When it comes to the war in Iraq that "Bush" has fought as his own personal version of "Battleship", I often wonder how in the hell he came to the conclusion that this was going to be a "winnable" situation. Maybe he should have listened to some of the people who were trying to tell him things.
The more I read about the aftermath and what is going on over in the Middle East now, as a result of our "incursion" into this country the more freaked out I get.
Read on:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/10/27/eyewitness_to_a_failure_in_iraq?mode=PF
It seems some people never take advice, even when they should.
On another note, it feels like Florida outside today....yesterday temps in the 70s with high humidity and now today "hurricane type winds" blowing at 50-60 MPH. Too strange.
Time for work.
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Another Brush with the Famous....
So...I had just come back to the hotel (work) to finish the daily paperwork after the bar had closed down late Friday evening.
I was on my way out the door heading back home when the bus pulled up carrying "Bob Dylan".......
I know, alot of the younger generation probably won't remember him (one of my servers thought he was a poet!!) and even for myself, his music , for the most part was a little past my generation. And if there were some songs he wrote and sang while I was growing up, it wasn't to my taste...but.....still it was cool to see him get off the bus with his "roadies" and walk into the hotel. What better thing to do at 3AM in the morning???
PS: He is playing in Kenosha at Carthage College tonight (saturday) and he and his group will probably sleep most of the day away in the comfy confines of the hotel, in order to be ready for their "gig" tonight.
A link about this great singer and songwriter if anyone feels like they need (or want) a refresher ont this guy:
http://bobdylan.com/links/
Who knows...he may order Room Service this afternoon and guess who delivers Room Service orders in the afternoon?? Anyone want an autograph of a music legend?
Email me......just kidding.
I have and never will be an autograph hound, though I do have some pretty nifty momentos from meeting a few different popular personalities: An autographed CD from Joan Jet (Remember "I Love Rock and Roll-Put another Dime in the Jukebox Baby") and a "secret service pin" from Senator Edward's staff. Those are the two most recent, though I also have a couple more "do-ditties" from a few other people.
What else is happening..havn't been feeling too hot the last few days....I hope I am not coming down with the Flu or something. I dont usually get sick but the last few days, I just feel totally drained. And this weird fall weather? It is the end of September, and I have had the AC on for the last few days. Tempuratures in the 70s...humidity at or close to 100% and bizzare storms blowing across the state this weekend. Too strange. I guess its not only us though. Alot of strange weather patterns across the nation the last few weeks. Oh well. Time for Bed.
I was on my way out the door heading back home when the bus pulled up carrying "Bob Dylan".......
I know, alot of the younger generation probably won't remember him (one of my servers thought he was a poet!!) and even for myself, his music , for the most part was a little past my generation. And if there were some songs he wrote and sang while I was growing up, it wasn't to my taste...but.....still it was cool to see him get off the bus with his "roadies" and walk into the hotel. What better thing to do at 3AM in the morning???
PS: He is playing in Kenosha at Carthage College tonight (saturday) and he and his group will probably sleep most of the day away in the comfy confines of the hotel, in order to be ready for their "gig" tonight.
A link about this great singer and songwriter if anyone feels like they need (or want) a refresher ont this guy:
http://bobdylan.com/links/
Who knows...he may order Room Service this afternoon and guess who delivers Room Service orders in the afternoon?? Anyone want an autograph of a music legend?
Email me......just kidding.
I have and never will be an autograph hound, though I do have some pretty nifty momentos from meeting a few different popular personalities: An autographed CD from Joan Jet (Remember "I Love Rock and Roll-Put another Dime in the Jukebox Baby") and a "secret service pin" from Senator Edward's staff. Those are the two most recent, though I also have a couple more "do-ditties" from a few other people.
What else is happening..havn't been feeling too hot the last few days....I hope I am not coming down with the Flu or something. I dont usually get sick but the last few days, I just feel totally drained. And this weird fall weather? It is the end of September, and I have had the AC on for the last few days. Tempuratures in the 70s...humidity at or close to 100% and bizzare storms blowing across the state this weekend. Too strange. I guess its not only us though. Alot of strange weather patterns across the nation the last few weeks. Oh well. Time for Bed.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Only a Few More Days to Go....
The election for the next president of the U.S. is coming down to the wire and most polls are saying that the two canidates are in a dead heat (tied).
At this point it is almost impossible to say who will come out ahead...but I think (and I am sure others do as well) that IT is time for a change of sorts. I honestly do not know if "John Kerry" should be that change....but I am willing to give him a chance. If nothing else, I think our goverment needs a "breath of fresh air" and I think Kerry will give that to us.
http://www.johnkerry.com/video/player.php?video=070904_ontheroad
http://www.johnkerry.com/video/player.php?video=072904_remarkable_promise
After seeing these videos, it is not hard to realise that, esp. in Wisconsin, there are alot of people who need and want a change.
I plan on casting my vote for Senator John Kerry this November. It is time for a change.
