World News: Dec 15, 2010

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

To pee, or not to pee...

TO PEE OR NOT TO PEE.
I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes & the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit.

In order to get that paycheck, in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem).

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.

So, here is my question: Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their BUTT----doing drugs while I work.

Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

I guess we could call the program "URINE OR YOU'RE OUT"!

Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don't. Hope you all will pass it along, though. Something has to change in this country - AND SOON!

P.S. Just a thought, all politicians should have to pass a urine test too! AMEN!

How long would they last???

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JP : Good Stuff For Your Soul................

Good Stuff For Your Soul

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JP FW:Job in Motorway Police - Junior Petrol Officer FA-FSc

Aas received

From: pindi-islamabad@googlegroups.com [mailto:pindi-islamabad@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ~<<Eng Nis Awan>>~
Sent: 15 December 2010 11:07
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Subject: [Pindi-Islamabad:62948] Job in Motorway Police - Junior Petrol Officer FA-FSc

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JP : SQuba, The Swimming car!!!

sQuba The Swimming Car!!!

Three decades ago James Bond (then enacted by British star Roger Moore) wowed the world with a car that could 'fly' under water in the movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Only, it was animation and not an actual scene.
But Frank M Rinderknecht, the 52-year-old automobile visionary and boss of Swiss automaker Rinspeed, has turned a dream into reality with his 'sQuba.'
Rinspeed sQuba is the most exciting thing at this year's Geneva Motor Show and is creating many a ripple.

sQuba is the world's first real submersible car that can 'move like a fish underwater'.

It can dive up to 32.8 feet (10 mt) below the surface of the water and can move at a sedate 1.8 miles per hour.

The sQuba has an open cockpit for 'safety reasons' (so that people can get out easily anytime in case of an emergency). The occupants of the car have to breathe compressed air through built-in scuba masks.

sQuba is an electric car that uses rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and 3 electric motors for propulsion. It is a zero-emission car as documented by the rotating license plate in the rear. It produces no exhaust emissions.

The 'sQuba's' filling station is the water reservoir.? It is no surprise that the vehicle features powerful yet energy-saving LED lighting technology.

The first car that could drive underwater was Quandt's Amphibicar, built in 1968. Only 3,878 were produced but many are still being driven on roads.

Then Gibbs Technologies came up with Gibbs Aquada in 2004 which Virgin boss Richard Branson used to break the speed record for crossing the English Channel.
However, the sQuba seems to be the most exciting of them all.

To drive on the roads, the sQuba 'relies on a stainless coil-over suspension from KW automotive and large Pirelli tires mounted on custom-made forged light-weight wheels from AEZ with 17- and 18-inch diameters.'

Technical data

Measurements

Length ----- 3'785 mm
Width ----- 1''940 mm
Height ----- 1'117 mm
Wheelbase ----- 2?300 mm
Track front ----- 1?470 mm
Track rear ----- 1?520 mm
Ground clearance ----- 130 mm
Empty weight ----- approx. 920kg

Performances

Top speed ----- > 120 km/h
Acceleration 0-80 km/h ----- 7.1 sec
Water speed ----- > 6 km/h
Under water speed ----- > 3 km/h
Dive depth ----- 10 m

Engines

Street ----- Electric
Power output ----- max. 54 kW at 4'500 /min
Torque ----- 160 NM at 1'500 /min
Water - Stern propellers ----- Electric
Power output ----- 2 x 800 W
Diving - bow jet drives ----- Electric
Power output ----- 2 x 3.6 kW Rotinor
Batteries ----- Lithium-Ionen
Voltage ----- 6 x 48 Volt

Propulsion

Power train ----- Rear wheel drive
Gearbox ----- R - N - F
Suspension
Chassis ----- Steel
Body panels ----- Carbon Nano Tubes
Seating capacity ----- 2
Front suspension ----- Double wishbone
Rear suspension ----- Double wishbone
Dampers/springs ----- KW automotive
Steering ----- Rack & pinion

Tyres

Front tyres ----- Pirelli P Zero 205/40 R17
Front wheels ----- AEZ 7.5 x 17"
Rear tyres ----- Pirelli P Zero 225/40 R18
Rear wheels ----- AEZ 8 x 18"
Miscellaneous
Air supply ----- 1 x 15 liter + 1 x 18 liter ScubaPro
Laser scanner ----- Ibeo
Lubricants ----- Motorex

-=======================================-

Reagan, the Bushes, and Saddam Hussein

Reagan, the Bushes, and Saddam Hussein
by Russ Baker, Posted December 10, 2010
This article appeared in the August 2010 edition of Freedom Daily

Throughout the Reagan-Poppy Bush years, the White House had been an eager backer of Saddam. The two administrations had provided millions of dollars in aid and had permitted the export of U.S. technology that Iraq used to build a massive arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons. George W. Bush would repeatedly express outrage over Saddam's 1988 gassing of the Kurds, neglecting to mention that Donald Rumsfeld, now his defense secretary, had visited and talked business deals with Saddam back in the '80s and that the Reagan and Poppy Bush administrations continued to support the Iraqi dictator after the gassing. The larger goal, however, was a so-called balance of terror that would prevent any country from gaining ascendancy in the strategic Gulf region, and so the United States actually provided materiel and intelligence to both sides in the brutal, nearly decade-long Iraq-Iran war, in which over a million people died.

