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| "Chase Burning," courtesy of artist Alex Schaefer |
Cheney [...] wrote that Rice "came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right."& this earlier but equivalent bullshit from a Cheney biographer concerning Cheney's partner in war crimes, Donald Rumsfeld:
Instead, Miss Rice was so fazed by former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that she burst into tears at a meeting in the White House situation room.And appalled by the entire tone of the Torygraph item. (Referring to her as "Miss" rather than Doctor, "floodgates opened," which is hardly in line w/ the quote "Her eyes welled up and her next words caught in her throat. The men in the room did not know where to look." Those are some wide-open floodgates, not that we believe any of it ever happened.)
The floodgates opened for the then national security adviser in February 2004, as the Bush administration was wrestling with growing instability in Iraq and the legal status of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
According to Workamper.com, a workamper is “an adventurous individual who has chosen a wonderful lifestyle that combines ANY kind of part-time or full-time work with RV camping. If you work as an employee, operate a business, or donate your time as a volunteer, AND you sleep in an RV (or on-site housing), you are a Workamper. Workampers generally receive compensation in the form of a free campsite, usually with free utilities (electricity, water, and sewer hookups) and additional wages.”The (momentarily imaginary) response:
[...]
Most workamper jobs are of the minimum-wage variety. Workampers generally don’t receive unemployment insurance benefits, severance pay or any warning that a job is about to end. Workampers face many of the same job insecurity issues as the millions of Americans who have been downsized due to job outsourcing, financial mismanagement and slow consumer demand for products and services, except workampers are purposely more nimble and have been conditioned to pack up and move to where the jobs are. “We have to be mobile to land a job,” said Suzann. Those who become jobless and live in traditional stationary homes aren’t usually able to move to another city on a moment’s notice.
A guy who certainly isn't helping his reputation with all these public outbursts, especially at a time when, according to various sources, scouts from other teams are starting to pick up on his moodiness and the fact he can be high maintenance[.]As illustrated:
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| Double-barreled, bit-chezz! |
She hailed the tea party as being common-sense Americans who understand government shouldn't spend more than it takes in, know they're taxed enough already and want government to abide by the Constitution.Isn't this taking Gawd's name in vain? And how do we know this isn't Gawd warning us about climate change & the possibility of "fracking" causing earthquakes?
"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."
Plenty of people in the crowd said they were interested to learn more about Perry, but Bradenton retiree Philip Staples said he's already sold on Bachmann. "She's got the fire in the belly, and she's a straight shooter. She's one of the common people,'' he said.
Asked in an interview to spell out the chief difference between her and Perry, Bachmann pointed to her record leading the charge against most of President Barack Obama's agenda and willingness to buck her own party.
Ron Paul is only a "libertarian" where and when it's convenient. Much of the rest of the time, he's not merely a social conservative but a religious conservative promoting an agenda very close to that of Christian Nationalists.While it's a four-yr. old item, Representative Paul's head is stuffed so far up his ass it's hardly likely any of his positions have "evolved" in the meantime.
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| Do not imagine we scrawled this for photo fodder. |
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| Context: New tree holders in the 'hood. |
In its 97 years, Crescent Heights Methodist Church has flourished and floundered. As recently as 2004, the congregation was growing so much, it asked the many 12-step programs meeting there to find other spaces. The West Hollywood Recovery Center was started as a direct result of the church closing its doors to the 12-step programs there (12-step groups have since been allowed to meet there again).We could always count on 12-Stepping losers being outside smoking, & get a laugh from announcements of the show tunes services.
During that time, Pastor John Griffin was holding Sunday services that incorporated Broadway show tunes, bringing in a lot of new members. But when Griffin was reassigned to a church in Long Beach in 2005, the people who loved the Broadway tunes left with him.
"I'm a gay, pro-medical marijuana pastor," Pastor Scott Imler told West Hollywood Patch. "The United Methodist Church is becoming increasingly conservative and our church is too gay for them."