At this point it is almost impossible to say who will come out ahead...but I think (and I am sure others do as well) that IT is time for a change of sorts. I honestly do not know if "John Kerry" should be that change....but I am willing to give him a chance. If nothing else, I think our goverment needs a "breath of fresh air" and I think Kerry will give that to us.
http://www.johnkerry.com/video/player.php?video=070904_ontheroad
http://www.johnkerry.com/video/player.php?video=072904_remarkable_promise
After seeing these videos, it is not hard to realise that, esp. in Wisconsin, there are alot of people who need and want a change.
I plan on casting my vote for Senator John Kerry this November. It is time for a change.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
What did I tell you??? The MARK OF THE BEAST IS HERE
I knew it was just a matter of time before this happened (and I think I ranted about it in one of my previous blogs).....Actually, I think that it is kind of a cool idea if it is used right...but there are so many ways that it can be used wrong (and it probably will be).
_____________________________________________________________________
October 14, 2004
Identity Badge Worn Under Skin Approved for Use in Health Care
"From the Online New York Times"
By BARNABY J. FEDER and TOM ZELLER Jr.
The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.
The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist.
Applied Digital Solutions, based in Delray Beach, Fla., said that its devices, which it calls VeriChips, could save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatment. And it expressed hope that such medical uses would accelerate the acceptance of under-the-skin ID chips as security and access-control devices.
Scott R. Silverman, chairman and chief executive of Applied Digital, said the F.D.A.'s approval should help the company overcome "the creepy factor" of implanted tags and the suspicion it has stirred.
"We believe there are far fewer people resisting this today," Mr. Silverman said. But it is far from clear whether implanted identification tags can overcome opposition from those who fear new levels of personal surveillance and from some fundamentalist religious groups who contend that the tags may be the "mark of the beast" referred to in the Book of Revelation.
In Applied Digital's vision, patients implanted with the chips could receive more effective care because doctors, other emergency-room personnel and ambulance crews equipped with Applied's handheld radio scanners would be able to read a unique 16-digit number on the chip.
The chip does not contain any records, but with the number, the care provider would be able to retrieve medical information about blood type, drug histories and other critical data stored in computers. The records could be easily updated.
Tiny radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags similar to VeriChip have been embedded in livestock and pets in the millions in recent years as a more secure form of identification than external tags.
But no device maker has yet been able to create a market for human implantable tags like VeriChip, which are the size of a grain of rice and are inserted under the skin of the arm or hand with a syringe.
Applied Digital's distributors overseas have achieved some highly publicized, if limited successes. This summer, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Mexico's attorney general, announced that he and scores of his subordinates had received implanted chips that control access to a secure room and documents considered vital in Mexico's struggle with drug cartels.
Also, Solusat, the sole distributor of VeriChip in Mexico, says about 1,000 people have received the chip implants to link to their medical records. "You can have all the benefits of radio identification," a Solusat executive, Antonio Aceves, said, "but now it is inside your body."
In March, the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona began offering VeriChips to regular patrons who wanted to dispense with traditional identification and credit cards. About 50 "V.I.P.'s" have received the chip so far, according to a spokesman, which allows them to link their identities to a payment system. The program has been expanded to a club in Rotterdam also owned by Baja, and about 35 people there have signed up for the implants, the company said.
VeriChip announced last week that it had signed a distribution agreement with a British company, Surge IT Solutions, which it said intended to use the technology to control access to government facilities. And Antonia Giorgio Antonucci, an Italian doctor, is leading a study using VeriChip at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome.
"We want to see if the doctors think the device is practical or not," Dr. Antonucci said.
Applied Digital has been free to sell VeriChip in the United States for nonmedical applications, but lack of acceptance of the technology made F.D.A. approval for medical uses a high priority.
"I've believed all along that the medical application was the best, followed by security and financial applications," Mr. Silverman said.
Still, the science-fiction specter of a nation of drones tagged with sub-dermal bar codes may be a difficult image for the company to overcome in selling its technology.
Online conspiracy theorists, for example, often attach abilities to the technology that do not exist, like the ability to track individuals via satellite.
But real privacy concerns have emerged.
"At the point you place the chip beneath the skin, you're saying you will not have the ability to remove the ID tracking device," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest advocacy group in Washington. "I think, increasingly, if this takes off - and it's still not clear that it will - the real social debate begins around prisoners and parolees, and perhaps even visitors to the U.S. That's where the interest in being able to identify and track people is."
Indeed, the debate over civil liberties and privacy has made discussing any practical benefits of a technology like VeriChip harder.
"The fact that we're engaged in such a deep, fundamental privacy debate really does complicate the prospect for this kind of technology," said Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a regulatory research group in Washington. "We haven't even sorted out the appropriateness of a RFID tag that goes on a pallet of tomatoes," Mr. Crews said, "much less one that can go under a person's skin."
Applied Digital has tried to counter such concerns by arguing that the implantation of chips is voluntary and the only records linked to a VeriChip will be those authorized by the person with the chip.
But critics say that if the technology gains a foothold, employers, government authorities and others with power over individuals could dictate how it is used. For instance, if chips were to replace dog tags as military identification, the decision would not be up to the discretion of individual soldiers.
The evolution of radio identification technology also concerns some critics. Passive tags like VeriChip do not broadcast radio waves and cannot now be used to track a person's movements. And current scanners cannot read the passive chip from more than a few feet away. But design advances or the addition of a separate power source for the chip could expand those ranges and make tracking possible.