In a paradoxical twist, when W. sought to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he cited those same weapons without mentioning that his own father had helped to provide them. He also failed to mention what many proliferation experts correctly believed: that most or all of those weapons had been destroyed as part of Saddam's scale-down after the imposition of the no-fly zones and President Clinton's own threats to invade.

Surprisingly, the United States's secret relationship with Saddam Hussein goes back even further a remarkable 40 years. This information was published by the wire service UPI in April 2003, shortly after the invasion, while U.S. forces were hunting for the reviled Saddam Hussein, but it was generally ignored. The report noted,

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.... While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

The article noted that Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy and participated in a U.S.-backed Cold War coalition. But when Qasim decided to withdraw from the alliance and began warming up to the USSR, CIA director Allen Dulles publicly declared that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim.... In Beriut, the CIA paid for Sadddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course.... Even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug a cutthroat."

... During this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy.... In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Ba'ath party coup.... But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Ba'ath party was hunting down Iraq's communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down.

Saddam Hussein is hardly the only dictator whom the United States essentially created, long supported, and then turned on when circumstances changed. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, a long-time CIA asset, was another. Poppy, as Ford's CIA director and then as Reagan's vice president, had fostered a relationship with the notorious drug trafficker during the '70s and '80s, even keeping him on the U.S. payroll at more than $100,000 a year. But Noriega did not always do as the Americans wanted. While Noriega sold arms and provided intelligence to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, he refused to supply weapons to the U.S.-backed Contras to help overthrow the Managua government.

According to Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Noriega insisted to him that he had had the best of relations with Bush for years. But Noriega told Birns that at an airport meeting in Panama shortly before the invasion, he had had a spat with Vice President Dan Quayle when he refused to commit Panama to a more confrontational role in fighting against Washington's Central American enemies. Birns, who was in Panama as Noriega's "honorable enemy" guest only hours before the U.S. invasion and was arguably the last American to meet with Noriega before U.S. troops arrived, told me that the Panamanian strongman was bitter because after years of servitude to Washington's various regional crusades, Bush was unceremoniously dumping him.

As former head of French intelligence Count Alexandre de Marenches puts it in his memoirs,

If it's proved that Noriega was on the US payroll, then it was a shameful mistake.... Never use shady characters.... I expressed this philosophy to George Bush.... Now years later, the worst nightmare has come to haunt the Americans a protracted and messy jury trial following a lethal and embarrassing military operation in Panama all designed to get rid of the rat they should never have hired in the first place.... If you do, after all, hire the rat, and are ultimately forced to get rid of him, then by all means do so quickly and permanently.

Though Jimmy Carter had agreed to return the Canal Zone to Panama by 2000, that did not mean Poppy was willing to give up influence in the tropical republic. At the end of 1989, Poppy ordered an invasion of the country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the imposition of a more compliant government.

Twisting arms

For W., one benefit of turning attention toward Iraq and touting Saddam as a major threat was to take the world's eye off more than a few potentially embarrassing balls. What, for example, had led to 9/11? What about the U.S. role during the 1970s and 1980s in creating a global mujahideen force as surrogates in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union? Or the objective of actually fostering the USSR's Afghan invasion in the first place by baiting the Soviets into what Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped would be quicksand for the Communists? These global gambits, acknowledged in memoirs of key decision makers, including Brzezinski, have seldom been widely discussed or generally understood.

Then there was the politicization of intelligence, which began under Poppy Bush's CIA directorship with his creation of the "Team B" that sought to refute the agency analysts who had accurately determined that the USSR was already in decline. Some intelligence analysts had also warned only to be ignored about the risk of creating an extremist Islamic force armed to the teeth.

And there was the simple fact that 15 of 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudis. What would or should the Saudi government have known about these people? And what about the deep and long personal relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family? All the public ever learned, thanks in good part to the film Fahrenheit 9/11, was how W.'s administration showed remarkable diligence in spiriting Saudi royals out of the United States right after 9/11 an operation about which the administration has maintained silence.