After we posted the story noting that a Ric Flair representative told TMZ that Flair was considering taking legal action against claims made in the Grantland.com article, a number of readers sent in emails pointing out that Flair admitted in his 2004 autobiography to suffering from Alcoholic Cardiomyopathy.Considering that Flair's considered complaint against Grantland is that he doesn't have boozer's ticker, we are ++amused. Guy's another fucking Rick "Read/don't read that book I put my name on & had published last yr." Perry, isn't he? Wooooo!
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| This artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf" might look like. Y dwarfs are the coldest star-like bodies known, with temperatures that can be even cooler than the human body. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. |
PASADENA, Calif., Aug. 24 (UPI) -- NASA scientists say they've discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as that of the human body.
The discovery was made using the space agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, since the so-called Y dwarfs are nearly impossible to see when viewed with a visible-light telescope, a release by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said Tuesday.
The WISE infrared telescope was able to spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to the sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.
"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Y dwarfs are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family, often referred to as "failed" stars, having too little mass to fuse atoms at their cores and burn like the sun. Instead, astronomers say, they cool and fade with time until what little light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths.
One of the Y dwarfs, WISE 1828+2650, is the record holder for the coldest brown dwarf, with an estimated temperature of less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit, they said.
Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid. Then John Kay of Steppenwolf sang the phrase "heavy metal thunder" in 1968's Born to Be Wild. But it first reached print as a synonym for hard rock via Mike Saunders (later Metal Mike Saunders, singer for early-80s punks the Angry Samoans), in a review of Humble Pie's As Safe As Yesterday in Rolling Stone from 1970, describing the album as "more of the same 27th-rate heavy metal crap".Two origins we did not know:
The same year, punk rock was coined [in Rolling] Stone's Detroit rival, Creem, via Dave Marsh, who used it in a ? & the Mysterians live review ("Needless to say, it was impossible to pass up such a landmark explosion of punk rock, even after two nights running of Tina Turner"). Punk magazine came along a few years later.
But sometimes an artist assigns a title that becomes something else. Power-pop was coined by Pete Townshend in 1967 to define the Who, but wound up being what Eric Carmen of prime power-pop practitioners the Raspberries described as "groups that came out in the 70s that played kind of melodic songs with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming". Not to mention the endless acolytes who mimicked them.
Often, technology drives musical changes, so equipment plays its role, too. Acid, noted above, is one example. So is dub, short for the "dubplate" (duplicate platter) Jamaican sound system operator Ruddy Redwood ordered in late 1967 from Duke Reid's pressing plant. The recording was On the Beach by the Paragons, and the engineer, Byron Smith, accidentally wiped the vocal. Reid played it alongside the vocal version; the response was so strong he began putting instrumentals on the B-sides. Eventually, creative engineers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry would take the dub side into whole new areas of bass-heavy abstraction.
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| No idea who "nick koudis" is; he can get his fucking royalties anytime he wants. |
it becomes pretty obvious that the hurricane therefore won't arrive w/ a whimper, let alone a bang. A great disappointment to us. Even the obvious opportunity to let this one wailis small compensation for the destruction & human tragedy for which we had hoped.Aug 25 (Reuters) - New York City residents who live in low-lying areas should voluntarily start moving out on Friday, before Hurricane Irene is expected to hit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Thursday.
Otherwise, they risk getting stuck because the mass transit system that millions of New Yorkers rely on might have to be shut down on Saturday, he said at a televised news conference.
New Yorkers should start feeling the effects of Hurricane Irene early Sunday morning. It is expected to hit the city of 8.4 million people as a Category 1 storm, the lowest ranking of major storms.
The mayor made it clear that residents in coastal areas, such as Battery Park City on Manhattan's southern tip, Coney Island and the Rockaways, should not linger until he issues an evacuation order because doing so could endanger emergency workers.
A seven-hour police standoff in Hawthorne ended abruptly today, when authorities burst into the apartment where they thought their suspect was barricaded — only to discover that he wasn't there.At least the taxpayer's obligation to pay disability or funeral expenses wasn't increased by any of these Keystone Kops shooting themselves or another oinker during this entire cluster-fuck.