Mr. Silverman has said that the current chip could help managers of high-security installations like nuclear power plants locate people in the building because scanners in doorways should be able to track who enters and leaves a room.
Applied Digital has VeriChip distribution agreements with companies in several states, but those have been largely dormant. It said it hoped to find big medical distribution companies to market the chip to doctors' offices, specialty clinics and emergency rooms.
Dr. Richard Seeley, Applied Digital's medical adviser, said the company would concentrate on winning acceptance of the chip among patients with complex problems like diabetes, which require them to see many doctors, and those with disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Seeley said the company was also talking to large orthopedics companies to demonstrate the value of linking the chip to medical devices like hip and knee implants.
Mr. Silverman said that surveys had shown that 14 percent to 22 percent of people would consider having the implant, but more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they would consider having the implant if the question was framed to show a medical benefit from the chip.
Applied Digital, which has been losing money for years, cautioned yesterday that it did not expect substantial revenue or profit from VeriChip anytime soon. But investors were optimistic enough about the F.D.A. news to send the company's shares up 68 percent, to close at $3.57 yesterday. Shares of Digital Angel, a subsidiary of Applied Digital that makes animal tags and manufactures the VeriChip, rose nearly 29 percent, to $3.49.
____________________________________________________________
What next? I think we should all shave our heads to make sure that 666 hasn't been engraved in our skulls while we were sleeping. I may not have long to wait as each day I loose more and more of my hair......
_____________________________________________________________________
October 14, 2004
Identity Badge Worn Under Skin Approved for Use in Health Care
"From the Online New York Times"
By BARNABY J. FEDER and TOM ZELLER Jr.
The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.
The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist.
Applied Digital Solutions, based in Delray Beach, Fla., said that its devices, which it calls VeriChips, could save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatment. And it expressed hope that such medical uses would accelerate the acceptance of under-the-skin ID chips as security and access-control devices.
Scott R. Silverman, chairman and chief executive of Applied Digital, said the F.D.A.'s approval should help the company overcome "the creepy factor" of implanted tags and the suspicion it has stirred.
"We believe there are far fewer people resisting this today," Mr. Silverman said. But it is far from clear whether implanted identification tags can overcome opposition from those who fear new levels of personal surveillance and from some fundamentalist religious groups who contend that the tags may be the "mark of the beast" referred to in the Book of Revelation.
In Applied Digital's vision, patients implanted with the chips could receive more effective care because doctors, other emergency-room personnel and ambulance crews equipped with Applied's handheld radio scanners would be able to read a unique 16-digit number on the chip.
The chip does not contain any records, but with the number, the care provider would be able to retrieve medical information about blood type, drug histories and other critical data stored in computers. The records could be easily updated.
Tiny radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags similar to VeriChip have been embedded in livestock and pets in the millions in recent years as a more secure form of identification than external tags.
But no device maker has yet been able to create a market for human implantable tags like VeriChip, which are the size of a grain of rice and are inserted under the skin of the arm or hand with a syringe.
Applied Digital's distributors overseas have achieved some highly publicized, if limited successes. This summer, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Mexico's attorney general, announced that he and scores of his subordinates had received implanted chips that control access to a secure room and documents considered vital in Mexico's struggle with drug cartels.
Also, Solusat, the sole distributor of VeriChip in Mexico, says about 1,000 people have received the chip implants to link to their medical records. "You can have all the benefits of radio identification," a Solusat executive, Antonio Aceves, said, "but now it is inside your body."
In March, the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona began offering VeriChips to regular patrons who wanted to dispense with traditional identification and credit cards. About 50 "V.I.P.'s" have received the chip so far, according to a spokesman, which allows them to link their identities to a payment system. The program has been expanded to a club in Rotterdam also owned by Baja, and about 35 people there have signed up for the implants, the company said.
VeriChip announced last week that it had signed a distribution agreement with a British company, Surge IT Solutions, which it said intended to use the technology to control access to government facilities. And Antonia Giorgio Antonucci, an Italian doctor, is leading a study using VeriChip at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome.
"We want to see if the doctors think the device is practical or not," Dr. Antonucci said.
Applied Digital has been free to sell VeriChip in the United States for nonmedical applications, but lack of acceptance of the technology made F.D.A. approval for medical uses a high priority.
"I've believed all along that the medical application was the best, followed by security and financial applications," Mr. Silverman said.
Still, the science-fiction specter of a nation of drones tagged with sub-dermal bar codes may be a difficult image for the company to overcome in selling its technology.
Online conspiracy theorists, for example, often attach abilities to the technology that do not exist, like the ability to track individuals via satellite.
But real privacy concerns have emerged.
"At the point you place the chip beneath the skin, you're saying you will not have the ability to remove the ID tracking device," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest advocacy group in Washington. "I think, increasingly, if this takes off - and it's still not clear that it will - the real social debate begins around prisoners and parolees, and perhaps even visitors to the U.S. That's where the interest in being able to identify and track people is."