And what of the manner in which the 9/11 attack itself was handled most notably the failure to act on intelligence leads in advance and the competing accounts of the activities of Vice President Cheney in those crucial minutes and hours after the attack? And what of the mystery of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's equally peculiar actions, including his odd decision to "assist" at the scene of the Pentagon attack rather than assume command? There were so many questions, and all they did was undermine the confidence in the competency and candor of the administration.

Absent a distraction, the media and a few public intellectuals were bound to raise such potentially embarrassing topics. Indeed, some did but a war always takes center stage.

Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, New Yorker, and many other publications. This is an excerpt from his book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Copyright 2009 by Russ Baker. Reprinted by permission.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1008e.asp

It is not those who do not vote, but ...

"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves" – Thomas Sowell.

Re: ACTION ALERT: Tell the Senate and House to Pass DADT Repeal NOW!

Tommy,

Keith is right. "Your" article would not pass a Lesbian sniff test... it is pure plagiarism. On top of being purposefully inaccurate and therefore a lie it is a purposefully inaccurate plagiarized lie.

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 12:36 AM, Keith In Tampa <keithintampa@gmail.com> wrote:

Funny, a guy by the name of Adam Bink, (Communist, South Dakota) wrote the very same article as you did Tom:

http://prop8trialtracker.com/2010/12/14/house-dems-to-introduce-dadt-repeal-companion-bill-vote-expected-tomorrow/

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Make Bill of Rights Day America’s Anti-Politician Day

Make Bill of Rights Day America's Anti-Politician Day
by James Bovard, December 14, 2010

Wednesday, December 15, is the 219th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Bill of Rights Day should be the preeminent Anti-Politician Day on the American calendar. Instead, it has become simply another pretext for rulers to delude the ruled.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, "A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth ... and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference." Yet, some of the Founding Fathers such as Alexander Hamilton fought tooth-and-nail against codifying any limit on politicians' power. And the second president John Adams did all that he could to destroy any restraints on the feds' power to suppress criticism of the government.

President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the first Bill of Rights Day, which occurred on December 15, 1941 a few days after FDR's dream came true and the United States was simultaneously at war with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. FDR called the Bill of Rights "the great American charter of personal liberty and human dignity," but proceeded to label the rights "privileges" and then listed only "privileges" contained in the First Amendment. FDR then asserted that "free schools" could not exist without the Bill of Rights, though there was nothing about education in the first 10 amendments. The Second World War provided a blank check for FDR to seize almost boundless power at home and abroad, and he never let the Constitution stand in his way.

Subsequent politicians have done their best to make Americans view the Bill of Rights as simply another government handout. President Bill Clinton, in an April 19, 1994, television interview, declared, "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."

The Bill of Rights did not give freedom to Americans; instead, the Bill of Rights expressly prohibited the government from violating pre-existing rights of the people. The Bill of Rights was not "radical" according to the beliefs of Americans of that era; instead, it codified rights both long recognized in English common law or that had been carved out over centuries of resistance to English tyranny. The Founding Fathers had difficulty getting the Constitution approved in many states not because it was "radical" in protecting people's rights from the government but because it was perceived as concentrating too much power within the federal government to violate the rights of the people.

President Obama is upholding the tradition of invoking the Bill of Rights to muddle Americans' political thinking. When he formally proclaimed Bill of Rights Day last December, he declared that "fidelity to our fundamental values is one of America's greatest strengths.... As Americans, we must keep striving to live up to our founding ideals." Obama made this declaration after signaling that all the high-ranking Bush administration officials who authorized torture and other war crimes would face no federal prosecution.

In his Bill of Rights Day proclamation this year, Obama declared: "The United States will always speak for those who are voiceless, defend those who are oppressed, and bear witness to those who want nothing more than to exercise their universal human rights. Our Bill of Rights protects these fundamental values at home, and guides our actions" abroad.

In the same season that Obama is making such declarations, his administration is also insisting that it is entitled to kill Americans without any due process, without any judicial proceedings, simply because some government officials suspect those Americans are "involved" with terrorist groups.

Presidents and members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution and thus to respect the rights recognized and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Insofar as the feds trample the Bill of Rights, the government is illegitimate. Insofar as the government perennially violates the Bill of Rights, it becomes an aggressor against the American people.

At this point, what we really need is a constitutional amendment to require the federal government obey the Constitution. As long as the rulers are permitted to scorn the rightful limits on their power, our political system consists of little more than elective dictatorship.

Americans need to remember Bill of Rights Day but for the proper reason. Americans must recognize that the government poses the greatest peril to their liberties. December 15 is the day to stop and count the ways that politicians are ravaging your rights and to take action to turn the tide against Leviathan.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com1012h.asp