why. (burning man from la times).
plz replace ppl on earth thank you.
Sep 30, 2008
Sep 24, 2008
beggar bugger semantics
more from our friends in ksa
Director of Social Affairs in Makkah Ali Al-Hanaki said most of the children selling chewing gum or tissues are in fact beggars in disguise.
He said a special committee was formed to check such cases and added that families of beggar children would be deported.
Director of the anti-begging office in Jeddah, Saad Al-Shahrani, said 98 percent of all beggars were foreigners.
Director of the office of the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice Sheikh Ahmed Al-Ghamdi said any parents who allow their children to go out in the streets for selling or begging at this age cannot be true Muslims.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=114744&d=25&m=9&y=2008&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom
Director of Social Affairs in Makkah Ali Al-Hanaki said most of the children selling chewing gum or tissues are in fact beggars in disguise.
He said a special committee was formed to check such cases and added that families of beggar children would be deported.
Director of the anti-begging office in Jeddah, Saad Al-Shahrani, said 98 percent of all beggars were foreigners.
Director of the office of the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice Sheikh Ahmed Al-Ghamdi said any parents who allow their children to go out in the streets for selling or begging at this age cannot be true Muslims.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=114744&d=25&m=9&y=2008&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom
Sep 23, 2008
sarah palin kept in the closet till november
from cs monitor
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/09/23/why-wont-sarah-palin-talk-to-the-press/
Why won’t Sarah Palin talk to the press?
By Jimmy Orr | 09.23.08
At one time, Joe Biden was the mystery man. Not getting any press. Not making any noise. That wasn’t of his own doing, of course. He was just being ignored. John McCain, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin were just too newsworthy.
Not recently, however. Biden’s been all over the news. Some of his appearances have been positive for the campaign and some have made the Obama campaign wince, grimace, and imitate the Homer Simpson, “Doh!”
But he’s been out there. Sure, he dramatized the helicopter incident. And sure he flip-flopped on the McCain disco commercial. But he’s also fired up the base at different gatherings and has spoken forcefully about Obama’s agenda and slammed McCain into next year. And he’s given the press whatever they wanted.
Dick Cheney
We can’t say the same thing about the Republican nominee for vice president. In fact, it’s the polar opposite.
It’s like she’s disappeared in to Al Gore’s infamous lockbox. Either that or she’s pulling off the greatest impersonation ever of Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location.
We changed our minds
Today, for example, the traveling press was told there would be a print reporter and a producer in the pool at the beginning of the meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But then the McCain campaign changed their collective minds and said video and still cameras only. The networks said the equivalent of “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” They weren’t going to cover the event at all.
High noon
So a standoff ensued. It was like the Old West. Just like the scene from Tombstone when Doc Holliday meets Johnny Ringo.
In the end, the McCain campaign relented, asked the press to be their Huckleberry and allowed a CNN producer entry. The networks get their footage. The campaign gets photos and videos of Palin with a foreign dignitary.
On the surface this all seems like it could be avoided. Especially because the condensed press was in the room for a grand total of 29 seconds. Why all the drama? “It was just a miscommunication,” said one Palin staffer.
Since being selected to the McCain ticket, Palin has participated in just three interviews and has yet to hold a press conference. She is scheduled to speak with Katie Couric later this week.
Beatles, U2, Pink Floyd
The fact is, Palin is the equivalent of a Pink Floyd show (minus the chemicals). They sell out every time, and so does Palin. She brings in tremendous crowds where she goes - reportedly drawing 60,000 people in Florida over the weekend.
John McCain’s chief honcho in New York, Representative Peter King, compared her to some of the immortals of rock ‘n roll.
“She’s become like the Beatles or U2,” King said. “She’s got a certain celebrity status now – people want to see her; they want to hear her.”
Attica! Attica!
The press feels the same way. They don’t have idolization thing going but they want access. And it showed this afternoon around the series of tubes.