Indeed, the debate over civil liberties and privacy has made discussing any practical benefits of a technology like VeriChip harder.
"The fact that we're engaged in such a deep, fundamental privacy debate really does complicate the prospect for this kind of technology," said Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a regulatory research group in Washington. "We haven't even sorted out the appropriateness of a RFID tag that goes on a pallet of tomatoes," Mr. Crews said, "much less one that can go under a person's skin."
Applied Digital has tried to counter such concerns by arguing that the implantation of chips is voluntary and the only records linked to a VeriChip will be those authorized by the person with the chip.
But critics say that if the technology gains a foothold, employers, government authorities and others with power over individuals could dictate how it is used. For instance, if chips were to replace dog tags as military identification, the decision would not be up to the discretion of individual soldiers.
The evolution of radio identification technology also concerns some critics. Passive tags like VeriChip do not broadcast radio waves and cannot now be used to track a person's movements. And current scanners cannot read the passive chip from more than a few feet away. But design advances or the addition of a separate power source for the chip could expand those ranges and make tracking possible.
Mr. Silverman has said that the current chip could help managers of high-security installations like nuclear power plants locate people in the building because scanners in doorways should be able to track who enters and leaves a room.
Applied Digital has VeriChip distribution agreements with companies in several states, but those have been largely dormant. It said it hoped to find big medical distribution companies to market the chip to doctors' offices, specialty clinics and emergency rooms.
Dr. Richard Seeley, Applied Digital's medical adviser, said the company would concentrate on winning acceptance of the chip among patients with complex problems like diabetes, which require them to see many doctors, and those with disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Seeley said the company was also talking to large orthopedics companies to demonstrate the value of linking the chip to medical devices like hip and knee implants.
Mr. Silverman said that surveys had shown that 14 percent to 22 percent of people would consider having the implant, but more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they would consider having the implant if the question was framed to show a medical benefit from the chip.
Applied Digital, which has been losing money for years, cautioned yesterday that it did not expect substantial revenue or profit from VeriChip anytime soon. But investors were optimistic enough about the F.D.A. news to send the company's shares up 68 percent, to close at $3.57 yesterday. Shares of Digital Angel, a subsidiary of Applied Digital that makes animal tags and manufactures the VeriChip, rose nearly 29 percent, to $3.49.
____________________________________________________________
What next? I think we should all shave our heads to make sure that 666 hasn't been engraved in our skulls while we were sleeping. I may not have long to wait as each day I loose more and more of my hair......
The Strangest Dream
Some dreams are so vivid that they feel real. I had one of those last night and to be honest, it was so good a dream that I wanted it to go on forever......
I was driving through a snowstorm in a city that seemed slightly familiar. The snow was coming down pretty hard and I could see people outside shoveling their walks. I remember seeing an old friend out on the city sidewalks as I was driving down the road, trying to control the traction of my truck on the slippery roads. I didn't stop though to talk to him, as I knew I had to get to this little restaurant at the edge of town, for some reason that at that point, I couldn't remember.
I got to the restaurant and that is when I remembered why I was there. It was to see my mother! Yes, my mom, who died like 5 years ago! (I know....Weird....Why would I be going to some restaurant to visit my mother who wasn't even alive-but in the dream she wasnt dead.....She was a waitress at this little restaurant in this little snowcovered town somewhere).
I walked in to the restaurant and I remember two distinct sections. One was smoking with a bunch of booths running across a wall and to the front of the entrance, was another section that I could not see, along with a stairway leading to what looked like a basement banquet area. The lady that I saw when I first entered the restaurant said to me "Take a seat anywhere hun, someone will be right with you". I stood there contemplating what to do. Which area was my mom working in?? I was so excited to hopefully get to see her after so long. I think I was even crying....And of course I was also very confused. Here, I thought she had been dead for the last 5 years.
The dream starts to fade a little from here, but I do remember that I peaked around the corner of the one section and I heard my mom's voice in that part of the restaurant. I peaked down the stairs to the basement and saw all of these old ladies who looked what like I imagined some of my great aunts on my mom's side of the family looked like. Classy old ladies with fur coats and high heels and big bouffant hairdos, all milling around the bottom of the stairway.
So I decided of course to sit in that section. As I went to sit down, the lady who I had talked to earlier said to me "Hun....The waitress in that section is very busy today and probably wont be able to take care of you....." But I told her that is ok and that "I can wait forever....And that I REALLY wanted the waitress who was in that section!!". She told me to go ahead and sit down.
So....I am sitting down, unraveling my silverware and just sitting there fidgeting, watching this woman jump from one table to the next with the agility and grace of the best server I have ever seen. Jumbling coffee pots and water glasses in both of her hands and running from one end of that room to the other.
When all of a sudden....She sees me! She drops the coffee pot that she is holding on the floor!
She just stands there and stares at me!
I start to cry.....
She walks over to my table....
She says....."Why didn't you tell me you were coming?? I am so busy right now honey, I have 6 tables and two are "wet" and four are still "dry" and I need to get some food out.Just sit there and I will be back in minute ok???"
And then I woke up.........
