Say Anything Blog

Summary of Link:

President Bush has decided to attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August, despite the fact that human rights groups have asked him to boycott them because of China’s crackdown on Tibet and its support for the genocidal government in Sudan.

Should this surprise anyone? After all, this is the same man who, while Governor of Texas, mockingly mimicked a female death row inmate who was pleading for her life to be spared.

Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who has urged a boycott of the games, made the following statement: “I think that a president who has said we are conducting warfare in different parts of the world in order to promote democracy and human rights loses credibility when he announces that he is going to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in a country that is the world’s worst human rights abuser.”

Other political leaders have had a difficult time deciding a course of action. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain will not attend the opening ceremony, but will be at the the closing ceremony to pick up the torch for the symbolic hand off to London, the host of the 2012 games. German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not attend the opening , but announced that her decision was not political.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/04/america/prexy.php
Bush to attend opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics - International Herald Tribune

http://www.ccadp.org/bushkills.htm
George W. Bush - Mocking the woman he had put to death !

Thought a couple of quotes might be appropriate on this great day in our history:

“Why stand we here idle? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Patrick Henry - Speech in Virginia Convention March 1775

“I ran away from my masters. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t heard those songs of liberty that saluted my ears and thrilled through my heart.”

-Jehu Grant, Former Slave, American Soldier, American Revolution

Summary of Link:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicides consisted of 55% of the nation’s nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005. And 2005 was not a fluke year. Gun related suicides have outnumbered firearm homicides and accidents 20 of the last 25 years.

Attention has been focused upon these stats due to the recent Supreme Court decision which struck down the handgun ban enacted in the District of Columbia in 1976. One public-health study found that suicide and homicide rates in the district dropped after the ban was adopted.

The high court’s majority decision made no mention of suicide, but in Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion he used the word 14 times. Further, he made this insightful remark: “If a resident has a handgun in the home that he can use for self-defense, then he has a handgun in the home that he can use to commit suicide or engage in acts of domestic violence.”

http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/post/
Say Anything: Reader Blogs

Summary of Link:

I can’t believe the hubris of some of the folks in Washington. David Vitter, for example, has asked the Federal Election Commission if he can use campaign funds to pay for the $137,177 in legal expenses he had incurred after it was revealed that he was involved in a high priced Washington D.C. prostitution ring.

Vitter has paid $70,000 of the legal fees personally, and is asking that the money be re-imbursed through his campaign funds. His attorneys argue that Vitter’s involvement in the matter was predicated solely on his status as a United States Senator and that others involved were not dragged into the legal proceedings and did not incur the related legal fees. Vitter has $1.6 million in his campaign coffers.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D. C. Madam involved in the case, was convicted in federal court in April of money laundering, mail fraud and conspiracy. Palfrey committed suicide in May, two weeks after her conviction. She faced four to six years in federal prison.

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This has to be the strangest endorsement of a presidential candidate ever.

John McCain’s jailer in North Vietnam, Tran Trong Duyet, revealed in an interview that he would vote for McCain despite the fact that he lied about being tortured and placed in solitary confinement while being held captive.

Duyet believes he made up those stories to win more votes.

Duyet made the following remarks about McCain: “He’s tough, has extreme political views and is very conservative. He’s very loyal to the U.S. military, to his beliefs and to his country. In all of our debates, he never admitted that the war was a mistake.”

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Summary:

It looks as though gay couples are taking full advantage of their new right to wed in California. In the two days since the ban was lifted, over 2700 marriage licenses were issued. The statewide average for a whole week in June is 2,460.

The marriage licenses were issued to both same-sex and heterosexual couples, although county clerks in many locations indicated that the vast majority handed out Tuesday were to gay couples. The new marriage application replaces the terms “bride” and “groom” with “Party A” and “Party B” and does not indicate whether the people marrying are of the same sex.

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Isaac Stevens never believed that when he fullfilled his life long dream of becoming a soldier that his battle would be against a heartless military bureaucracy and not against the Taliban or El Qaeda.

His nightmare began when he suffered a spinal injury and was discharged from the Army. Stevens’, 28, in a wheel chair, found himself penniless and fighting off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Like thousands of other vets, Stevens is waiting for his disability payments. Many wait from six months to a year before receiving them. “When I got out, I hate to say it, but man, that was it. Everybody just kind of washed their hands of me, and it was like, ‘OK, you’re on your own,’” said Stevens, who was discharged in November and was in a shelter by February.

