Jul 4, 2009

Independence Day 2009



...testing remote advance posting

Jul 2, 2009

Ain’t comin’ out ‘till the firecrackers stop

British comedy actress Mollie Sugden dies at 86

Mollie Sugden was one of a select group of British performers to achieve national treasure status. She was noted for her portrayal of fearsome battleaxes.

Sugden was best known for playing the bossy sales lady Mrs. Slocombe (pictured) in the long-running BBC sitcom Are You Being Served.

The innuendo-laden television comedy was successfully exported for several years and is still being shown on public broadcasting stations in America.


Mollie Sugden is shown above at the funeral of her Are You Being Served co-star Wendy Richard earlier this year. Richard lost her long battle with cancer at age 65.

Link

Minnesotan’s must be sooo proud

(click on picture to enlarge)

Link

Jul 1, 2009

Watchful eye


A man vacuums near a replica of the face of the Statue of Liberty in the statue's visitor center in New York City.

Tourists will be allowed to visit the top of the statue again beginning July 4th.

Baby gorilla at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha


This 12-day-old gorilla was born to Timu, the world’s first test tube gorilla.

Go after ACORN says judge

A judge in Pennsylvania says somebody has to go after ACORN.

A district judge in southwestern Pennsylvania, who held another ACORN worker for trial on election law violations, urged prosecutors to go after the real culprit, the organization that employed him - ACORN.

"Somebody has to go after ACORN," Senior District Judge Richard H. Zoller said about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

The judge said it's happening all over the country. “All you have to do is turn on the television," he said, referring to voter registration fraud charges brought recently against ACORN and its workers in Nevada.

More of the story here.

Worlds longest yard sale

This gigantic four-day yard sale is held every year beginning on the first Thursday of the month of August (this year it will be August 6-9)

This sale is 654 miles long - from West Unity, Ohio to Gadsden, Alabama - along the highway 127 corridor.

One of the photos below shows a life-size Darth Vadar - just the thing for your front entry hall.

Link





Franken declared winner giving Democrats filibuster proof Senate majority

Al Franken (pictured) was given a Senate victory in Minnesota giving the Democrats their magic 60-vote majority.

The Franken win in Minnesota is reminiscent of an election in the Pacific Northwest five years ago.

Remember the 2004 gubernatorial election in the state of Washington? That’s when Christine Gregoire was declared the winner after three recounts. She was behind in the first two recounts until additional ballots were mysteriously discovered in King County.

Al Franken has followed the same path in his Minnesota Senate race against Norm Coleman. After recounts that even produced ballots mysteriously found in the trunk of an election workers car. In on county there were more votes for Franken than registered voters in on the county.

Mr. Franken has managed to pull a “Gregoire” in Minnesota.

As Joseph Stalin once said - elections are not decided by the people who cast the ballots - elections are decided by the people who count the ballots.

One blogger suggested it may be appropriate for Al Franken to publicly thank ACORN for his win.

We reported on the Al Franken saga four times in the past. Two of those reports can be found here and here.

More on the Franken win here and here.

Meet Al Franken the new Minnesota Senator

(click on picture to enlarge)

Senator Al Franken, Democrat from Minnesota

Jun 29, 2009

Racket demolished during tennis tournament


Belgian Kristof Vliegen breaks his racket during a match against Croatian Ivan Ljubicic during the Monte-Carlo ATP Masters Tournament.

Do they ever get their socks clean after playing on a clay court?

Supreme Court overturns Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court

Can’t you just hear conservatives saying, “there, take that Mr. Obama!”

The Supreme Court today narrowly ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said they were denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor (pictured) that had come to play a large role in the consideration of her nomination for the high court.

The city had thrown out the results of a promotion test because no African Americans and only two Hispanics would have qualified for promotions. It said it feared a lawsuit from minorities under federal laws that said such "disparate impacts" on test results could be used to show discrimination.

In effect, the court was deciding when avoiding potential discrimination against one group amounted to actual discrimination against another.

Without leaning on affirmative action, Obama and his handlers could not possibly have selected Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee.

Above: firefighters react to SC decision.

Her rulings are simplistic, some of them were reportedly only one or two sentences long. Her rulings were often not bound by case law but by what she thinks the law should say.

As with many other left-wing judges, she was prone to make law from the bench rather than interpret law.

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is actually rather pathetic. By her won admission, Sotomayor didn't have the intellectual capacity to get into Law School without affirmative action.

