Lesbian President?

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I personally don't have anything against lesbians. In fact, girl on girl has got to be one of the very best turn ons.

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But I don't think the country is ready for a lesbian to be president.

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El Paso, Texas

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Pablo (aka ZZ Top) taking it easy in the El Paso, Texas heat. Smelling the roses and making a little musica.
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In your own mind imagine the Moody Blues song with words that go, "Give just a little bit more, take a little bit less, from each other tonight."



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Hillary Thatcher

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I recently retired and moved back to America after working for the last 15 years in Europe. I was the General Manager of the European division of a multinational food processing company. An American colleague of mine who I worked with over there has now retired to Venice, Italy. He sent me an e-mail this morning in which he suggests that maybe a woman is just what America needs right now.
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Please try to look past his language. Actually he is a highly eductated man with a very open mind:
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"On the other hand Thacher was a complete bitch that makes Hilary look like a girl scout and she saved a failing nation. Merkel is hated in Germany but she is doing OK too.
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I think a woman will do what America needs. Health care, education, care for the elderly, a bit less war (perhaps) Thacher sent England to war against Argentina for a worthless piece of sheep Herder land or is there oil under it?
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I have been a supporter of Obama, and I still like him a lot. But maybe what we need to overcome the racist, ignorant, elitist Republicans is a mean, dishonest, street fighter with her bloody fangs bared.
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This is not the America I believe in, but maybe it has come to that.
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The Wall

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I beg to disagree with Robert Frost. Good walls don't in fact make good neighbors. If you are a good neighbor you don't need much of a wall marking your property line.
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I have a piece of the Berlin Wall here in my house on the east side of El Paso, Texas. I personally self-collected it in Berlin. The USSR learned that this wall didn't work. And the wall being built between The United States of America and The United States of Mexico won't either.
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In the name of protecting the country from another 911 type attack, the very worst form of jingoism, xenophobia, and racism is surfacing.
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I have lived in Europe twice. The first time was for a few years in the 1970's. The Vietnam War was raging and I was lucky to be sitting in an office with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany. To go to The Netherlands or France you had to stop and show your passport. It took maybe 5 minutes. Unlike here in America, where it can easily take you an hour waiting in line to get past U.S. Customs when returning from Mexico.
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Many years laters I lived in The Netherlands for 15 years working as the European General Manager for a multinational food company. When I got there you still had to stop at the border and have your passport stamped, and each little European country had its own currency. Within a few years you could cross the national borders without stopping, and most of the European countries had traded in their national currencies for the Euro common currency.
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The prophets of doom said it would not work. But it did. Almost with zero problems.
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We don't need to be spending outrageous amounts of money building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Not when such a large percentage of our own people do not have health insurance.
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No, Bush is as lost in this matter as he is in foreign policy. He is such a loser.
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But Hillary just keeps bashing away. She is so dishonest and rude. If there ever was a year when the Republican bums would be voted out for sure, this was it. And now due to her insistence that the country owes the presidency to her, we just might have another Republican president.
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Idiocracy

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This is a really funny movie. Honest.

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Especially for those dumb asses who refuse to use punctuation or proper capitalization when writing sentences.

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The Scorpions

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I have a wonderful niece. She is beautiful and a lot of fun.

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Her husband sometimes kids her a little, pretending that she likes the musical group called The Scorpions (which she detests).

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I like my niece a lot, but I have to admit: I also really like The Scorpions. Talk about HIGH ENERGY!!!!!

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YouTube has a lot a videos of them: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_If_4UwgepQ

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Safe Sex

Government Corruption

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If anyone has any doubts about the ill effects of allowing even minor amounts of corruption in government workers or elected officials, just explain to them what is happening in Mexico.
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Mexico is a delightful country. Rich in natural resources, with a people who embody hard work and quiet dignity. And the country is slowly imploding as a result of many decades of government corruption.
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25% Less Sodium

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Someone on the internet is trying to teach me a lesson.