(Was I in some restaurant in heaven or something? I don't know for sure, but it sure seemed like a real experience. Everything was so vivid. Maybe heaven is just another plain of existence where people still work and when they get hungry, they go out to eat. And it snows!! And my mom's relatives of course would be in the restaurant that she works in).
God, what a weird dream. I really miss her.
Time to get ready for work.
And yes, I am blubbering like a total idiot right now. I cant help it.
What is wrong with me???
I was driving through a snowstorm in a city that seemed slightly familiar. The snow was coming down pretty hard and I could see people outside shoveling their walks. I remember seeing an old friend out on the city sidewalks as I was driving down the road, trying to control the traction of my truck on the slippery roads. I didn't stop though to talk to him, as I knew I had to get to this little restaurant at the edge of town, for some reason that at that point, I couldn't remember.
I got to the restaurant and that is when I remembered why I was there. It was to see my mother! Yes, my mom, who died like 5 years ago! (I know....Weird....Why would I be going to some restaurant to visit my mother who wasn't even alive-but in the dream she wasnt dead.....She was a waitress at this little restaurant in this little snowcovered town somewhere).
I walked in to the restaurant and I remember two distinct sections. One was smoking with a bunch of booths running across a wall and to the front of the entrance, was another section that I could not see, along with a stairway leading to what looked like a basement banquet area. The lady that I saw when I first entered the restaurant said to me "Take a seat anywhere hun, someone will be right with you". I stood there contemplating what to do. Which area was my mom working in?? I was so excited to hopefully get to see her after so long. I think I was even crying....And of course I was also very confused. Here, I thought she had been dead for the last 5 years.
The dream starts to fade a little from here, but I do remember that I peaked around the corner of the one section and I heard my mom's voice in that part of the restaurant. I peaked down the stairs to the basement and saw all of these old ladies who looked what like I imagined some of my great aunts on my mom's side of the family looked like. Classy old ladies with fur coats and high heels and big bouffant hairdos, all milling around the bottom of the stairway.
So I decided of course to sit in that section. As I went to sit down, the lady who I had talked to earlier said to me "Hun....The waitress in that section is very busy today and probably wont be able to take care of you....." But I told her that is ok and that "I can wait forever....And that I REALLY wanted the waitress who was in that section!!". She told me to go ahead and sit down.
So....I am sitting down, unraveling my silverware and just sitting there fidgeting, watching this woman jump from one table to the next with the agility and grace of the best server I have ever seen. Jumbling coffee pots and water glasses in both of her hands and running from one end of that room to the other.
When all of a sudden....She sees me! She drops the coffee pot that she is holding on the floor!
She just stands there and stares at me!
I start to cry.....
She walks over to my table....
She says....."Why didn't you tell me you were coming?? I am so busy right now honey, I have 6 tables and two are "wet" and four are still "dry" and I need to get some food out.Just sit there and I will be back in minute ok???"
And then I woke up.........
(Was I in some restaurant in heaven or something? I don't know for sure, but it sure seemed like a real experience. Everything was so vivid. Maybe heaven is just another plain of existence where people still work and when they get hungry, they go out to eat. And it snows!! And my mom's relatives of course would be in the restaurant that she works in).
God, what a weird dream. I really miss her.
Time to get ready for work.
And yes, I am blubbering like a total idiot right now. I cant help it.
What is wrong with me???
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Hang this Guy by his Testicles Please!
ARRRRG..........
__________________________________________________________________
From the Milwaukee Journal Online Edition
10-10-2004
Man accused of beating cat into coma
Janesville - A man was arrested on allegations of beating a cat into a coma.
Janesville police said the 36-year-old man was arrested Saturday at the Rock County Jail, where he was being held for unrelated probation violations.
Veterinary hospital staff called police after the man's live-in girlfriend brought her sick cat there with broken ribs, a broken jaw, broken teeth and bruised internal organs. It was also comatose, according to police reports.
The woman told officers she had noticed the week before that the cat had stopped eating, stopped making noises and did not like to be picked up. After a few days, the cat's tongue was hanging out, police reports said.
The woman said she questioned her boyfriend, but he denied hurting the cat.
Veterinary staff said the cat has a good chance of survival.
___________________________________________________________________
Thank god that little creature stands a chance at recovering. I hope they lock his ass up for at least a year.....if not more. Cruelty to animals is worse than to humans. The animals cant defend themselves and do not understand in the least what is probably happening to them.
I gotta go hug my little girl and smother her with kisses now....
__________________________________________________________________
From the Milwaukee Journal Online Edition
10-10-2004
Man accused of beating cat into coma
Janesville - A man was arrested on allegations of beating a cat into a coma.
Janesville police said the 36-year-old man was arrested Saturday at the Rock County Jail, where he was being held for unrelated probation violations.
Veterinary hospital staff called police after the man's live-in girlfriend brought her sick cat there with broken ribs, a broken jaw, broken teeth and bruised internal organs. It was also comatose, according to police reports.
The woman told officers she had noticed the week before that the cat had stopped eating, stopped making noises and did not like to be picked up. After a few days, the cat's tongue was hanging out, police reports said.
The woman said she questioned her boyfriend, but he denied hurting the cat.
Veterinary staff said the cat has a good chance of survival.