Neighbors near Kornblum Avenue and 132nd Street told Fox LA that they saw officers with their guns pulled attempting to serve a search warrant around 4 a.m. this morning.
Authorities were searching for a suspect accused of shooting a man in the leg a [sic] two weekends ago near Dockweiler Beach. The LAPD's Pacific Division thought they saw a movement in the building, so they called in the Swat Team just after 6 a.m. this morning [sic].
In the meantime, authorities had cordoned off the neighborhood, and neighbors were evacuated. Some news reports were saying that the suspect was refusing to come out, and this incident was labeled a "potential barricade situation."
And then it wasn't.
The SWAT officers finally entered the apartment around 11:30 a.m. but then, well, the suspect wasn't there, according to Los Angeles police Officer Norma Eisenman.
LAPD didn't really said much after that, so it's hard to tell what happened. No other information about the suspect or the alleged assault with a deadly weapon were released.
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| Leave that Billy Paul/Today in History item alone! |
The fate of the festival has been a cliffhanger for much of the month, with city officials voicing dismay that, in the middle of a municipal budget crisis, event organizers still owe $260,000 from last year's festival to the city. Meanwhile, backers of the event described critics of the festival as “haters” and implored the board to change course.Well, once you're reduced to screeching "haters" at critics, it should be over.
Board member Jerilyn López Mendoza was the first to address McKinley and the room, and she expressed concerns echoed by members of the Silver Lake community who were afraid the organizers would do little to improve upon the safety, noise, and access to the festival for locals, who in recent years became incensed at being required to pay admission to cross the street to get to their own homes.You are invited to imagine what may have resulted if, when we lived in the Swish Alps, a festival volunteer had requested us to pay US$25.00 to get back to our dump.
DoD Funded Evangelical Christian Youth ProgramsAt least they aren't naming them by number (yet).
Service members are not the only ones targeted by evangelical Christian programs paid for with DoD contracts. Military children are also heavily targeted, both here in the U.S. and on bases overseas. Evangelizing the children of service members is one of the largest areas of spending.
The biggest ministry contracted by the DoD to target children is Military Community Youth Ministries (MCYM), whose mission statement is "Celebrate life with military teens, Introduce them to the Life-Giver, Jesus Christ, And help them become more like Him." MCYM has received $12,346,333 in DoD contracts since 2000. One of MCYM's tactics? Stalking "unchurched" military children by following their schools buses.
Ranking second is Cadence International, with over $2,671,603 in contracts since 2003. Cadence describes itself as "an evangelical mission agency dedicated to reaching the military communities of the United States and of the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ." Cadence not only targets young service members and military children for conversion to evangelical Christianity, but also actively tries to convert members of foreign militaries in the countries where they operate under DoD contracts.
In addition to military youth ministries like MYCM and Cadence, military children are also targeted by military base Religious Education Directors, also hired with DoD contracts. These ministries and Religious Education Directors employ tactics that can only be described as "stalking" children, with some DoD contracts even requiring that the contractors identify and target the "unchurched" children at non-religious events and activities and get them into chapel programs, and to supply reports naming these children by name.
One of the reasons given by Cadence for the success of its "Strategic Ministry" is: "Deployment and possibly deadly combat are ever-present possibilities. They are shaken. Shaken people are usually more ready to hear about God than those who are at ease, making them more responsive to the gospel." Of course, they must first gain access to these "shaken" soldiers, but that's no problem -- the Army helps them out by allowing them to operate on Army posts and granting the soldiers in AIT extra privileges if they attend Cadence's retreats.Did "the Life-Giver, Jesus Christ," suggest that the best way to gain converts was to prey on the scared & "shaken?"
We were all in the first cab, and the assault occurred directly behind the conductor’s pen. Most riders huddle toward the center of the train, oblivious or disinterested in the fact that the first car provides a grand view of the twists and turns of the Los Angeles tunnels.but he repeated it:
I looked down, and saw a string of blood working its way down the ridges of the subway cab.Shouldn't that be "grooves in the floor of the car," or something? Although "a string" would imply it was in just one groove.