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The problem is, I am such a slow learner than I don't even know for sure what I did wrong. I have had the same problem with a couple of my wives. Either way, the people I have managed to piss off are fairly intelligent. They have gotten computers from at least 35 different countries to innundate me with junk e-mails. So far today has been a sort of a record, in that I have gotten almost 50,000 of these so called SPAM e-mails.

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It is fun to look at the country of origin: Egypt, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Kasahkstan, Czech Republic, Estonia, Malaysia, Jordan, etc. I've logged 35 countries so far. A classic example of globalization.

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Maybe the problem is that I believe in the concept of freedom of religion. Including the right to think that all ORGANIZED religions are a bunch of hogwash (at the very best). And in execution in real time many religions are a horribly negative concept.

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The famed swindler Billy Sol Estes was serving time in jail near here for a while, and he worked day release for a friend of mine. When asked how he liked the day job, Billy Sol supposedly said to my friend, "Just another day in jail."

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That is kind of how I view these SPAM e-mails.

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Owl Attack

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This morning my little black doggie "Inu" and I were out walking in the Chihuahuan desert near El Paso, Texas.

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Inu walked past what turned out to be a burrowing owl's house. He did not look inside or do anything to the hole. But apparently the resident did not welcome company on a Sunday morning.

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The owl flew out of the hole, gained some altitude, then took a nice swooping dive towards Inu. His talons were less than six inches (15 cm) above Inu's back when he realized that it might be wise to not get involved with an animal of this size utilizing physical violence. So he employed the classical pilot's go-around maneuver of applying full power and doing everything possible to immediately gain altitude.

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Inu gave the owl the same moves that Obama gave Hillary the other night. Just brushed the attack right off his back. Just no big deal at all!

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Noctilucent Clouds

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Noctilucent clouds were only fairly recently discovered. They are extremely high thin clouds. About 50 miles (85 km) high. They are so high that not even weather balloons can reach them.

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Scientists used to think that water based clouds could not exist at such a high altitude where the atmospheric pressue is so low. But now they know they do. Noctilucent clouds are made of water ice crystals.

These clouds are so thin that they are not visible in daylight. The only time one can normally see noctilucent clouds is when the sun is well below the horizon, i.e. deep twilight.


LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud
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Battle of Juarez

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Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden in Scotland back in 1746. I intended to do a blog entry on that.
And here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culloden
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But a much more important issue has come to the forefront. There is a wild west battle going on just a few miles from my house between the Drug Lords, the clean police and the corrupt police, and Mexican state government, and the Mexican Federal Government.
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Ironically yesterday I had a couple of men working at my house doing some landscaping. It turns out that the helper is a Juarez policeman. Just to get by financially he is moonlighting in El Paso doing manual labor.
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The New York Times has published an excellent and timely article on what is going on just across the border from El Paso, Texas U.S.A. This is a very important issue and I would encourage all to read this article.
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/americas/16mexico.html
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Angela Merkel

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MERKEL'S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION


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Angela Merkel is the first female German Chancellor (prime minister). Helmut Kohl referred to her as "the girl."
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And for a woman in her mid fifties she has a pretty nice set of hooters. This is not photoshopped, this is real. Here she is talking with the prime minister of Norway.


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The American Economy

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George Soros is one of the wealthiest and most intelligent men that I know of. Not only is he a billionaire investor, he also is a prolific author. He has out a new book which at the moment is only available electronically on the internet. In a few weeks it will be available in paper form. It is called “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means"

If you go to You Tube there is a very brief video with him telling a little about the book: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CxO5BggW2mg

The conventional wisdom in the year 2008 is that governments make terrible decisions regarding how to spend money. Centralized control of the decision making process has been proven ineffective in the USSR, Cuba, and the other communist/socialist economies.

But what only a few visionary people have begun to see is that markets which are completely free and unregulated also make terrible decisions regarding how to spend money. Over the last 50 years or so, those of us in the west who have done some study in economics, have fallen under the spell of a false assumption. It is normal to believe that markets seek equilibrium. That they will overshoot a little on either side, but eventually will find the best way to allocate resources.