Andrew Sullivan is creative in his criticism calling the McCain campaign’s handling of Palin “sexist” citing a different set of rules are applied for media access to Palin and “devising less onerous debate rules for a female candidate.” His advice to the beleagured press pool? Revolt!
“Fight back, you hacks! Demand access,” Sullivan writes. “Demand accountability! It’s our duty. If we cannot ask questions of a total newbie six weeks before an election in which she could become president of the country, then the First Amendment is pointless.”
Scott Conroy over at CBS grouses that this is not the first example of poor communication skills on behalf of the McCain campaign.
In Orlando on Sunday, Palin had another off-the-record stop at an ice cream shop, but the pool producer who was assigned to be in Palin’s motorcade was not notified when the candidate departed to get ice cream, and so there was no editorial presence at the event.
ABC’s Kate Snow reports frustration:
Palin has not held a news conference since being selected as McCain’s running-mate, nor taken questions from her traveling press corps, frustrating journalists assigned to cover Palin for the election.
Kenneth Vogel at Politico says things are getting testy:
Sarah Palin’s relationship with her traveling press corps went from barely existing to downright chilly Tuesday, when the two sides briefly engaged in a standoff over journalists’ access to Palin’s photo ops on the sidelines of the United Nations meetings here.
Mark Silva over at The Swamp says the campaign is trying to avoid a repeat of an incident last week.
The McCain/Palin campaign’s effort to stifle editorial coverage of the candidate’s meetings with world leaders comes a week after CBS News asked Palin an impromptu question about the AIG bailout, while Palin made an off-the-record stop at a Cleveland diner.
“After the Cleveland event, a Palin staffer told CBS News that questions “weren’t allowed.”
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/09/23/why-wont-sarah-palin-talk-to-the-press/
Why won’t Sarah Palin talk to the press?
By Jimmy Orr | 09.23.08
At one time, Joe Biden was the mystery man. Not getting any press. Not making any noise. That wasn’t of his own doing, of course. He was just being ignored. John McCain, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin were just too newsworthy.
Not recently, however. Biden’s been all over the news. Some of his appearances have been positive for the campaign and some have made the Obama campaign wince, grimace, and imitate the Homer Simpson, “Doh!”
But he’s been out there. Sure, he dramatized the helicopter incident. And sure he flip-flopped on the McCain disco commercial. But he’s also fired up the base at different gatherings and has spoken forcefully about Obama’s agenda and slammed McCain into next year. And he’s given the press whatever they wanted.
Dick Cheney
We can’t say the same thing about the Republican nominee for vice president. In fact, it’s the polar opposite.
It’s like she’s disappeared in to Al Gore’s infamous lockbox. Either that or she’s pulling off the greatest impersonation ever of Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location.
We changed our minds
Today, for example, the traveling press was told there would be a print reporter and a producer in the pool at the beginning of the meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
But then the McCain campaign changed their collective minds and said video and still cameras only. The networks said the equivalent of “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” They weren’t going to cover the event at all.
High noon
So a standoff ensued. It was like the Old West. Just like the scene from Tombstone when Doc Holliday meets Johnny Ringo.
In the end, the McCain campaign relented, asked the press to be their Huckleberry and allowed a CNN producer entry. The networks get their footage. The campaign gets photos and videos of Palin with a foreign dignitary.
On the surface this all seems like it could be avoided. Especially because the condensed press was in the room for a grand total of 29 seconds. Why all the drama? “It was just a miscommunication,” said one Palin staffer.
Since being selected to the McCain ticket, Palin has participated in just three interviews and has yet to hold a press conference. She is scheduled to speak with Katie Couric later this week.
Beatles, U2, Pink Floyd
The fact is, Palin is the equivalent of a Pink Floyd show (minus the chemicals). They sell out every time, and so does Palin. She brings in tremendous crowds where she goes - reportedly drawing 60,000 people in Florida over the weekend.
