Hate so silly it could make you sick
Via
Instapundit A
Tennessee Editorialist Speaks out,
Small, pitiful groups of perverse traitors cloaked in a warped, hate-filled and degraded version of Christianity are tirelessly traveling across America, cruelly protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq.
They are scheduled to stop in Middle Tennessee today, in Smyrna and Ashland City, to dishonor the solemn services and add to the horror and grief of those who mourn Staff Sgt. Asbury F. Hawn of Lebanon and Spc. Gary Reese Jr. of Ashland City. The Army National Guardsmen served together in the 278th Regimental Combat Team and died in an enemy attack Aug. 13 in Iraq.
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., will be there, not to spread the comforting Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to spew a disgustingly vulgar and crude message of gay hatred while celebrating the death of U.S. soldiers.
This evil little congregation, led by Fred Phelps, gained infainfamy for showing up at the funerals of homosexuals to taunt family and friends and to promote their own unique brand of hatred. This summer they started picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in battle with placards that say, "We hate gays" and "Thank God for dead soldiers."
Their Web site, http://www.godhatesgays.com/, promotes the protests in crude press releases that say, "They turned America over to fags; they're coming home in body bags."infamy for showing up at the funerals of homosexuals to taunt family and friends and to promote their own unique brand of hatred. This summer they started picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in battle with placards that say, "We hate gays" and "Thank God for dead soldiers."
On the bright side apparently someone hacked the forwarding and the
God Hates site is forwarded to a
God Hates Phelps site
Google Chat
Google this week introduced their versiom of Chat. I hadn't used chat clients in a while, but I thought I would try it out. It is very spartan and doesn't have a load of features. It doesn't play with other formats at all and you can't have group chats. It doesn't even have search capabilities. Still the beauty of it may just be in the simplicity. It does support voice, but I haven't tried it out yet, and probably won't. The quality of the voice is getting good reports though. One needs a Gmail account to use Gtalk, and the program does monitor your gmail account for new emails. Gmail is only available via invitation which one can get by emailing
me with first and last name information. On the whole I like it, its simple downloads and loads quickly.
Coming to A DNS Server near you
Liberty's blog has been a lot of fun, and grown tremendously. We've covered Hurricanes and elections. Justice injustice, and even Pelicans. All in all its been a lot of fun, at Zero cost. Blogger is free, and I've successfully used SBC's provided web space to keep it going.
After 2 years I invested in a domain name and web space. I'm running out of space at http://pages.sbcglobal.net/liberty.freedom With the new site I will be free to post more photo's and not try to skimp on some other features. Folks will be able to type out the web address a little easier, Whats tough though is that lots of folks have been real kind with their linkages. and promoting the site is not one of the fun tasks of blogging. In the long run its going to be worth it. The new site will be at
http//:libertysblog.com Right now there isn't much/anything, and it may take a couple of days before the dns servers all get activated.
Irony from the Left and Right
In Crawford the Protestors put up crosses to represent the fallen, as part of their protest of the Iraq war. Some Guy mows them down with his pickup in protst.
Is it me? but the thought of leftist putting up crosses, and a right winger mowing them down is a more than a little ironic. The neighbors never seemed to mind the stench of the pig farm that was the Bush Ranch before W bought it, but they are complaining about Cindy stench these days.
As President Bush's neighbors seek relief from protesters by way of the county commission, one local resident took matters into his own hands and now has been charged with criminal mischief. McLennan County resident Larry Northern, 59,
faced $3,000 bail Tuesday after witnesses said he swerved his pickup truck in and out of a display of crosses set up on the side of the road by anti-war protesters.
