’d like to donate, make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt. In the memo section, note that it’s a gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. And mail your check to: Attn Dept G, Bureau of the Public Debt, P. O. Box 2188, Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188.


Comment: My soon to be 88 year old Mother had a bad day yesterday. First she lost Daddy's wedding ring that she has been wearing on her thumb for the 9 years since his death. And then her tax accountant called to tell her she owed $ 4,000 on her taxes. She was in a panic about both when I called her last night. Turns out Mom misunderstood the accountant - he said $ 400! Feeling undertaxed? Send your check to the address above!

Flood victim?

Baby mammoth reveals ancient secrets

Excerpt:

"Her internal organs were well preserved — the heart was seen distinctly with all its ventricles and atria, as well as the liver and its veins," Tikhonov told Reuters.

"This is the best preserved specimen not only of the mammoth but of any prehistoric animal."

The mammoth species has been extinct since the Ice Age. Tests on Lyuba showed she was fed on milk and was three to four months old when she died 37,000 years ago in what is now the Yamalo-Nenetsk region in Russia's Arctic.

Scientists were excited by the find because, although her shaggy coat was gone, her skin was intact, protecting her internal organs from contamination by modern-day microbes.

Tikhonov said the computer tomography, which provided a sharp three-dimensional image of Lyuba's insides, revealed no injuries or fractures.

The scans showed her airways and digestive system were clogged with what scientists believe was silt, leading them to conclude that she must have drowned.



Comment: By flood victim, I mean "THE FLOOD"

Can't work the flagpole!

Metro charter school accused of teaching Islam

Excerpt:

State law requires the school to fly an American flag during school hours, however no flag flies outside of TIZA Academy.

Zaman told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS he didn’t know how to work the flagpole.

Comment: Followup to State sponsored Muslim school?. Sounds like the school director is a graduate of my alma mater!

Olympic Torch Emits 5,500 Tons of CO2

Olympic Torch Emits 5,500 Tons of CO2

Excerpt:

So when the torch isn't being marched through city streets and/or extinguished by protesters, how is it getting around? You guessed it, by plane -- an Air China A330 custom painted with the Olympic logo and color scheme. The A330 burns 5.4 gallons of fuel per mile. That translates into 462,400 gallons for the entire trip. With Earthlab estimating that every gallon of jet fuel burned produces 23.88 pounds of CO2, the Olympic Torch Relay is adding about 11 million pounds of carbon to the atmosphere. That's 5,500 tons.


Comment: Is John Travolta the pilot? My solution (it is both simple and economical) is an animated gif! We can all log on and view! If you object to it ... don't view the site!

"High School Musical" rehearsal

'Musical' woes leave audience singing blues

Excerpt:

It's not the experience you expect when you're paying $50 or more for a ticket. Patrons of "High School Musical" got a rude surprise Sunday afternoon when the actor in the lead role of Troy Bolton had to read his lines from a script during the second act.
...
"He was on stage with a script," said Kristine Olson of Stillwater. "My husband said, 'That's a script!' I said no, it was a prop for the scene, but then he kept it, and the entire second act, he's flipping pages."

Olson and her husband paid $200 for five tickets. She was miffed, but said it wasn't a deal breaker for their three young children.

Denise Miller of St. Paul was less sanguine. "I couldn't believe how unprofessional this was," said Miller, who brought her daughter and granddaughter to the show. "I want something for this."


Comment: I tried to watch the "High School Musical" on TV ... and couldn't make it through it (ZZZZ)

Banks: 'still peeling back the onion'

Some Banks (Yes, Banks) May Be Back in Favor

Excerpt:

But how safe are big investment banks that stand knee-deep in the securitized mortgage crisis? Determined to avert a bank failure that could reverberate through the economy, the Fed has made available hundreds of billions of dollars — which may eventually come out of taxpayer pockets — in low-interest loans. Many big banks also benefited last week from a capital infusion as a result of the shares they were able to sell in the $18 billion initial public offering of Visa. Can investors now safely assume that the fever has broken?

Not quite, Mr. Ellison said. “The earnings prospects are still declining,” he said. “And loan growth won’t be there.”

He and other skeptics wonder whether more nasty surprises are to emerge from balance sheets. “Full disclosure only happens when things are good,” Mr. Ellison said. “Even now, we’re still peeling back the onion.”

But Richard Bove, a financial strategist at Punk, Ziegel & Company who was among the first to lower ratings on the banks last summer, now says he thinks the selling has gone too far. “ I personally believe that investors should dramatically overweight their portfolios with bank stocks,” he said.

Assets have been devalued and earnings reduced, but most banks — even those like Citigroup and Bank of America that have taken large write-offs — still have positive cash flow, he said.

Going strictly by the numbers, Derek Rollingson, manager of the quantitative ICON Financial fund, concludes that financial stocks are trading at 45 percent less than true value. “We’ve priced in all the bad news,” he said. “Has the market overreacted to the news? In the case of the financials, we would say yes.”

