Archive for the 'News and Headlines' Category

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Cell Phone National “Do Not Call” List

Published on June 11, 2006 in News and Headlines. 0 Comments

I just got this and thought it important enough to put here. Normally, I delete forwarded mails as soon as they hit my inbox (lest they be work- or business-related), however this one seemed a bit too important to pass up.

Subject: Cell Phone Do Not Call List

Effective in 18 days, telemarketers will be able to get access to your cell phone number and they will be allowed to call you. This can cause a lot of wastage of minutes. And for people using their cell phones regularly for business, this can be a HUGE distraction.

If you would like your phone number added to the DO NOT CALL registry, simply call 1 888 382 1222 from your cell phone. It will take about 1 minute and 15 seconds, but it will give you peace of mind. Then, you only have to do this once every 5 years.

Be sure to forward this message to as many people as you can.

There. Now, if I have your email, I won’t have to swamp your inbox with FWD’s. You can thank me later, by commenting on this message or buying me dinner.

$9,000,000,000,000

Published on March 16, 2006 in News and Headlines, Observations and Politics. 0 Comments

Trillion: The numeral trillion refers to one of two number values, depending on the context of where and how it is being used. It is the largest numerical value in everyday non-scientific use in the English language. It comes between a billion and a quadrillion. Examples of usage:

  1. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. over $1-trillion dollars.
  2. The reason George Bush settled on $2.2-trillion for the budget is because someone told him “ten-bajillion” wasn’t a real number.
  3. The US deficit is at $9-trillion. Suddenly my student loan payment doesn’t seem quite as bad.

Remember: If you vote anything other than Republican in this midterm election then the Republicans won’t have two more years to fix this mess. They’ve spent the past six years fixing all of Clinton’s mistakes. Also, you eat human fetuses after you happily abort them, then throw a baby-eating abortion party.

Congress Says “No” to Investigating Illegal Bush Wiretaps

Published on March 8, 2006 in News and Headlines and Politics. 0 Comments

This is just sickening: “The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee rejected a proposal to investigate the Bush administration’s program of conducting electronic eavesdropping without warrants, while agreeing to create new congressional panels to increase oversight.. (See the full article in Bloomberg.)

In other words, “We, the Republican congress, have decided not to investigate the President’s violations of FISA and the 4th Amendment, and instead have chosen to make his actions legal retroactively.” Man, what if Clinton had as lap-dog of a congress as this one? He wouldn’t have been impeached! Oh, but wait: cheating on your wife and then lying about it is much, MUCH worse than running illegal wiretap programs (yes, as in “multiple” — there’s more than one) against innocent Americans.

I’m sure Nixon was praying for spineless lap-dogs like these just before he resigned. But Bush? He has them! Except for a few exceptions, the entire Republican congress is made up of nothing but criminals protecting a corrupt administration.

The Culture of Corruptions created by the Republicans make me ashamed of ever having been affiliated with the party. (Yes, I am a registered Republican. Not for long, thought. These criminals have done a great job in pushing me to the not-quite-as-dark-side of the force.)

More sources: Daily Kos, The Moderate Voice. Information as I find it.

Update: More from Unclaimed Territory:

The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday rejected Sen. Rockefeller’s motion to hold hearings to investigate the President’s warrantless eavesdropping program by an 8-7, strict party line vote. Yet again, every Senate Republican followed White House instructions not to investigate the President, and this time did so despite the statements of several of those GOP Senators just within the last 8 weeks that such an investigation was urgent and necessary.

Sen. [Captain Obvious] Rockefeller stated the obvious: Emerging from a closed-door session in which Democrats lost two party-line votes, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, said the outcome pushed the panel “further into irrelevancy” and reflected the influence of the Bush administration.“The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House,” said Rockefeller.

Irrelevant indeed, Mr. Rockefeller. So when do we officially replace the “c” with a “k” in “America”?

Video Undermines Bush Assertions About Katrina

Published on March 2, 2006 in News and Headlines and Politics. 0 Comments

Rather interesting developments in the whole “Who screwed up Katrina” situation:

From the AP: In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could [UPDATE]breach top levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

SEE THE FOOTAGE HERE, available in QuickTime (.mov) and Windows Media Player (.wmv).

More information can be found here:

Updates as I find them. Check out the links for tons more information from people who blog a lot more than I do. Oh, and from news sources as well. (Look, even Faux News got into the act.)

UPDATE: From MSNBC: (Video available here.) It looks like the entire “failure all around” scenario is shaping up to be just that: failure all around, especially at the federal level. Not only did Bush and his cronies screw up the event with their “fog of bureaucracy”, but a new video shifts the blame more to the state (while at the same time not exonerating the federal government in any way).

(It should be noted that this was during the actual hurricane, so any delay in communication should be expected. We have taped evidence that Bush knew the worst case scenario, where Michael Brown basically begged for federal government assistance. But what about the governor? What was she doing all this time? How was she preparing for this worst case scenario?)

My question is, in a city that’s shaped like a bowl, what’s really the difference between a levee getting topped and breached? Severity? In either case the city’s still getting flooded, with water that has no place to go.

According to MSNBC, “[Max Mayfield] warned only that the levees might be topped, not breached, and that on the many conference calls he monitored, ‘Nobody talked about the possibility of a levee breach or failure until after it happened.’”

My question stands. The administration is relying on the whole “topped, not breached/it’s all Brown’s fault” argument as their excuse for not getting help in right away, but doesn’t this seem like — oh I don’t know — relying on a technicality like “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?

This makes for a great spin of events for the Bush, aka “The Teflon President,” aka “Spinmeister W”.

[UPDATE]: The Moderate Voice has a lot more information on this new video. Newsweek has an item about a hastily produced “missing transcript” of a video conference call — a transcript that hadn’t been provided to Congress but was hastily sent to Newsweek by the White House. Although no one knows for sure (yet), it would appear this was shoved forward due to the emergence of the highly damaging video…