Aren't all politicians all-talk and no-action?

WASHINGTON - John Kerry (news - web sites) scooped up key union endorsements Friday as presidential rivals criticized his nearly 20-year Senate record, calling the Democratic front-runner all-talk, no-action on affirmative action and health care.

First it was e.coli.... then it was Mad Cow disease... now it is a Listeria threat in Pittsburgh... who is protecting our beef supply? PETA? Hey George...WAKE UP! Stop getting your pants in a wad over gay marriage and other right-wing conservative whacko Bible-banger issues and take control of the country...you are President for at least 9 more months before election day....

Porcelain
(by Moby)


In my dreams I'm dying all the time
As I wake its kaleidoscopic mind
I never meant to hurt you
I never meant to lie
So this is goodbye
This is goodbye

Tell the truth you never wanted me
Tell me

In my dreams I'm jealous all the time
As I wake I'm going out of my mind
Going out of my mind

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt" - Bertrand Russell

So true!

I'm feeling somewhat humbled these days that I'm not the only one who experiences crashing computers, uncooperative software, and a quirky DSL router that will work endlessly for a week then constantly drop my DSL connection. It would seem that the Mars rover Spirit had too many "temp" files on its onboard computers which caused it to crash 60 times and generally konk out.

"Mission manager Jennifer Trosper said engineers are exploring several scenarios for what may have caused problems with Spirit's onboard computer memory, including an overload from the buildup of data files during the spacecraft's eight-month voyage to Mars. "

I'm still amazed and enthralled at this whole Mars mission....

Friendships
Tonight I was chatting with a super good friend. I told him about an incident in which a friendship had come to an abrupt end with somebody recently and was very hurt by the whole incident. To quote what I had to say about friendships:

"I'm into friendships for the long haul. Every friendship goes through "hot"periods, and times when cold winds blow. When the cold winds blow, and both people work to get through it, the friendship grows even stronger. And for me, "a real friendship doesn't have any asterisks or fine print." "

After seeing Democractic Presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry tonight on 60 Minutes...he is the only candidate at this point who I can vote for in the upcoming man. An educated, very passionate (yet reserved) man with a conscience.

Is it a really good thing that we see Jerry Falwell (really "Jabba The Hut" potentially nekkid) cavorting in the water? This also proves that right-wing fascist conservative Bible bangers can use whatever verse in the Bible to justify themselves and their actions. Blech!

TAMPA, United States (AFP) - The first nudist resort created primarily for Christians in the United States is due to open in Florida and its co-founder claims that he can provide passages in the Bible where nudity is prominently mentioned.

"Depending on the version of the Bible you use, there are as many as 40 passages that refer to nudity," said Bill Martin, co-founder of Natura, which will be the first Christianity-themed nudist colony in the country when it opens in a Tampa suburb in April.

"In (the Bible book of) Isaiah 20.2, God tells Isaiah to go into the wilderness naked for three years. So there's historical basis for a Christian nudist lifestyle," continued Martin, who is a Quaker.

When Natura is completed, the 240-acre resort area will have 500 homes, a hotel, a water-slide park, and a non-denominational Christian church. Although nudity will be mandatory, attending church services will be clothing-optional for residents, according to Martin.

Followers of the Baptist, Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mennonites, and Quaker religions are some of the different Christian denominations who will call Natura home.

"Fundamentalist Christians and the Southern Baptists may object to us, but I will meet with them anytime to talk about both Natura and nudity," said Martin. "It's funny that some Southern Baptists oppose us, because for about the first 500 years after the death of Christ, mass baptisms were done nude."

This is really cute... Ken Lay of Enron and the head of WorldCom get off scott free ripping off their employees billions and billions and billions of dollars with their high-priced lawyers, but this 92 year old guy who had hit on really hard times gets 12 years for robbing a bank of $1,999! This is the same idiocy which has under 21 year old grocery clerks not being able to ring up a bottle of wine...although it's good enough for them to get killed or maimed on the battlefield. This is the type of in-your-face stupidness which numbs my male reproductive organ!


