Friday, December 19, 2008
Face of Defense: Double Amputee Marine Wants to Stay in to Help Others
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Matthew Ryan Bradford lost his legs and vision in Iraq. And that, he says, makes him the perfect person to stay in uniform and help other injured Marines. Bradford said he knows he won’t be able to do every job in the Marine Corps, but he hopes to stay in uniform because he believes he has something to offer.
“I want to be a Marine. I don’t want to get out yet,” he said. “I’m trying to stay in so I can go back to Bethesda and work at the hospital in the liaison office so I can talk to the wounded.”The reactions he occasionally gets when he’s out in public bother him, though, he acknowledged. Some thank him, some buy meals for him, and some even apologize for what happened in the course of serving his country.
“I’m like, ‘Don’t be. It could’ve happened to anyone,” Bradford said. “[I have] no regrets. I’d go back if I could, but I can’t see.”
He lost his left eye when a piece of shrapnel went through it and lodged in his brain, and retina damage cost him sight in his right eye.
[you read that right, the blindness was in addition to his amputations. What unit of measurement do we use to describe such character?]
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Local woman organizes 'God packages' for U.S. troops
There’s something going around this season and it’s contagious.
Not to worry. This won’t make you feel “yucky” like the flu or the sniffles. More than likely, it’ll make a person feel good. It’s called gratitude.
And I didn’t realize just how catching it is until I met Jan Sass on our latest KTNW-TV In Steppe show. She’s the founder of U.S. Troop Care Package, a local effort that puts together care packages to show appreciation for deployed military.
It started with one box. Today, thousands of Care Packages are sent to troops in more than 30 countries...
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Typical items found in the care packages that we send to our deployed troops.
Gaza militants up rocket attacks as truce to expire
Gaza City/Tel Aviv - Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip said Wednesday they were unlikely to extend an Egyptian- brokered six-month truce with Israel that expires on Friday. (Snip) Palestinian fighters in the strip fired 15 self-made rockets into southern Israel on Wednesday, in addition to one mortar shell, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said, adding they brought the total number launched since Tuesday to 25...
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The Sovereignty Dodge
"We don't think the world's great nations and countries can be held hostage by non-state actors," Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said yesterday. Fair enough. But what is the world to do when those non-state actors operate from the territory of a state and are the creation of that state's intelligence services? [snip]
... but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched...
[moreover, Pakistan's complaining of US drone bombing is particularly hypocritical considering its only been done in regions the Pakistani government itself has labeled the 'ungoverned territories'.]
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Newsweek: Shoe Toss Was 'One Small Measure of Justice'
Newsweek correspondent Michael Hirsh said
"Bush is not going to end up in The Hague obviously, there’s not going to be any charges against him, and so, you know, a shoe shied at him by an Iraqi journalist might be the one small measure of justice that was achieved."
He suggested the Bush era was a time of "mass hallucination" and Obama’s rise put an end to the madness. Hirsh wished Bush good riddance:
"This guy’s about gone, and we can stop pretending that there was any kind of, you know, rational strategic motivation behind this act of war that he committed."
Hirsh said Bush and his team have "blood on their hands," but will never admit they were wrong. Hirsh’s interview was posted on YouTube on Monday
[what bias?]
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Durban II
.
Claudia Rosett wrote a sensible article about the coming Durban-2 summit in Forbes. For those unfamiliar with Durban-1, or the idea of Durban, what we’re talking about here is an infamous 2001 anti-racism-turned-anti-Israel UN conference, soon to be reconvened:
Durban II is not solely a mob move against Israel. It is a dishonor to real heroes of the war on prejudice, such as Martin Luther King. It is an assault on the genuine tolerance of free societies. It is an attempt to commandeer the U.N.–yet again–as a vehicle for the kind of hate that leads to such horrors as the slaughter in Mumbai, or for that matter, Sept. 11.The extent to which the Obama administration will be willing to compromise in order to participate in this dispensable event can serve as an indication from which to learn more about the new team in power. We know very little about the way this man is going to rule, one Israeli official has told me. Durban will give us some early sense of his real priorities.