Col. Becky Baker, assigned to injured-soldier transition at the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, said that there is now a change in policy; however, the changes have been slow to take hold across an Army stretched by war. It’s definitely a practice that is new. It takes a while for new practices to be institutionalized.

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I meant to post this on June 12th., the 45th anniversary of the death of Medgar Evers. It is a young Bob Dylan doing one of my early favorites,"Only a Pawn in Their Game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUvQzgxTxmE
YouTube - bob dylan - only a pawn in their game (newport 63’ 6/16

It looks like the steam is gone from the gun control debate. Why you ask? It is not because Democrats have won the fight. It is just the opposite- they have given up the fight. Democrats — scarred by past NRA campaigns — almost never talk about gun control anymore.

What effects will this have on the 08 Presidential campaign? Democrats should be thrilled with recent past election victories in the Senate. NRA-backed candidates in Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri, Minnesota and Virginia all lost in 2006, even though the gun group spent more than $1 million on their races, according to federal election data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

To be sure, we have not heard the last from the powerful NRA, but they could very well be a victim of their own success. They have pounded the Democrats into submission so badly that I am reminded of an old saying: if you can’t beat them, join them.

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PaDUer
An interesting article about the R nominee for the President of the US..He certainly is a “sweetie”..How can his ex-wife Carol still support him?..

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’ she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce. ‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
-snip-
But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

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With the eyes of the world focused on the upcoming Olympics in China, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security is worried about the potential negative publicity the U.S. could receive if the Chinese government uses U.S. made security devices to break up potential protests over Tibetan independence.

The department is currently reviewing the security devices that are allowed to be exported to China. One of concern is the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). The device, manufactured by American Technology Corp., sends out concentrated, 150 decibel [dB] high-energy acoustic waves that are painfully loud and can cause serious injury to the ear.

During fiscal 2007, LRAD orders were shipped to Australia, Singapore, Korea and China. Some U.S. police departments have also purchased it.

Theresa Harris, director of the World Organization for Human Rights U.S.A. summed it up well: “The U.S. Government is obligated under international law and federal statutes to prevent U.S. companies from exporting the tools of torture to police and security agencies that have a documented record of human rights violations.”

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In a report by Patrick Colburn, he states that there is a secret deal being negotiated
in Iraq that would keep U.S. troops in the country indefinitely. If it is successful, no matter
who wins the election in November, the troops would stay.

If true, Colburn believes that the accord will provoke a political crisis in the US. 
President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

Perhaps McCain’s ludicrous remark about 100 years in Iraq will come true.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/revealed-secret-plan-to-keep-iraq-under-us-control-840512.html
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control - Middle East, World - The Independent

A decision to resume importing U.S. beef by the South Korean government sparked a massive demonstration that shut down a 16 lane thoroughfare in the capital city of Seoul.

South Korea had stopped all imports of beef from the U.S. after their 2003 outbreak of mad cow disease.

The protest, a candle-lit vigil of 100,000, was preceded by more than a week of other protests against President Lee Myung-bak, who has seen a drastic decline in his popularity.

College student Ju Ha-na, 24, who took part in a head-shaving ceremony in protest with 19 others said that it was not just the beef deal, but that the government is anti-working people.

President Lee last week apologized for ignoring public health concerns and promised to restore the ban if there was a fresh outbreak of mad cow disease.

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Despite the negative publicity from the sexual abuse by priests which has justifiably outraged all, there is some good news I can share about my church: The Catholic Church in Africa has grown by 30 million in the last 7 years.

In the Americas and in Oceania their numbers grew by 8.4 percent and 7.6 percent respectively, while in Asia the number of faithful remained more or less stable.In Europe,growth was less than one percent.

Also, in my link, there is info on the growth of bishops and priests.

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While the tobacco industry continues to wreak havoc on the health of people throughout the world, I am happy to see that our United Nations has declared May 31st World No Tobacco Day.

Because most people start the habit before 18, this years focus is on on youth. Douglas Bettcher, Director of the agency’s Tobacco Free Initiative, says that the tobacco industry employs predatory marketing strategies to get young people hooked to their addictive drug.

In some areas of the world, especially in developing nations, some kids are hooked at the age of 10.

The U.N. called on governments to impose a ban on all tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship to deter young people around the world from taking up smoking.

Countries who have taken up the ban show that consumption of tobacco has been reduced by 16 per cent.

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