Oldest U.S. Bank Robber Gets 12 Years in Prison
LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) - The oldest bank robber in the United States, 92-year-old J.L. Hunter Rountree, was sentenced to over 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to robbing $1,999 from a Texas bank last August.

Rountree, who goes by the nickname 'Red,' said he robbed his first bank when he was about 80 because he wanted revenge against banks for sending him into a financial crisis.
Rountree was sentenced on Friday to 151 months in a federal prison, which he will serve at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
He appeared in court in a loose-fitting prison outfit and shackles on his ankles. He had a cane to help him walk. Rountree listened to the proceedings through headphones because he is hard of hearing.
Police said Rountree, who was not armed, handed two envelopes to a teller at a bank in Abilene, Texas. One envelope had the word 'robbery' written in red ink. Rountree told the teller to stuff money into the other envelope, or else she would get hurt.
After asking Rountree twice if he was kidding, she put the money into the envelope and Rountree then made off in a 1996 Buick sedan, police said.
A bank employee noted the license plate of the vehicle and Rountree was pulled over by police on a highway about 20 miles from the crime scene, 30 minutes after the robbery.
Rountree left a prison in Florida, where he was the oldest prisoner in the state, about a year and a half ago after serving a three-year sentence imposed on him for a 1999 bank robbery in Pensacola.
He was caught holding up a bank in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1998 when he was 87, and given three years' probation.
Federal officials said they had no records to prove it, but they are fairly certain Rountree was the oldest person ever to rob a bank in the United States.
In a prison interview with the Orlando Sentinel in 2001, Rountree said he had been a businessman in Texas but had fallen on hard times. He also told the paper that prison food was better than what was served at some nursing homes.
"A Corpus Christi (Texas) bank that I'd done business with had forced me into bankruptcy. I have never liked banks since," he told the newspaper. "I decided I would get even. And I have."

They say that Mad Cow disease cannot be transmitted to human beings. Are we totally sure??? I think just possibly there might be a link between Mad Cow disease and its possible effects on human beings when you consider Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean's recent showing of insanity when he lost the Iowa Democratic caucuses and was speaking to supporters. Scary.

Click here to hear it. (RealPlayer or other MP3 sound file compatible utility must be installed on your system.)

See what USA Today wrote about this (Adobe Acrobat needs to be installed) by clicking here.

The most politically incorrect thought just crossed my mind (again).

In college course catalogs they talk about "English as a Second Language."

Shouldn't it be "Engrish as a Second Ranguage"????

Everybody Hurts
by R.E.M.

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on.
Don’t let yourself go, everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes.

Sometimes everything is wrong. now it’s time to sing along.
When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
When you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on.

Everybody hurts. take comfort in your friends.
Everybody hurts. don’t throw your hand. oh, no. don’t throw your hand.
If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

If you’re on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on.

Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
Everybody cries. and everybody hurts sometimes.
And everybody hurts sometimes. so, hold on, hold on.
Hold on, hold on. hold on, hold on. hold on, hold on. (repeat & fade)
(everybody hurts. you are not alone.)

Tonight, somehow I got to thinking about my political beliefs and my value system. What I think what basically irks me are the people -- both Republicans and Democrats -- who can be so closed minded and with a stroke of their broad paintbrush give way to carte blanche condemnation of each other's views. It is so counterproductive. What I think it comes down to is that I detest persons who are so fixed in their belief system that there is no flexibility nor compassion.

That's what is my problem, too, with organized religion and fundamentalist Christians. They so totally miss the boat about what GOD IS, what He represents, if He exists, and what He is all about.

It's about LOVE...stupid!

I have made a few housekeeping changes on my blog. Please post any comments to my rants and raves ABOVE the item. I think this update might make responding less confooooozing.

Suicide Bomber Kills About 20 in Baghdad
(AP) A suicide driver set off a truck bomb at the gates of the U.S.-led coalition headquarters Sunday, killing about 20 people and wounding 63 in the deadliest attack here since Saddam Hussein's capture last month"

That really pins it down...."kills about 20"

(AP) - An aide to Iraq's most prominent Shiite cleric on Friday branded the U.S. formula for transferring power a "hasty agreement" aimed at boosting President Bush's re-election campaign. Doubts over the American plan for transferring power to Iraqi hands by July 1 have loomed over the U.S.-led occupation this week, with the Americans pointing to sporadic violence as evidence the country is not ready for direct elections.