That markets seek equilibrium is unproven. In fact, history shows us that just the opposite is true.

Markets which are completely unregulated go from boom to bust. This was shown true in the 1800’s, the 1930’s, and now after decades of belief in the sanctity of the market we are beginning to see that the boom-bust cycle of unregulated markets is inevitable. And in general, the people who are hurt the most in these busts are the people least able to get by. The poorest people.

So we have learned that excessive government regulation is destructive. And now we are learning that insufficient government regulation is just as destructive.

The question becomes, how do we regulate markets without destroying their innovativeness and dynamism? Certainly there is no question that the regulators have to be squeaky clean. Any hint of corruption, bribery, or under the table dealings will ruin it all.

One thing is certain: The U.S. Government, and the Federal Reserve in particular, have relied almost exclusively on regulating the growth of the money supply by controlling the interest rates given on loans to big banks. This monetarist approach is fundamentally based upon this now proven incorrect assumption that unregulated markets will seek equilibrium rather than going from boom to bust.

Most of the trouble that the economy is facing right now is attributable to years of this Reagan economic theory that says if you reduce taxes and reduce the scope of the Federal Government, everyone will prosper. We now see that the middle and working classes in fact do not prosper from this idea. The wealthy folks do, but not the common working man.

Much of the country’s economic base (manufacturing) has now gone overseas to escape laws regarding child labor, minimum wages, on the job safety, and the laws of the 1970’s which tried to keep the air breathable and the water drinkable.

The government should have imposed import duties on all products made overseas which applied tariffs to compensate for these Mexican, then Chinese companies which polluted horribly and did not treat their workers like human beings. But because everyone was enthralled with the idea of deregulation of the markets, the U.S. Federal Government didn’t do this.

Throughout the history of mankind there has been this same type of conflict between the wealthy property owners and the serfs or slaves. In the 1930’s this conflict came out into the open. What we are seeing right now is really no different.

A majority of the Americans who have followed the “rules” by getting a decent education and working really hard are in trouble now. The market value of their house is lower than the amount they owe on their mortgage. They have very little (or zero) savings, and their high interest rate debts like credit cards and car loans are almost choking them.

One or two months being out of work and most folks would be in real trouble.

I bring to the table an interesting perspective. For 30 years I was successful in business. I fully believed in the market economy and how lazy and stupid almost all government workers were. In college and graduate school I took a lot of economics and accounting.

My first real job was working as a Pension Consultant, auditing pension plan trust funds. I did this for 5 years, working for everything from one to three person professional corporations to multi-thousand unionized companies. I learned a lot and am really grateful for this opportunity.

Then for almost 26 years I worked my way up the ladder in a manufacturing company. Assistant plant manager, then Operations Manager, Plant Manager, and for the final 15 years of my career the General Manager of the European Division of a multi-national food processing (manufacturing) company.

Over this long career I fought plenty of battles with unreasonable, power-mad regulatory jerks regarding work place safety, environmental rules, food safety, corporate taxation, etc. I was 100% plugged into the business view of the best way to run an economy.

A strange thing happened when I moved to Europe though. I found myself living and working in a culture where people believed in their government. Yes, the taxes were higher than in America, but the services provided by the government were excellent.

When the governmental food safety inspector came in, unlike in America he did not want to make General by shutting us down. He genuinely wanted to work with us to help us make incremental improvements. He did not have the adversarial attitude that OSHA and the FDA had in America.

It was generally accepted by all citizens that any society which had a large number of people who did not have access to the health care system was a brutal society. I found that although most people admired parts of the American society, they strongly looked down on big parts of the American system. From the perspective of being in the U.S.A. we see this as anti-Americanism. And we see that it is continuing to grow.

From the perspective of people living in more civilized societies (like Canada, Australia, England, Germany, France, Holland, etc.) the American society has just plain blown it. The U.S.A. has thrown away so many great opportunities to make this country even better. And now the foreigners are genuinely sad to see America on the decline. And it is a fairly rapid decline at that.

