GoRemy and the tax man here
The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.
Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.
“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”
But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000.
“Increasingly, Barack Obama’s message is becoming more accessible, appealing, and yes, potentially successful,” he wrote. “Any Democrat who voted for Dukakis, Mondale or Kerry should regard this as a betrayal.”
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said that he was “sympathetic” to the concerns of bloggers who worry that their nominee seems stubbornly bent on winning the election, but he warned them that the DNC’s “hands are tied.”
“If Sen. Obama is really determined to win, I don’t think any of us can talk him out of it,” Mr. Dean said.
Liberal bloggers said that they would be watching Sen. Obama’s vice-presidential selection process “very closely” for signs that he is plotting to win the election.
“Barack Obama still has a chance to pick someone disastrous as a sign that he wants to lose this thing,” Ms. Foyler wrote. “If not, he should brace himself for some really mean blog posts.”
For the odd person who does not suspect that this is a spoof, the text is from Borowitz
Litter offsets : very good, as most times
One comment : Remy, are you old enough for that Indian insert ? How much you wanna bet that 90% of those looking at this are not old enough to know about those commercials from the 70’s ? Man, I guess I am old now…wow….. I need to buy some age offsets…and hope they work !!!
The Indian was part of a big Cleaning campaign in the 70’s. And it worked. America became a much cleaner place thanks to the TV campaigns and the fines.
Minister’s shock warning on rise of anti-Islamic prejudice
By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter
Friday, 4 July 2008
Reuters
Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like ‘aliens in their own country’
Britain’s first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like “the Jews of Europe”.
Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.
Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like “aliens in their own country”.
He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.
… Meanwhile, the noose is increasingly tightening around the Internet, one of the last places where there is still some semblance of free speech. Under the guise of protecting copyrighted materials, many countries around the world are getting tough on the ‘illegal’ downloaders, with penalties ranging from barring broadband access to heavy fines.
The irony is that the artists, the very people those Orwellian measures purported to protect, are quick to criticize the Orwellian measures.
In another more extreme, if not ridiculous, example, AP news agency goes after a little known blogger for publishing fragments of their news articles and reports.
It seems that their lies and propaganda get exposed so often by the army of bloggers that they have now chosen to resort to such blatant intimidations – the move of a liar protecting his lies.
Alongside the intimidations, major ISPs are throttling users with high bandwidth usage.
Some ISPs even hire a company to monitor and hijack websites that these users visit. All those measures serve to do one thing: discourage users from accessing the Internet. And where will they turn for news if not from the web?
The TV with ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News, of course!
In the background, the wiretapping measures continue to be enacted.
The US Congress has just passed the new surveillance bill, which combines the worst of all alternative bills.
It both allows retroactive immunity to the telecoms and gives sweeping surveillance power to the government. Even Sweden, the country that hosts controversial sites such as Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay, has passed a bill that allows wiretapping, cross-border, of all telephone and Internet communications.
Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News.
For the people in Iraq, the war is full time. A woman wept as the body of a relative was borne to burial in Najaf.
[…]
Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.
“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
I can empathize with them but with this attitude in life we would never be happy since many good things come to an end. The poor kids are in depression and do we understand them ! May be it will prompt some government to get the whole families out of there.
30 Jun 2008 15:13:20 GMT
AL TANF, Syria, June 30 (UNHCR) – It seemed like a good idea. Take a group of Palestinian children to the seaside to help them escape the monotony and hardship of their lives in limbo on the arid Iraq-Syria border.
But it all proved a bit too much for most of the children taken to the Syrian city of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea earlier this month from the Al Tanf camp, where they and their families have lived for months after fleeing their homes in the violence-plagued Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
The sudden freedom of movement, the cool sea breezes, the abundant food and drink and the other laughing kids showed these nine children what they were missing and what they would miss once again when they returned to Al Tanf at the end of their week’s holiday.
June 30, 2008: The year is 1908, and it’s just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.
That’s how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.
Today, June 30, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia–and after 100 years, scientists are still talking about it.
“If you want to start a conversation with anyone in the asteroid business all you have to say is Tunguska,” says Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It is the only entry of a large meteoroid we have in the modern era with first-hand accounts.”
While the impact occurred in ’08, the first scientific expedition to the area would have to wait for 19 years. In 1921, Leonid Kulik, the chief curator for the meteorite collection of the St. Petersburg museum led an expedition to Tunguska. But the harsh conditions of the Siberian outback thwarted his team’s attempt to reach the area of the blast. In 1927, a new expedition, again lead by Kulik, reached its goal.
“At first, the locals were reluctant to tell Kulik about the event,” said Yeomans. “They believed the blast was a visitation by the god Ogdy, who had cursed the area by smashing trees and killing animals.”
A Greek and a Bulgarian have been charged with forcing a group of Bulgarian migrants to work 15 hours a day on a tobacco farm in northern Greece for just over one euro a day each.
Police found the seven migrants – six adults and a girl – near the farm earlier this week in a wretched state. They had been living in a stable, from which they say they were evicted for complaining about their pay – a total of 10 euros a day for all seven – and living conditions.
Police were tipped off by a Bulgarian woman who said her brother had asked her to deposit 600 euros in a bank account in order to secure his “release.” The employers said the 600-euro fee was to cover the cost of each migrant’s travel to Greece. But the migrants, who are now in a hostel, say they covered their own costs and had been told they would be paid 50 euros a day for the work.
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