The crosses represented the U.S. troops who have died in Iraq, with individuals' names on each. Northern was charged with criminal mischief over $1,500 and under $20,000. Cindy Sheehan, who has led the protest outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, said she was very upset by the vandalism. "I just want to say that what happened last night is very disturbing to all of us and it really should be very disturbing to America, because no matter what you think about the war, we should all honor the sacrifices of the ones who have fallen," said Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq in August 2004."What we saw here last night was a sacrilege ... five of
those crosses are those of my friends," added protester Charlie Anderson, who said he is a veteran of the Iraq war. But Sheehan and her group are largely blamed for creating the hostility brewing among the president's neighbors, who have appealed to the McLennan County Commission to erect a barrier that could prevent anti-war protesters from congregating on the road outside Bush's ranch. More than 60 people signed a petition sent to the commissioners asking them to expand the no-parking zone that bans cars within a few hundred feet of the ranch. The effect would be to push the anti-war protesters, who have pitched tents and set up port-a-potties on the winding two-lane road, about seven miles away from the neighbors' properties into the town of Crawford. Some residents said they worry about the safety of children waiting for school buses in the area. Schools began classes Tuesday.
"All those of us that live in that area and in that community and our children also have civil rights, and we do feel that those are being seriously compromised at this time," said John Laufenberg, who attended a Tuesday meeting of the commission and refuted concerns raised by protesters that expanding the parking ban would violate civil rights.
Northern's alleged aggression isn't the first by area residents. On Sunday, Bush neighbor Larry Mattlage fired a shotgun, in part to sound his frustration with the constant guests in his neighborhood. Police say Mattlage broke no laws and so he was not arrested. No one was hurt in either incident. Bush said he sympathizes with Sheehan but has made no indication that he will meet with her. Sheehan did meet with Bush in June 2004, at a gathering at Fort Lewis, Wash., for grieving families.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Edwards , wife of former vice presidential candidate John Edwards, wrote a letter of support for the protesters that urged others to call the president and demand he meet with Sheehan."The president's cavalier dismissal of Cindy Sheehan is emblematic of a greater problem. This is a mother who raised her son to love his country enough to serve. ... And when the worst does happen, when
the world comes crashing down and she puts the boy she bore, the boy she taught,
the boy she loved in the ground, what does that government say to her? It says we'll do the talking; we don't need to hear from you," Edwards wrote.
Rob has something about this
A long time Passing
Some time off from blogging. Its been a while longer than I expected.
Mostly this sabbatical has been about readjusting time. There is only so much time in a week. So much time in the day. ( 9 hours at work + 2 hours driving). Other projects come into our lives and something just has to give.
The other projects are:
Getting a handle on Visual Basic .NET, an almost impossible task, but I did get a product out that works somewhat reasonable.
Beta testing Agent 3.0. What sucks for a blogger is that I'm tied to a none disclosure agreement. Its released now and I like it it, but it doesn't have all the features it sorely needs yet. Multi Server Email !!
Exercise and good health. I bought a tread mill. It sucks up at least 30 minutes a day of my time. I still eat poorly I love good food, but hopefully I will drop a few pounds.
Slow Blogging
The weather has been warm, the news is mostly about missing pretty white women, and I've been trying to get up to speed on Visual Basic .NET All this leads to me not doing much Blogging. Its going to take me a couple of weeks to back up to speed, and I'll try to post when I can.
On Requiring an ID to Vote.
Claire or the
Jarbo Bayou Times pleads:
The vast majority of Texans feel that a person should provide a photo ID in order to cast a vote. They also believe that those who commit election fraud should go to jail. Call your State Senator at 512-463-4630 tell them to protect your right to a fair election vote to provide a photo ID.
I must confess I don't understand the controversy. I would think everyone would want to ensure the "one voter one vote" concept. Apparently some Democrats believe they deserve more.
The Death of a Muslim Woman:
In responce to my outrage over the temper tantrum the Muslims displayed ove the Newsweek Story, Thrane drops a link via email
The Death of a Muslim Woman: "The Whore Lived Like a German" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE
In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women?