Comment: Wells Fargo announces earnings next Wednesday.

The illogic of ‘Tax Defiers’

U.S. Says It Will Increase Efforts Against ‘Tax Defiers’

Excerpt:

If you think paying taxes is unfair, illegal or unconstitutional, then watch out — the Justice Department is after you.

Just as the Internal Revenue Service is getting into its perennial tax-season tough talk, Justice Department officials weighed in Tuesday with a vow to ramp up efforts against “tax defiers.”

A tax defier is not a wealthy individual who buys a sophisticated tax shelter in a fraudulent effort to shield legitimate income from taxes. Nor is a defier a taxpayer who has a difference of opinion with the I.R.S. over deductions, or one who challenges specific tax policies enacted by Congress.

A tax defier, according to a Justice Department statement, is someone who “seeks to deny and defy the fundamental validity of the tax laws.”

“The tax defier is someone who rejects the legal foundation of the tax system, despite decades of legal precedent upholding the system’s constitutional and statutory validity, and who takes specific and concrete action to violate the law,” the department’s statement said.

Such people were once more commonly known as tax protesters. A spokesman for Justice said Tuesday that the department official who announced the new program, Nathan J. Hochman, the assistant attorney general for the tax division, “is calling them defiers because he feels ‘protesters’ implies constitutionally protected rights.”

Comment: Think Kent Hovind now blogging from a federal penitentiary!

Hovind was originally reported to the IRS by Pensacola Christian College senior vice president Rebekah Horton in the mid 1990s, after she learned of Hovind's anti-tax stand. "'We know the Scriptures do not promote (tax evasion),'" Horton said in testimony against Hovind during his 2006 trial, "'It's against Scripture teaching'.... Horton believed it was the college's duty to report the misleading doctrine. 'I didn't want to see innocent people get led astray,' she said. Pensacola Christian College then decided its students no longer were permitted to work with Creation Science Evangelism".

Avoiding shattered nest eggs

Don’t Paint Nest Eggs in Company Colors

Excerpt:

“I used to think Enron was the poster child of what not to do with company stock,” said Mike Scarborough, president of an investment advisory firm based in Annapolis, Md., referring to the energy trading company whose collapse shattered the nest eggs of employees who held so many of its shares.

“But it may ultimately turn out to be Bear Stearns, because money and investing is their business — and it still turned out badly.”

To be sure, the situations of Bear Stearns and Enron are different in many ways. For starters, just in terms of company stock, top executives at Enron encouraged workers to load up their 401(k)’s with company shares. That wasn’t the case with Bear.

Nevertheless, the rapid collapse of the investment bank’s shares — they fell to about $10 from $70 in around three weeks — offers yet another reminder of the risks associated with making concentrated bets on your employer’s stock, even if it appears to be a blue-chip investment.

Conventional wisdom says company stock isn’t that big a problem now. Thanks to the bear market and blow-ups at companies like Enron and WorldCom at the start of the decade, as well as the Pension Protection Act of 2006, retirement investors aren’t as concentrated in company stock as they once were.

In general, the numbers bear this out. In 2001, when Enron filed for bankruptcy, investors in 401(k) plans that offered company stock held 28 percent of their retirement account in employer shares, on average, according to Hewitt Associates, the employee benefit research firm. By the end of last year, that figure had dropped to 16 percent.

But many financial planners say 16 percent is still way too much to invest in a single stock, let alone that of your own employer. Think about it: $100,000 invested in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index would have shrunk to $90,760 since January. But had a Bear Stearns employee invested 16 percent of his money in company stock — with the remainder going into the S.& P. 500 — his account would have fallen to below $78,300. This at a time when his job may be in jeopardy.

Mr. Scarborough, whose firm advises workers on managing their 401(k)’s, recommends investing no more than 5 percent in employer stock. This is especially true for employees of a large company whose stock is widely held, because they may already own some of its stock indirectly. “A lot of diversified mutual funds in their 401(k)’s probably own those shares,” he said.


Comment: Many 401K programs match the employee contribution with company stock.

McCain’s faith

McCain’s faith: Pastor describes senator as devout, but low-key

Excerpt:

John McCain has a deep and personal Christian commitment despite his reluctance to speak publicly about it, according to the man the presumptive GOP presidential nominee claims as his pastor.

Dan Yeary, pastor of North Phoenix Baptist Church, described the Arizona senator and his wife, Cindy, as “very unobtrusive” people who don’t seek special attention when they are able to come to worship. “They come in the side door. They’re very pleasant. They talk to people. They’re very approachable.”



Comment: North Phoenix Baptist Church

Mrs. Butterworth hawks Geico

THICK, BUTTERY … INSURANCE?

Excerpt:

Not surprisingly, the Geico ad comes as The Blackstone Group, which purchased Mrs. Butterworth’s and other brands last year, is working to revive the syrup brand.

Comment: I only use real maple syrup! But I like the ad!