Now, her nomination to the Supreme Court is a classic case of an affirmative action president nominating an affirmative action judge to serve on the highest court of the land.

Link

Bernard Madoff: stripped of stolen riches and given life in prison

An article at the link below reports:

Convicted Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff (pictured) was sentenced to 150 years in prison Monday for a fraud so extensive that the judge said he needed to send a message to potential imitators and to victims who demanded harsh punishment.

Scattered applause and whoops broke out in the crowded Manhattan courtroom after U.S. District Judge Denny Chin issued the maximum sentence to the 71-year-old defendant.

The judge said a conservative estimate of the amount Madoff cost his victims is more than $13 billion.


Bernard Madoff owned several homes including a $6.5 million penthouse in a building on Manhattan’s Upper Eastside shown above.


Now he resides in this cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center prison in New York awaiting transfer to a prison where he will spend the rest of his life.

Before sentencing, one victim said, “Life has been a living hell. It feels like the nightmare we can't wake from.”

Another said, “He stole from the rich. He stole from the poor. He stole from the in between. He has no values. He cheated his victims out of their money so he and his wife Ruth could live a life of luxury beyond belief,”

Link

Most think they are not old regardless of age

A survey by Pew Research Center found that most people say they feel younger than their calendar age.

The average age considered "old" by respondents was 68 -- but there were real differences in perception driven by the respondents' own ages:

More than half of those under 30 say the average person becomes old before 60.

Middle-aged respondents say it's closer to 70.

Those aged 65 and older say "old" is not until 75.

"What you find is the older people are, the more people push back the age that is old," says Russell Ward, a sociologist who focuses on aging at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and who was not involved in the survey. "It's more in your future. You're not there yet."

But isn’t it how a person feels that determines when a person thinks they are old?

We all know people who look and act much younger than their biological age.

I have often said (with tongue-in-cheek) that sometimes I feel much younger than my calendar years. Other times, however, I get the urge to ship a case of prune juice to the nearest nursing home along with a signed note saying, “hold for arrival.”

Seriously, the secret of aging is to stay young at heart no matter how old the rest of your body is.

Link

Countless Russians jobless as Putin closes casino’s

Vladimir Putin has decreed that every legal casino and slot-machine parlor in Russia will be shut down.

It will be one of the largest mass layoffs in recent Russian history.

Putin’s anti-vice plan will put hundreds of thousands of people out of work in the midst of a global economic crisis.

The Kremlin has offered the gambling industry only one option for survival: relocate to four regions in remote areas of Russia, as many as 4,000 miles from the capital.


The potential marketing slogans -- Come to the Las Vegas of Siberia! Have a Ball near the North Korean Border! -- may not sound inviting, but that is in part what the government envisions.

None of the four regions are prepared for the transfer, and no casino is expected to reopen for several years leaving the industry’s workers out on the street indefinitely.

Link

Climate Change Bill could haunt Democrats in future elections

As liberal Democrats struggled to win a narrow, party-line approval of climate change legislation, they had to be haunted by a critical question: has the political climate changed since 1993?

Under pressure from the Clinton administration, many House Democrats reluctantly backed a proposed B.T.U. tax pushed by a young inexperienced president.

The ill-fated B.T.U. bill was intended to tax each unit of energy consumed.

When the bill later went down in flames in the Senate, many Democrats in the House got burned when it was seized upon as a campaign issue by Republicans, who took control of the House the next year.

Now that another equally absurd bill, promoted by another young inexperienced president, has squeaked by the House, how many Democrats who voted for it are looking over their shoulders thinking déjà vu?

Whether Democrats realize it or not, the 2010 election campaign officially began with the narrow passage of this climate change bill in the House.

Link

Jun 28, 2009

TV pitchman Billy Mays dead at age 50

Fox News reported this morning:

Television pitchman Billy Mays (pictured), who built his fame by appearing on commercials and infomercials promoting household products and gadgets, died Sunday.

Mays, 50, was found unresponsive by his wife inside his Tampa, Fla., home at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, according to the Tampa Police Department.

Mays reportedly had a very pleasant personality and was very approachable.

However, if you ever watched late-night TV, you knew a different Billy Mays. He would pop up every few minutes in yet another commercial, bellowing as if he thought the whole world has gone a little deaf. That’s probably I why never could get myself to buy OxiClean.

No matter how nice Billy Mays was off camera, he had me reaching for the mute button on the remote more than any other single person.

Link