I couldn't agree more. President Bush is trying to eliminate one more possibility for anything to screw up his re-election bid. What better way than to pull the troops out?

NEW YORK -- Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday blasted President Bush as a "moral coward," saying he abandoned the public interest to accommodate his financial contributors. Gore, in a speech before a full house at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, said it sometimes appeared that "the Bush-Cheney administration is wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining industries."

It was the latest in a series of harsh critiques from Gore on the Bush administration. The ex-Democratic presidential candidate, who lost the 2000 election to Bush, had previously accused the administration of cracking down on civil liberties since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and mishandling post-war Iraq. Gore, speaking on a bitterly cold day, addressed the issues of global warming and the administration's environmental policies. "While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward," said Gore.

This all may be true...I have no use for Vice-President Cheney and his deep corporate ties....but Gore himself is a moral coward HIMSELF that he can't control his multiple time arrested, pot-smoking, alcoholic, jailbird son from driving his car on the banks of Potomac River high on pot without his lights on and spitting on a police officer justifying his actions because he was a "Gore." What a family of pompous asses!!! Sheesh!

I have really come to enjoy the new reality series called "AIRLINE" which airs Monday nights at 10-11 p.m. and repeats later on at 2 a.m. on A&E (Arts and Entertainment cable network). The series follows actual passengers and their "thrills, chillls and spills" behind the scene of Southwest Airlines...some who call it the Greyhound buslines of the 21st Century.

After last night's episodes I don't know if I can ever face one of these customer service reps and not feel embarrassed for my fellow members of the human race. I mean, how the passengers treat the customer service reps with such repugnancy and disrespect. I swear I could never be a customer service rep for an airline without ending up behind bars...and these people keep up a generally good attitude when dealing with some absolute scum of the human race.

My hat is off to the employees of Southwest Airlines!!!!

So tell me, how does the Taliban in Afghanistan differ from the dogmatic, conservative Bible-banging religious "right" in the US (other than that they don't openly execute those who disagree with them)?


KABUL (Reuters) - More than two years after the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban regime, state television has broadcast for the first time footage of an Afghan woman singing used old footage of Parasto, a well-known singer who now lives in the West, performing without a headscarf. The broadcast late on Monday will be seen as another small victory for moderate democrats led by President Hamid Karzai over religious conservatives opposed to many of the changes that have swept Kabul since the Taliban's collapse.

"We are endeavoring to perform our artistic works regardless of the issue of sex," Information and Culture Minister Sayed Makdoom Raheen told Reuters on Tuesday, when asked about the lifting of a ban on the broadcasting of women singing. The ban has been in place since 1992, when the "mujahideen," or holy warriors, came to power and fought factional battles that reduced much of Kabul to rubble and claimed tens of thousands of lives. The Taliban swept aside the mujahideen in 1996, and banned all television as part of its strict imposition of sharia law.

The mujahideen now form the backbone of the Northern Alliance, a faction of mainly Tajiks from the north who were instrumental in helping the U.S. military topple the Taliban in late 2001.

Now you think you might have a bad day...

Surgeons’ cut leaves British man ‘gay’

LONDON — A Leeds area man may file a lawsuit against doctors and a hospital after he went under the scalpel for a heart operation and, he told the media, came out “gay” via a tattoo on his leg, the Daily Mirror reported. In Leeds General Infirmary for a heart bypass operation, the man, whose name was not revealed by the Daily Mirror, said that during the surgery, doctors took part of a large vein out of his leg to replace a section of damaged artery in his chest. According to the tabloid, in order to get the vein, the doctors made an incision in the patient’s leg but did not notice the tattoo the man had on that leg. The tattoo, which said, “I love women” when the man went in for surgery, ended up reading “I love men” when he came out, the Daily Mirror reported. The man is considering a lawsuit against the hospital and doctors involved in the procedure.