___________________________________________________________________
Thank god that little creature stands a chance at recovering. I hope they lock his ass up for at least a year.....if not more. Cruelty to animals is worse than to humans. The animals cant defend themselves and do not understand in the least what is probably happening to them.
I gotta go hug my little girl and smother her with kisses now....
Scrappy Duex??
If there ever happened a time that my beloved little girl would unexpectadly die....I would consider this as an option for myself.
________________________________________________
Cloning a Bad Idea??
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
There are always plenty of strange sights at a major cat show: strange cats, strange owners, strange spectators. But the strangest sights at this weekend's cat show at Madison Square Garden will look perfectly ordinary. They are a pair of cloned Bengal kittens, called Tabouli and Baba Ganoush.
They also happen to be corporate cats, the property of Genetic Savings & Clone, a California company that is working with the Cat Fanciers' Association, the host of the cat show, to set up a feline gene bank. Tabouli and Baba Ganoush are, in fact, purring advertisements for cat cloning - a procedure that costs some $50,000 per cat at the moment.
Adorable as these kittens may be, they are also a truly terrible idea, one that the Cat Fanciers' Association should, by rights, have opposed. The very variety of cats on display at Madison Square Garden this weekend has been created by breeders over time out of genetic diversity itself. Even the most successful genetic crossings - pairings designed to produce a preferred characteristic - occur within the natural matrix of genetic chance. In a sense, cloning represents the end of the breeding line, the end of diversity. Well-heeled cat lovers can now pretend to have the same cat over and over again.
The Cat Fanciers' Association invited these kittens to Madison Square Garden partly to prove "that we were not so stuffy and fuddy-duddy - that we were aware of what technology has presented the animal world."
Cloned kittens may sound like a technological marvel, but you could hardly ask for a better example of the overweening sentimentality that some pet owners lavish upon their pets. The idea of cloning a kitten may somehow seem to be about the cat, but it's really only about the owner. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
_______________________________________________
So what if its only about the owner? If that is what makes the owner happy, ist that ok?
I watched a movie recently called "Godsend" about a couple who looses there 8 year old son to a tragic accident and then are approached by a Genetic Doctor and are offered the ability to "get back their son via cloning his DNA-thus having an exact duplicate of their deceased boy".
I am only a parent to a pet, but I guarentee you that if I ever had a child and I lost it, and there was the possibility of "copying" an exact duplicate...I would.
Time for bed.
Warm regards to all.
________________________________________________
Cloning a Bad Idea??
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
There are always plenty of strange sights at a major cat show: strange cats, strange owners, strange spectators. But the strangest sights at this weekend's cat show at Madison Square Garden will look perfectly ordinary. They are a pair of cloned Bengal kittens, called Tabouli and Baba Ganoush.
They also happen to be corporate cats, the property of Genetic Savings & Clone, a California company that is working with the Cat Fanciers' Association, the host of the cat show, to set up a feline gene bank. Tabouli and Baba Ganoush are, in fact, purring advertisements for cat cloning - a procedure that costs some $50,000 per cat at the moment.
Adorable as these kittens may be, they are also a truly terrible idea, one that the Cat Fanciers' Association should, by rights, have opposed. The very variety of cats on display at Madison Square Garden this weekend has been created by breeders over time out of genetic diversity itself. Even the most successful genetic crossings - pairings designed to produce a preferred characteristic - occur within the natural matrix of genetic chance. In a sense, cloning represents the end of the breeding line, the end of diversity. Well-heeled cat lovers can now pretend to have the same cat over and over again.
The Cat Fanciers' Association invited these kittens to Madison Square Garden partly to prove "that we were not so stuffy and fuddy-duddy - that we were aware of what technology has presented the animal world."
Cloned kittens may sound like a technological marvel, but you could hardly ask for a better example of the overweening sentimentality that some pet owners lavish upon their pets. The idea of cloning a kitten may somehow seem to be about the cat, but it's really only about the owner. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
_______________________________________________
So what if its only about the owner? If that is what makes the owner happy, ist that ok?
I watched a movie recently called "Godsend" about a couple who looses there 8 year old son to a tragic accident and then are approached by a Genetic Doctor and are offered the ability to "get back their son via cloning his DNA-thus having an exact duplicate of their deceased boy".
I am only a parent to a pet, but I guarentee you that if I ever had a child and I lost it, and there was the possibility of "copying" an exact duplicate...I would.
Time for bed.
Warm regards to all.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
More Fun in Politics
It’s good to see some people are able to keep their sense of humor in this extremely divisive election. Here’s another parody from JibJab that pokes an enormous amount of fun at our DC politicians. Enjoy!
Link to JibJab - then click on Good to be in DC! (requires Macromedia Flash Player)
On another note.....my two friends who are both "Bushy's" keep me looking for things that add a little debate to this very interesting election campaign.
Such is the following link:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1331/
Hope everyone had a good tuesday......
Link to JibJab - then click on Good to be in DC! (requires Macromedia Flash Player)
On another note.....my two friends who are both "Bushy's" keep me looking for things that add a little debate to this very interesting election campaign.
Such is the following link:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1331/
Hope everyone had a good tuesday......