John McCain’s chief honcho in New York, Representative Peter King, compared her to some of the immortals of rock ‘n roll.
“She’s become like the Beatles or U2,” King said. “She’s got a certain celebrity status now – people want to see her; they want to hear her.”
Attica! Attica!
The press feels the same way. They don’t have idolization thing going but they want access. And it showed this afternoon around the series of tubes.
Andrew Sullivan is creative in his criticism calling the McCain campaign’s handling of Palin “sexist” citing a different set of rules are applied for media access to Palin and “devising less onerous debate rules for a female candidate.” His advice to the beleagured press pool? Revolt!
“Fight back, you hacks! Demand access,” Sullivan writes. “Demand accountability! It’s our duty. If we cannot ask questions of a total newbie six weeks before an election in which she could become president of the country, then the First Amendment is pointless.”
Scott Conroy over at CBS grouses that this is not the first example of poor communication skills on behalf of the McCain campaign.
In Orlando on Sunday, Palin had another off-the-record stop at an ice cream shop, but the pool producer who was assigned to be in Palin’s motorcade was not notified when the candidate departed to get ice cream, and so there was no editorial presence at the event.
ABC’s Kate Snow reports frustration:
Palin has not held a news conference since being selected as McCain’s running-mate, nor taken questions from her traveling press corps, frustrating journalists assigned to cover Palin for the election.
Kenneth Vogel at Politico says things are getting testy:
Sarah Palin’s relationship with her traveling press corps went from barely existing to downright chilly Tuesday, when the two sides briefly engaged in a standoff over journalists’ access to Palin’s photo ops on the sidelines of the United Nations meetings here.
Mark Silva over at The Swamp says the campaign is trying to avoid a repeat of an incident last week.
The McCain/Palin campaign’s effort to stifle editorial coverage of the candidate’s meetings with world leaders comes a week after CBS News asked Palin an impromptu question about the AIG bailout, while Palin made an off-the-record stop at a Cleveland diner.
“After the Cleveland event, a Palin staffer told CBS News that questions “weren’t allowed.”
Sep 20, 2008
Sep 19, 2008
टिमोथी एगन nyt
September 17, 2008, 9:06 pm
Moo
People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.
What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.
Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!
Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.
Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.
Let’s start with those cows. A few years ago, I met Harvey Baskin, one of the last of Alaska’s taxpayer-subsidized dairy farmers, at his farm outside Anchorage. The state had spent more than $120 million to create farms where none existed before. The epic project was a miserable failure.
“You want to know how to lose money in a hurry?” Harvey told me, while kicking rock-hard clumps of frozen manure. “Become a farmer with the state of Alaska as your partner. This is what you call negative farming.”
That lesson was lost on Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.
This is Heckuva-Job-Brownie government, Far North version.
On a larger scale, consider the proposal to build a 1,715-mile natural gas pipeline, which Palin touts as one of her most significant achievements. Private companies complained they couldn’t build it without government help. That’s where Palin came to the rescue, ensuring that the state would back the project to the tune of $500 million.
And let’s not talk about voodoo infrastructure without one more mention of the bridge that Palin has yet to tell the truth about. The plan was to get American taxpayers to pay for a span that would be 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, and about 20 feet short of the Golden Gate — all to serve a tiny airport with a half-dozen or so flights a day and a perfectly good five-minute ferry. Until it was laughed out of Congress, Palin backed it — big time, as the current vice president would say.
Why build it? Because it’s Alaska, where people are used to paying no state taxes and getting the rest of us to buck up for things they can’t afford. Alaska, where the first thing a visitor sees upon landing in Anchorage is the sign welcoming you to Ted Stevens International Airport. Stevens, of course, is the 84-year-old Republican senator indicted on multiple felony charges. He may still win re-election thanks to Palin’s popularity at the top of the ballot.
Alaskans will get $231 per person in federal earmarks — 10 times more than people in Barack Obama’s home state. That’s this year, with Palin as governor.