From "Time Enough For Love".....

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze new problems, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
– Robert A. Heinlein

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

“A ‘critic’ is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased—he hates all creative people equally.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
- Robert A. Heinlein

A couple of days ago I said that the imbeciles of the world were employed at Sprint PCS stores. I actually met one today when I tried (for the THIRD time) to get my cell phone serviced who obviously had failed Sprint's obligatory employee imbecility test. His name was "Richie," a really cool African American guy with a great sense of humor and a great smile. He works at the Santee store.

I really had a pretty gnarly sore throat today. Got up...worked a bit...went back for a nap...got up...etc. I actually did get something accomplished. I don't know where this came from, but in one of my more lucid moments (or as it) today I had the weirdest thought about Stonehenge in Great Britain. I have no idea why the idea crossed my mind, but while the popular media and he educated circles love to continue the promote stereotype of it being the meeting place of ancient druids in their effort to connect with a higher force or UFOs, somehow I got the idea Stonehenge was assembled together by a whole bunch of errant, boozed up teenage druids who decided to play a joke while their parents were rolling their eyes worrying about the future driud generations. In their best California surfer accents, "Hey dude, let's like put these stone blocks all together in a circle, and like really mess with the heads of some dudes thousands of years from now."

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988), The Notebooks of Lazurus Long

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988), Time Enough for Love (1972)

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
Robert A. Heinlein

A wonderful friend made the observation today:

"Religions have a way of narrowly defining a person's being. I guess that's the difference between religion and spirit."

Why hasn't anyone in the US media pointed out that the so-called conservative "Christian" right-wing intolerant whacked out Bible bangers are no different than the conservative Muslim right-wing intolerant whacked out Qu'Ran bangers? Just like the song from REM said several years ago..."Losing My Religion."


BAM, Iran (The Associated Press)- Hard-liners in Iran’s government criticized U.S. relief efforts after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 30,000 people and flattened the ancient city of Bam, accusing Washington of trying to meddle in Tehran’s affairs. The criticism came as Iran told the Bush administration that it did not want Washington to send Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., former president of the American Red Cross, to Iran as part of a relief mission after the 6.6-magnitude quake, the State Department said. The United States has already sent Iran several planes full of humanitarian relief, including teams of doctors and aid workers, even though diplomatic relations have been severed since the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian President Khatami has thanked Washington for its support, but hard-line clerics within the government expressed suspicion about the motives behind U.S. aid offers.
State radio, a mouthpiece for Iran’s clerics, charged Friday that Bush had “once again demonstrated that America’s interfering and hostile policy against Iran has not altered at all.”

LOSING MY RELIGION
© Copyright 1991, Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe.

Life is bigger
It’s bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I’ve said too much
I set it up

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Every whisper
Of every waking hour I’m
Choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt lost and blinded fool
Oh no I’ve said too much
I set it up

Consider this
The hint of the century
Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees failed
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I’ve said too much
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

Yahoo! News - Anger Over Australia Crocodile Hunter's Baby Stunt:

MELBOURNE, Australia (Reuters) - Celebrity crocodile hunter Steve Irwin triggered outrage when he held his 1-month-old baby while feeding a snapping crocodile during a show at his Australian zoo.

In a show for the public and the media Friday, Irwin held his son in one arm while feeding a dead chicken to a large, lunging crocodile then put the baby on the ground and helped him walk toward the reptile's pond.
Seven television network was inundated with calls after the incident was aired. Protests were lodged on a government families crisis line and with police.

In my best Foster's Grand Ale Australian accent, "Now lookie he'a... a jerk.... Could this be Australia's own Michael Jackson!? Oy think it is!!! Can we all spell 'jerk.'"

"Zen O'Clock - Time To Be"
written by Scott Shaw

"It is you who decides how to react a certain way to any life situation. You can choose to feel anything you want - peace when you are angry, happiness when you are sad, love for a person whom you previously hated. THIS IS YOUR TIME - consciously choose to make the best of it."

I couldn't have said it better.....