Among the U.N.’s 192 member states, only two have had the backbone to announce that they will boycott the Durban Review: Canada, and for obvious reasons, Israel. In the U.S., President Bush has deferred any final decision to the next administration.
President-elect Obama, what will you do about Durban II?
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FLASHBACKs:
081208: Coming Soon: UN Racists to convene conference on racism
081112: ‘Apartheid’ Israel, Islamophobia on the Agenda for U.N. Racism Meeting
081007: The Pathology of Durban II
"Boycott Durban II"Obama transition http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact
.
GLOBAL WARMING FREEZE?
The last two years of global cooling have nearly erased 30 years of temperature increase. To the extent that global warming ever existed, it is now officially over, says David Deming, a geophysicist and adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
In fact, there is worldwide evidence of the end of global warming, says Deming: [multiple multi-year cooling stats, snip]
These cold weather events are not abnormal or isolated incidents; global measures of climatic conditions indicate significant cooling. Moreover, NASA reports that oceans have been cooling for the last five years, sea level has stopped rising and Northern Hemisphere cyclone and hurricane activity is at a 24-year low.
But even though global warming is over, politicians are still trying to enact solutions to a non-existent problem. Instead, we must recognize that weather and climate change are natural processes beyond human control. To argue otherwise is to deny the factual evidence, says Deming.
[it's not about climate but power and money]
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The Plan to Create 'Green' Jobs
Just as the mainstream media are beginning to admit their bias during the election for Obama, the emboldened enviros are finally beginning to admit that the economics behind the green movement are bogus. In a nutshell, Obama says it cost $150 billion to create five million new jobs over the next decade, but the left wing San Franciso based Apollo Group says it will cost over three times as much - $500 billion.
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Cave bears killed by Ice Age
Oslo - Giant cave bears froze to death during the last Ice Age in Europe about 28 000 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that cleared human hunters of driving them to extinction thousands of years later. The largely vegetarian bears, weighing up to a tonne and bigger than modern polar bears or Kodiak bears, apparently died off as a sharp cooling of the climate led to a freeze that killed off the fruits, nuts and plants they ate.
[cooling is the much larger threat than warming to virtually all life on earth - especially man]
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The Great North American CO2 Sink
[not really readable to most of us humans - it's real science - but thought I'd post as future FLASHBACK when next I reference]
A Large Terrestrial Carbon Sink in North America Implied by Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon Dioxide Data and Models
S. Fan, M. Gloor, J. Mahlman, S. Pacala, J. Sarmiento, T. Takahashi, P. Tans
Atmospheric carbon dioxide increased at a rate of 2.8 petagrams of carbon per year (Pg C year1) during 1988 to 1992 (1 Pg = 1015 grams). Given estimates of fossil carbon dioxide emissions, and net oceanic uptake, this implies a global terrestrial uptake of 1.0 to 2.2 Pg C year1. The spatial distribution of the terrestrial carbon dioxide uptake is estimated by means of the observed spatial patterns of the greatly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide data set available from 1988 onward, together with two atmospheric transport models, two estimates of the sea-air flux, and an estimate of the spatial distribution of fossil carbon dioxide emissions. North America is the best constrained continent, with a mean uptake of 1.7 ± 0.5 Pg C year1, mostly south of 51 degrees north. Eurasia-North Africa is relatively weakly constrained, with a mean uptake of 0.1 ± 0.6 Pg C year1. The rest of the world's land surface is poorly constrained, with a mean source of 0.2 ± 0.9 Pg C year1.
S. Fan and J. Sarmiento, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. M. Gloor and S. Pacala, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA. J. Mahlman, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Princeton University, Post Office Box 308, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA. T. Takahashi, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA. P. Tans, Climate Modeling and Diagnostics Laboratory, NOAA, Boulder, CO 80303, USA.