The conductor yelled that no one was to leave the train, and went back into his corral.What the hell? Do young people know nothing, or absolutely nothing? Get this:
The knife looked almost homemade. Its handle was wooden, thick and seemed haphazardly carved. The blade was crude, maybe four or five inches long and three inches wide. A reporter asked me if it could have been a kitchen knife. I haven’t spent enough time in kitchens or Crate & Barrels to know exactly what a kitchen knife would look like.Odd & specific details to remember, but does Martens really not know from a kitchen knife? The blade was "crude," as if it had been forged in a backyard smithy somewhere?
I saw a beautiful woman who had been on the train frantically asking people what happened, and I walked over to tell her. If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that meet-traumatic has far more power than the meet-cute, but as I got closer I saw she had a wedding ring and opted to let others fill her in.This after he "knew he would be sick." Odd that after giving up on romance he managed to walk about two blocks before heaving in front of Trader Joe's.
I have never, at least knowingly, been less than five feet away from someone with the capacity to stab another human being.Wise up before it's too late. Even your board-game playing hipster indie-rock "friends" probably have the capacity to stab someone, quite possibly over a board game.
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| Guy looks familiar ... can't quite place him 'though. |
-- A man wearing a "Fuck the 49ers" T-shirt was shot outside Candlestick Park shortly after the end of Saturday night's preseason game between the Raiders and 49ers, a police sergeant said.No, typed too soon.
Police detained a suspect shortly after the shooting - a man wearing Raiders apparel who was found on a party bus in an RV section of the parking lot, according to San Francisco Police Sgt. Frank Harrell.
[...]
A second shooting victim was found near Pole V in the parking lot, Harrell said, and had superficial wounds to his face. He was listed in stable condition at S.F. General.
In addition, according to Bay City News, a San Rafael man, 26, was assaulted and knocked unconscious in a restroom at Candlestick during the game, police said. He was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.
[...]
Police believe all three men attended the game. A police statement said the man in critical condition was 24 and the other shooting victim was in his 20s.
The two shooting victims were found separately and any link between them, or between either of them and the suspect, had not been established.
Editor’s note: The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Heisler, 2006 winner of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award and a Truthdig contributor, was laid off by the newspaper in July, one year before he planned to retire. With 44 years in the business, and 32 at the Times, he reminds us that newspapers were in trouble long before the Internet but still offer at least the promise of something their competitors can’t match. Bearing in mind his severance agreement not to “disparage” the company “in any way,” he nonetheless provides an inside look as one of the world’s great papers is bought, sold and turned into a caricature of its former self.We note in passing that not long after the Times let Mr. Scheer go from his columnist position, one Jonah Goldberg began appearing on the Times' op-ed page each Tuesday.
Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures "with no apparent esthetic value" is within Long Beach Police Department policy.
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| Criminal photograph. |
"If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery," says McDonnell, "it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual." McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.Yes, you "have" "rights." NO, YOU MAY NOT USE THEM!
McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer's subject has "apparent esthetic value," officers make such judgments "based on their overall training and experience" and will generally approach photographers not engaging in "regular tourist behavior."
This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD's "policy … to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism."
In an interview with conservative talk show host Jay Sekoluw, Bachmann said she knew what was bothering the American people. Bachmann described America's worries as a "unified message," before listing off about five things, one of which is a long-gone country:We are also quite amused by "our loss militarily going forward." In English that might have been expressed as "potential reduction of the defense budget," unless Rep. Bachmann believes these United Snakes are going to lose "militarily" some time in the future. The audio. Plus which.
It really is about jobs and the economy. That doesn't mean people haven't [sic] forgotten about protecting life and marriage and the sanctity of the family. People are very concerned about that as well. But what people recognize is that there's a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.Good answer, Michele. And what about the Ottoman Empire? Should we fear them, too? Is America prepared for a naval attack from the Phoenicians?