A Murder Mystery in MY Neighborhood??
And I THOUGHT I lived in a nice little area of Racine......hmm.
The following happened 2 blocks down the road on the same street that I live on, yesterday.
I saw the people who lived in that duplex a few times over the last few years.
How sad that people arent safe in their own homes...in what one considers a safe neighborhood.
___________________________________________________________________
Bodies of 2 women found bound in Racine
Victims are mother, daughter
By SHEILA B. LALWANI and JENNIE TUNKIEICZslalwani@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 11, 2004
Racine - The bodies of two women were found Monday bound and shot inside a duplex on the city's south side.
Racine Double Homicide
Police await detectives after being called to a duplex in the 1700 block of Blaine Ave. in Racine on Monday. Police said they were looking into a possible link between the killings and a man in a car crash nearby.
Related Coverage
Video: TMJ4 News
Sgt. Bill Macemon, public information officer for the Racine Police Department, said police in Milwaukee took a man into custody Monday afternoon who may have fled from a car crash near the homicide scene in the 1700 block of Blaine Ave. on Racine's south side.
Macemon said Monday night that police had not linked the man directly to the homicide, but investigators are looking into the possibility of a link as one of several theories in the case.
Police did not release the victims' names, but neighbors identified the two as Nancy Mason, a mother of at least five children, and her eldest daughter. Macemon was told the daughter was 19 years old.
The initial rescue call indicated that the victims were found bound. A rescue report said someone in the family found the back door open, entered the home and found the two women dead. That person also found that the muzzle of the family's dog had been covered by duct tape, Macemon said.
Police did not identify a motive in the deaths.
A neighbor said one of the children told a neighbor that her sister had a gunshot wound to the arm.
The Racine County Sheriff's Department picked up the children's father from the Southern Wisconsin Center in Union Grove, where he worked, and brought him to the scene. He was not under arrest.
A 35-year-old man who lives across the street from the family was keeping the family's two youngest children in his home during the investigation. The man said the two children, both students at Knapp Elementary School, had walked into the home and had seen the bodies of their mother and sister. The man did not know if the children were the ones who called police. He said the children's eldest brother was also with them at the time.
"They walked in and had to see all that," the man said.
The man said he knew little about the family, although he had talked to them occasionally and was familiar with all of the family's children.
"They were the last family in the world you would think something like that would happen to. They stayed to themselves," he said.
April Paap, a neighbor, waited and watched from her porch. She said she had little contact with the family but remembered them because "they were always together."
A neighbor who asked to remain anonymous said it would be hard to believe if the deaths were related to a burglary.
"They didn't have anything," he said.
Neighbors said the family was very close and very quiet.
"They were harmless and good people. I've never seen them do anything wrong," said Carnell Barbee, 48, who lives a few houses down and across the street from the family. "All they did was enjoy living. They were a very close family."
Barbee said he also knew the family to be very religious.
Pauline Jackson, 60, who lives on Republic Ave., said the family was friendly, but they kept to themselves.
"They seemed like good people who wouldn't hurt anybody," Jackson said.
Jackson said the family was usually seen as a group.
"They all stayed together. If they went to the grocery store, they all went. No one was left behind," Jackson said.
Earlier in the day, a car struck a garage in the 3300 block of Republic Ave., just down the street from the duplex.
A young mother who lives across the street from the family said she was home all day and outside for much of the time. The only commotion she heard was the accident, from which the driver fled, she said.
She was shaken by the death of two of her neighbors.
"This is a good neighborhood. We all have kids here," said the woman, who didn't want her name used.
A man who works for Becker Investments of Kenosha, which owns the duplex, said the family was working to improve its situation. The mother had been home-schooling the children, he said, but he believed the youngest children were now all in public schools.
The family was behind on rent, but the rental company was trying to work with them, he said.
"They were trying to change their lives around. They were working on it, and we were trying to help them," he said.
According to state court records, the mother of the children had been charged several times with reckless endangerment of a child. Those charges were later dropped.
The incident Monday was in the same neighborhood as a 2002 double homicide in the 3700 block of Republic Ave. In that incident, a couple - Herman Petersen, 72, and wife Carol, 69 - were stabbed to death in their home after a burglary.
Kelly Wells of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
____________________________________________________________
I hope that the authorities find those responsible for this tragic event. I walked past the house earlier today and saw all the yellow police tape....was kind of errie to say the least. Those poor kids.........
The following happened 2 blocks down the road on the same street that I live on, yesterday.
I saw the people who lived in that duplex a few times over the last few years.
How sad that people arent safe in their own homes...in what one considers a safe neighborhood.
___________________________________________________________________
Bodies of 2 women found bound in Racine
Victims are mother, daughter
By SHEILA B. LALWANI and JENNIE TUNKIEICZslalwani@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 11, 2004
Racine - The bodies of two women were found Monday bound and shot inside a duplex on the city's south side.
Racine Double Homicide
Police await detectives after being called to a duplex in the 1700 block of Blaine Ave. in Racine on Monday. Police said they were looking into a possible link between the killings and a man in a car crash nearby.