So what is the solution? It is not just one item. It is complex and it will be hard work. But a decent first step would be to vote out all the corrupt elected official bums.

Democrats can be just as corrupt as Republicans, so one needs to be careful. An essential first step is to make certain that EVERYONE living in America has health care. Universal health care. Citizens, visitors, everyone.

The next step is to stop relying on unregulated markets to solve the country’s problems.

Free trade agreements are fine. As long as they have provisions incorporated into them which impose import duties to bring the price of these foreign made goods up to what they would be if the foreign companies obeyed the same rules for child labor, workplace safety, healthcare and pensions, and environmental protection that American companies have to.

Then laws need to be enacted which make sure that ALL workers in America earn a decent wage which includes health care for the worker and their families, and a government guaranteed retirement program which will allow them to retire in dignity with financial security.

During the last 25 years there has been inadequate progress in women’s rights, racial discrimination, fuel economy in the transportation sector, and protection and improvement of the environment.

The government needs to focus its attention on these issues. And quickly. Or Americans will begin seeing more and more parallels between the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the rise and fall of the United States of America.
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In the well respected German newspaper Der Spiegel today they made the following observation: "The credit-financed consumer boom of recent years is coming to a painful end. Today's American Way of Life has no chance of surviving the coming years undamaged. "
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This article is sober, it is well reasoned, and it bears reading by all well educated people: LINK: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,547317,00.html
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Article entitled: A Wall Streeter Becomes A Fan Of Regulation
LINK: http://tinyurl.com/6k2lon
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God Bless America

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A friend sent me by e-mail a neat video of a parachutist unfurling a gigantic American flag. And then they played the national anthem. I got all patriotic and a bit teary eyed.
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Then after thinking about it a bit I sent him this e-mail in response:
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Dear Bob,

That was amazing. And I am patriotic. I did my time honorably in the U.S. Army. Gonna be buried at Ft. Bliss national cemetery. Tend to get a little teary eyed saluting the flag.

But its a bunch of shit. We are pledging allegiance to an idealized version of the USA. The real life George Bush USA ignores and abuses basic civil rights.

In America right now the rich mutha fuckers keep paying lower and lower taxes, the poor folks don't have reasonable opportunities for securing decent jobs, and hard working fuckers in their 50's are routinely cast aside like dog shit.

So many other countries provide all of their citizens with basic human needs like universal health care. Even fucking France for heavens sake....

Sometimes it makes me absolutely ashamed to be an American.


Pablo
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One Man, One Vote

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The American form of Democracy has been in a state of evolution since the country was established. In the not so distant past you could not vote unless you were a property owner. And women and blacks were not allowed to vote.
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These glaring problems have finally been corrected, but it looks to me like we still have a ways to go.
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In the presidential election process it seems that the voters do not necessarily get to make the choice after all. For example, Al Gore got substantially more votes than Bush did. This fact is not in dispute by anyone.
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Now we are all learning about super delegates and even delegates from the election process who are changing their allegiances and their votes. So it is indeed very possible that the candidate who the people vote for in the primary election may not end up being the one which is on the ballot in the general election.
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One almost expects this sort of back room politics from the Republican party, but seeing these sorts of anti-democratic games being played openly in the Democratic party is not encouraging.
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The Olympic Games

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I have known two different people who won medals in the Olympic Games.
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One was a lady named Tineke Bartels who competed in a couple of different games in dressage. I've been to her house many times, so I got to see her silver medal.
LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt1ZH6rp-v8&feature=related
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The other peson I know who has won Olympic medals is Anky van Grunsven. She won a gold medal in dressage. And then did it again winning another gold medal in the following Olympic games. An amazing rider. She may well be the finest dressage rider ever.
LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7gtqOhGT4o&feature=related
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Back in 1972 I was living in Frankfurt, Germany and got the chance to go to the summer Olympic games in Munich, Germany.
LINK: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3266/2313067398_e0d6d6883c.jpg
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This was where the palestinian terrorists killed all the Jewish athletes. In a way this was the beginning of the modern era of all out violence, indiscriminate suicide bombings, etc..
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The recent anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, and the violent protests against the Olympic torch is London, Paris, and San Francisco made me think. I agree with the Dali Lama. Violent protest is outdated and inappropriate. But it should be well within everyone's rights to express one's opinion and protest in a non-violent manner.
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Muslim Martyrs