The shots came from nowhere and within minutes the young Turkish mother standing at the Berlin bus stop was dead. A telephone call from a relative had brought her to this cold, unforgiving place. She thought she would only be gone for a few minutes and wore a light jacket in the freezing February wind. She had left her five-year-old son asleep in his bed. He awoke looking for his mother, who, like many Turkish women in Germany, harbored a secret life of fear, courage and, ultimately, grief. Now her little boy has his own tragedy to bear: His mother, Hatin Surucu, was not the victim of random violence, but likely died at the hands of her own family in what is known as an "honor killing."
Hatin's crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family's adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame -- the embrace of "corrupt" Western ways. Days after the crime, police arrested her three brothers, ages 25, 24 and 18. The youngest of the three allegedly bragged to his girlfriend about the Feb. 7 killing. At her funeral, Hakin's Turkish-Kurdish parents draped their only daughter's casket in verses from the Koran and buried her according to Muslim tradition. Absent of course, were the brothers, who were in jail.
The crime might be easier to digest if it had been an archaic anomaly, but five other Muslim women have been murdered in Berlin during the past four months by their husbands or partners for besmirching the family's Muslim honor. Two of them were stabbed to death in front of their young children, one was shot, one strangled and a fifth drowned. It seems hard to fathom, but in the middle of democratic Western Europe -- in Germany, a nation where pacifism is almost a universal mantra -- murderous macho patriotism not only exists but also appears to be thriving. It may even be Germany's liberalism -- and its post World War II fear of criticizing minority cultures -- that has encouraged ultra-religious families to settle here.
The link is continued onto a second page.
The Bad Guys Update:
OK, Where is the outrage over the idiots rioting over a story about a Koran getting flushed. All the anger is placed at Newsweek, who simply made a mistake. Does anyone actually read that rag anymore? The Islamist, who kill over a minor story a half world away, are the real bad guys and are the folks we should be outraged at.
Seeing the actions of those motivated by the Koran, I can understand why one might flush one down the toilet. It would seem such flushing would be hazardous for ones plumbing. I think shredding it and using it for kitty litter is a better idea.
Update:
Lesley at Plum Crazy is one Blogger who understands my outrage at blaming Newsweek for the slaughter by Muslims in protest of the Newsweek article.
Dear People Blaming Newsweek for the Terrorist Attacks
Posted by Lesley
When did you start carrying the multiculturalist banner? I'm all in favor of respecting other people's cultures, for the most part, but, hi, hello? Killing 17 people in response to a book (maybe) being flushed down a toilet? Not an acceptable response. Had this occurred in response to the brouhaha over the Piss Christ, would you all be sitting here blaming the artist? Actually, maybe you would. Which would be frightening. Because, see above - Not an acceptable response.
Thanks.
P.S. Not an acceptable response
Being PC.
NewsWeek reports that some of the guards on Guantanamo Bay had left the Koran on a Toilet and someone may have even flushed one down the toilet. Some idiots in Afghanistan hear about this and they go on a tear and kill some people.
Rueters expounds:
The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.
On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.
The only problem is that the Koran flushing probably never happened.
We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our
sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its
midst," Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S.
newsstands on Monday.
The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition
that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told
Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators
flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees
talk.
But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be
certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and
that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
Whitaker told Reuters that Newsweek did not know if the reported toilet incident
involving the Koran ever occurred. "As to whether anything like this happened,
we just don't know," he said in an interview. "We're not saying it absolutely
happened but we can't say that it absolutely didn't happen either."
So how did this incident that didn't happen get into the pages of NewsWeek?
MSNBC provides some insite:
At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.
Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week's protests took place. "But insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."
Michael Isikoff is pretty well respected, and no one expected that the piece he wrote would be so inflamatory. Still I can't understand why Secratary Rice is getting so defencive abouyt it.
She wants to punnish anyone that pisses, shits on or flushes a Koran.
Ms Rice said “disrespect for the Holy Quran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States.”
“We honour the sacred books of all the world’s great religions. Disrespect for the Holy Quran is abhorrent to us all,” she added. Assuring the Muslims that the Bush administration will not ignore the reported incident, she said: “Our military authorities are investigating these allegations fully. If they are proven true, we will take appropriate action.”