[point: the US has reforested an average of 1 million acres per year for ~40 years which, due to the order-of-magnitude increased consumption of CO2 by growing trees vs. mature ones (parents: think feeding a teenager) which results in North America 'uptaking' more CO2 than it 'emits' - and is unique in the world in doing so. That's why all UN conversation focuses solely on emissions - as the US's net CO2 contribution is negative. Easily handled: the IPCC's 'recommendations' simply don't count it, or the US would be lecturing the rest of the world instead of the other way around.]
Read the Full Text
Groups line up for share of huge stimulus package
As President-elect Barack Obama and congressional leaders construct a behemoth economic stimulus package, a parade of interest groups is seeking shares of the portion that will go to infrastructure construction projects. The "ready-to-go" project lists are longer than the supplicants' arms and for sums that would have seemed fantastic only months ago, before the depth of the recession became apparent.
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"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."..
California Democrats devise plan to hike taxes
By structuring them as fees, they would skirt GOP opponents and raise $9.3 billion. A court fight looms.
Reporting from Sacramento -- California's Democratic leaders were planning a vote today on a brazen proposal to raise gas, sales and income taxes through a series of legal maneuvers that would bypass the state's Constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote to increase taxes.
The Democratic gambit, announced Wednesday, would raise $9.3 billion to ease the state's fiscal crisis by increasing sales taxes by three-fourths of a cent and gas taxes by 13 cents a gallon, starting in February. The plan would add a 'surcharge' of 2.5% to everyone's 2009 state income tax bill.
It would also require businesses to withhold taxes on payments above $600 made to independent contractors. Their package would total $18 billion and nearly halve the state's budget shortfall, projected to reach $41.8 billion in the next 18 months. [snip]
Republican legislators and antitax groups promised legal challenges to derail the Democrats' plan."Raising taxes on people and playing funny math and calling it fees is not governing," said Assembly GOP leader Michael Villines of Clovis. "That's trickery, is what that is."
The Democrats intend to do two things: eliminate some existing taxes, including those on gasoline, and substitute 'fee' increases that would include a 9.9% 'levy' on oil extraction and the income tax 'surcharge'. The Democrats will then reimpose the gas 'fees' at higher levels [but at 39 cents a gallon, hence the '13 cent' increase referred to]; fees can be raised with simple majority votes. The net effect would be billions of dollars in new revenue for the state.
Similar proposals have been considered in past budget crises but never acted on out of concern that they would unravel in court."If they proceed with this proposal to raise taxes with a simple majority vote, they will be sued and they will lose,"
[it's illegal, they know it, and they're going to do it anyway so they get the money while it's tied up in the courts. Still think this is a government representitive of the people or based on the rule of law?
If so, you need tell them ... >
CA State Legislature (Asy./Senate) = http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html
and pass on...]
U.S. Capitol Visitor Center Emphasizes Liberal Political Causes
The DC Capitol Visitor Center opened last week three years late and $360 million dollars over budget. The AP reported that James Billington, the librarian of Congress, said the new visitor’s center provides a splendidly presented civics lesson.” [snip]
... The exhibit hall display cases look like they were overrun by liberal interest groups. Environmentalism, healthcare, and public education groups must be pleased to have been deemed as important if not more important than our Constitution’s Bill of Rights... [snip]
S.203 38th Congress, Regarding Yosemite Valley, May 17, 1864
This bill signed into law ... to keep Yoesemite Valley from being ruined by increasing commerce and tourism...
... The Medicare Act of 1965-Gauranteeing Healthcare for the elderly. The president’s uneven signature results from his using multiple pens--gifts to key sponsors of the bill...
The Northwest Ordinance, the nation’s first legislators laid down the principles for public education... Article 3 declared, “…education shall forever be encouraged,” ...
But don't bother looking for the history on the second amendment at the visitor’s center.
South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint has taken up the cause of exposing the “left leaning” displays(h/t salon.com) in the CVC. DeMint’s statement said the following...
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[and then there's the religious component - FLASHBACK:
081209: (God) Bless America
"The center identified "E. Pluribus Unum" (rather than "In God We Trust") as the official national motto.".
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