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Click on the picture and it will enlarge.
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Clinton Wealth

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Since the year 2000 former president Bill Clinton and his wife have made $109,000,000. No wonder he looks so happy. It is hard to make that kind of money even as a drug kingpin.

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Yes, one hundred and nine million dollars. More than $100 million in less than 10 years. This is a little obscene when they both claim to be the champions of the lower middle class, blue collar working person.

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Do you think all this money was earned just because the Clintons are decent, honest, hard working people? Of course Bill made most of this money.

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Now it becomes crystal clear why his wife didn't leave him even when he publically humiliated her by having oral sex with that little fat girl with the blue dress. Do we really want to have to deal with this fellow and all the baggage he carries with him? If his wife gets elected as president does anyone believe that he will just stay quietly in the background? This is just like Putin becoming prime minister now that he can't be president any more.

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LINK: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-taxes5apr05,1,1574372.story

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Telescopically Blown Away

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I just spent the most wonderful evening.
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My 8 inch Dobsonian reflector came in yesterday. I assembled it and aligned the mirrors with a laser collimator yesterday. Unfortunately it was windy and overcast last night. Today I adjusted the 8x50 finder scope so that it was aligned with the main telescope. The telescope has a 2 inch eyepiece and a Crayford focuser that works super.
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I just can’t believe how great this telescope is. At about 9:00 p.m. I pointed it at the nebula in Orion and got a fantastic show. Good heavens, there it was, just like you see in the professional photographs or those made by the Hubbell telescope. And through the haze and light pollution made by 2 million people too.
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After I marveled at the nebula in Orion for 5 or 10 minutes I moved the telescope a few feet (to be out of the light from the streetlight directly in front of my house) and pointed it at the planet Saturn. Once again I was not disappointed at all. Unbelievable show! I only got one 2 inch eyepiece with the telescope which has a really wide field of view. In a few days I should get a kit with several eyepieces, two of which provide more magnification, and some filters. This evening I could almost pick out the different rings in Saturn, but not quite. Maybe with light filters and a bit more magnification.
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So after I had marveled at Saturn for 10 or 15 minutes I turned the telescope North towards the big dipper, Ursa Major. Looking at the handle, the next to the last star is the double one Mizar. Completely clear. One big one and one small one.
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Gosh I am just blown away. And this is the first time out with the telescope.
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Martin Luther King

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot 40 years ago today in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. And this many years later we still have a strong racial divide in the United States of America.
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His father was a Christian pastor. He studied systematic theology and at age 26 King earned his Ph.D. from Boston University. He had a terrific command of the English language and was an excellent orator. Martin Luther King with his philosophy of civil disobedience and non-violence in trying to end racial discrimination will go down in history as one of the people most responsible for the successes of the civil rights movement.

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LINKS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7330165.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King

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Super Obama Girl Video

This is really funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiMa2Fe-ZQ

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Geert Wilders Is Not Right Wing

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Dutch politician Geert Wilders may be many things, but he is not the right-wing populist he is accused of being. What the debate over his film "Fitna" reveals most clearly is the West's cowardice toward Islam.

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Geert Wilders is self-confident to the point of vanity and stubborn to the point of sacrificing himself. But he's not a right-wing populist.

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For one thing, he's a radical liberal. For another, what he's doing at the moment is extremely unpopular. Six years ago, Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an animal rights fanatic, was also called a "right-wing populist." He was indeed very popular -- not because he was "right-wing" but because he insisted on drawing attention to things that the traditional elites of Dutch society had steadfastly ignored.

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All of the above is from today's Der Speigel. This is a really fascinating article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,544478,00.html

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