I have the urge to find a Koran and use it as a liner for the cats litter box.
All That is Good
In Texas and the rest of the Country. The Republicans can take responcibilty for all the good things that have happ[ened to goverment, but theyu must accept the blame for all that has gone wrong with our goverment.
In the past several Years The Republicans have taken over, The legislature the
executive and even most of the courts are controlled by the Republicans they are in control/ The Democrats on the other hand have passed into irrelevancy. They don't have any power and are inconsequencial in my state, and in the US goverment. We voted for Republicans because they promised Honesty and integrity, smaller goverment, and lower taxes.
Staffing Problems Contributed To BP Plant Blast
The lawyers, victims, and
Click2Houston believe that staffing issues may contributed to the Texas City Refinery explosion. BP had been trimming down employees, using attrition and early retirement offers. Many of the positions that have been eliminated are older experianced staff. One would naturally wonder if this didn't have something to do with the explosion.
Staffing problems, lack of supervision and communication breakdown contributed to a blast that killed 15 people and injured more than 100 at a Texas City BP refinery in March, two surviving workers allege in a lawsuit.
Problems at the plant included understaffing in a critical control room and undertrained or inexperienced workers and personnel who didn't perform their job adequately in the area that exploded, according to the amended suit filed Wednesday in Galveston County State District Court.
It was filed on behalf of Miguel Arenazas and David Crow, JE Merit contractors who suffered broken backs in the blast while assigned to work maintenance turnaround of a nearby unit.
"Our continued investigation leads us to believe that there was a systematic breakdown in communications, in operator training and in management supervision of the startup procedures," said the workers' Houston lawyer, Rob Ammons.
Although the suits seem to be all aimed at deep pocketed BP. There could be some partial liability with JE Merit, the contracting company. Communication is at least a two way process, and they should have had some input on plant startup, allocation of manpower, and location of of equipment, and temporary buildings. Ultimatly it is BP's responcibility to ensure communication and safe startup of the plant. BP isn't talking and is in denial of any wrong doing. This isn't how one learns from thier mistakes.
BP spokesman Hugh Depland declined to comment on lawsuit. The company has denied negligence in the blast.
Supervision seems to be missing and there was no evacuation alarm when the hydrocarbons were released. The contractors claim they weren't even aware of the impending startup.
The supervisor of the refinery unit that exploded wasn't present during the section's startup, which is considered a dangerous time in a plant's operations, the lawsuit said. The two workers also claim a qualified substitute wasn't left in charge, key operators were allowed to leave the refinery at the startup time and only one board operator was assigned to the control room.
Crow is among workers who say they didn't know the startup was happening and heard no warning alarms. The workers question why they and other nonessential employees were allowed to be at the site during the startup.
They also question why a trailer was placed so close to the isomerization unit before it exploded.
Opportunity Hi Centered
The little robot that could is
Stuck in the SandNASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has run into a sandy snag. All of its six wheels have sunk in deep into a large ripple of soil.
Rover operators are optimistic they can extricate the robot from its jam, having gotten dug in before. But ground controllers will need time to wheel back on top of the soil again.
Time will also be spent figuring out what’s different about the soil that has bogged down Opportunity, hoping to keep this problem from occurring down the road.
The Mars machinery had been cruising southward across the open parking lot-like landscape of Meridiani Planum, full of larger and larger ripples of soil. Opportunity has been en route to its next stopover, Erebus crater, nestled inside an even larger crater known as Terra Nova.
The NASA engineers are sounding optimistic about getting Opportunity's 6 wheels unstuck. and we sure are cheering for it. I know its just a machine, but Opportunity has shown us spirit and a sticktoitness that has made fans of us terrestrials.
The Scoop on the Imus Contessa breakup
Its been interesting
following the fallout of the Imus and Contessa Brewer fiasco.