Related Coverage
Video: TMJ4 News
Sgt. Bill Macemon, public information officer for the Racine Police Department, said police in Milwaukee took a man into custody Monday afternoon who may have fled from a car crash near the homicide scene in the 1700 block of Blaine Ave. on Racine's south side.
Macemon said Monday night that police had not linked the man directly to the homicide, but investigators are looking into the possibility of a link as one of several theories in the case.
Police did not release the victims' names, but neighbors identified the two as Nancy Mason, a mother of at least five children, and her eldest daughter. Macemon was told the daughter was 19 years old.
The initial rescue call indicated that the victims were found bound. A rescue report said someone in the family found the back door open, entered the home and found the two women dead. That person also found that the muzzle of the family's dog had been covered by duct tape, Macemon said.
Police did not identify a motive in the deaths.
A neighbor said one of the children told a neighbor that her sister had a gunshot wound to the arm.
The Racine County Sheriff's Department picked up the children's father from the Southern Wisconsin Center in Union Grove, where he worked, and brought him to the scene. He was not under arrest.
A 35-year-old man who lives across the street from the family was keeping the family's two youngest children in his home during the investigation. The man said the two children, both students at Knapp Elementary School, had walked into the home and had seen the bodies of their mother and sister. The man did not know if the children were the ones who called police. He said the children's eldest brother was also with them at the time.
"They walked in and had to see all that," the man said.
The man said he knew little about the family, although he had talked to them occasionally and was familiar with all of the family's children.
"They were the last family in the world you would think something like that would happen to. They stayed to themselves," he said.
April Paap, a neighbor, waited and watched from her porch. She said she had little contact with the family but remembered them because "they were always together."
A neighbor who asked to remain anonymous said it would be hard to believe if the deaths were related to a burglary.
"They didn't have anything," he said.
Neighbors said the family was very close and very quiet.
"They were harmless and good people. I've never seen them do anything wrong," said Carnell Barbee, 48, who lives a few houses down and across the street from the family. "All they did was enjoy living. They were a very close family."
Barbee said he also knew the family to be very religious.
Pauline Jackson, 60, who lives on Republic Ave., said the family was friendly, but they kept to themselves.
"They seemed like good people who wouldn't hurt anybody," Jackson said.
Jackson said the family was usually seen as a group.
"They all stayed together. If they went to the grocery store, they all went. No one was left behind," Jackson said.
Earlier in the day, a car struck a garage in the 3300 block of Republic Ave., just down the street from the duplex.
A young mother who lives across the street from the family said she was home all day and outside for much of the time. The only commotion she heard was the accident, from which the driver fled, she said.
She was shaken by the death of two of her neighbors.
"This is a good neighborhood. We all have kids here," said the woman, who didn't want her name used.
A man who works for Becker Investments of Kenosha, which owns the duplex, said the family was working to improve its situation. The mother had been home-schooling the children, he said, but he believed the youngest children were now all in public schools.
The family was behind on rent, but the rental company was trying to work with them, he said.
"They were trying to change their lives around. They were working on it, and we were trying to help them," he said.
According to state court records, the mother of the children had been charged several times with reckless endangerment of a child. Those charges were later dropped.
The incident Monday was in the same neighborhood as a 2002 double homicide in the 3700 block of Republic Ave. In that incident, a couple - Herman Petersen, 72, and wife Carol, 69 - were stabbed to death in their home after a burglary.
Kelly Wells of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
____________________________________________________________
I hope that the authorities find those responsible for this tragic event. I walked past the house earlier today and saw all the yellow police tape....was kind of errie to say the least. Those poor kids.........
Sunday, October 3, 2004
The Passion of the Bush??
The following ditty has GOT to be the best I have read yet, regarding what "The Bush Whackos" will do to make their "chosen one" look like the reborn "Messaih"......
PS: Has the world truly gone nuts?? I think so!
____________________________________________________________________
October 3, 2004FRANK RICH
The New York Times (from the internet)
Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush
You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the state of the nation.
When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the Morning."
Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.
More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet."
Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: they were separated at birth.
"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).
"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter.
The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God.
"I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."
The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility.
Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own.
It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it.
A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."
The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.)
The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism."
In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."
"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."
Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh.
A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.
___________________________________________________________________
Ayecurrumba.....I tell ya....whoever this writer is....he is right on the money. But I predict that there will be quite a few copies of this DVD sold. In fact I am thinking of buying a few to give to some of my friends who "still think" that our president these next four years should be this "second self proclaimed Jesus".
Time for bed.
PS: Has the world truly gone nuts?? I think so!
____________________________________________________________________
October 3, 2004FRANK RICH
The New York Times (from the internet)
Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush
You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the state of the nation.
When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the Morning."
Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.
More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet."
Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: they were separated at birth.
"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).
"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter.
The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God.
"I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."
The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility.
Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own.
It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it.
A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."
The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.)
The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism."
In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."
"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."
Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh.
A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.
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Ayecurrumba.....I tell ya....whoever this writer is....he is right on the money. But I predict that there will be quite a few copies of this DVD sold. In fact I am thinking of buying a few to give to some of my friends who "still think" that our president these next four years should be this "second self proclaimed Jesus".
Time for bed.
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