If Palin were a true reformer, she would tell Congress thanks, but no thanks to that other bridge to nowhere.
Yes, there is another one — a proposal to connect Anchorage to an empty peninsula, speeding the commute to Palin’s hometown by a few minutes. It could cost up to $2 billion. The official name is Don Young’s Way, after the congressman who got the federal bridge earmarks. Of late, he’s spent more $1 million in legal fees fending off corruption investigations. Oh, and Young’s son-in-law has a stake in the property at one end of the bridge.
Some of these projects might be fully explained should Palin ever open herself up to questions. This week she sat down for her second interview — with Sean Hannity of Fox, who has shown sufficient “deference” to Palin, as the campaign requested.
One question: When Palin says “government has got to get out of the way” of the private sector, as she proclaimed this week, does that apply to dairy farms, bridges and gas pipelines in her state? I didn’t think so.
Moo
People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.
What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.
Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!
Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.
Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.
Let’s start with those cows. A few years ago, I met Harvey Baskin, one of the last of Alaska’s taxpayer-subsidized dairy farmers, at his farm outside Anchorage. The state had spent more than $120 million to create farms where none existed before. The epic project was a miserable failure.
“You want to know how to lose money in a hurry?” Harvey told me, while kicking rock-hard clumps of frozen manure. “Become a farmer with the state of Alaska as your partner. This is what you call negative farming.”
That lesson was lost on Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.
This is Heckuva-Job-Brownie government, Far North version.
On a larger scale, consider the proposal to build a 1,715-mile natural gas pipeline, which Palin touts as one of her most significant achievements. Private companies complained they couldn’t build it without government help. That’s where Palin came to the rescue, ensuring that the state would back the project to the tune of $500 million.
And let’s not talk about voodoo infrastructure without one more mention of the bridge that Palin has yet to tell the truth about. The plan was to get American taxpayers to pay for a span that would be 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, and about 20 feet short of the Golden Gate — all to serve a tiny airport with a half-dozen or so flights a day and a perfectly good five-minute ferry. Until it was laughed out of Congress, Palin backed it — big time, as the current vice president would say.
Why build it? Because it’s Alaska, where people are used to paying no state taxes and getting the rest of us to buck up for things they can’t afford. Alaska, where the first thing a visitor sees upon landing in Anchorage is the sign welcoming you to Ted Stevens International Airport. Stevens, of course, is the 84-year-old Republican senator indicted on multiple felony charges. He may still win re-election thanks to Palin’s popularity at the top of the ballot.
Alaskans will get $231 per person in federal earmarks — 10 times more than people in Barack Obama’s home state. That’s this year, with Palin as governor.
If Palin were a true reformer, she would tell Congress thanks, but no thanks to that other bridge to nowhere.
Yes, there is another one — a proposal to connect Anchorage to an empty peninsula, speeding the commute to Palin’s hometown by a few minutes. It could cost up to $2 billion. The official name is Don Young’s Way, after the congressman who got the federal bridge earmarks. Of late, he’s spent more $1 million in legal fees fending off corruption investigations. Oh, and Young’s son-in-law has a stake in the property at one end of the bridge.
Some of these projects might be fully explained should Palin ever open herself up to questions. This week she sat down for her second interview — with Sean Hannity of Fox, who has shown sufficient “deference” to Palin, as the campaign requested.
One question: When Palin says “government has got to get out of the way” of the private sector, as she proclaimed this week, does that apply to dairy farms, bridges and gas pipelines in her state? I didn’t think so.
Sep 13, 2008
Gov. Palin’s Worldview
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html?em
NYT
As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking.
If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.
It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.
What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.
The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.
One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”
We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.
The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.
But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.
Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”
Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”
Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.
This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.
In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.
NYT
As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking.
If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.
It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.
What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.
The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.
One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”
We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.
The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.
But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.
Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”
Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”
Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.
This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.
In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.
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