God Bless the Firefighters

You may have heard about this incident a few days ago here in the St. Louis area.

A young firefighter-paramedic, Ryan Hummert arrived at the scene. Ryan never got a chance to save a life that day. He was killed before he could do anything. Two officers were also gunned down, one a former school resources officer, well liked by the children he had worked with.

This occurred just blocks away from where I work. Many of the officers, firefighters, and paramedics I work with each day responded to this incident. I never met Ryan. At least I don't remember if I did. Our mall is surrounded by many communities which, when we call, all respond to help us in our times of need.

I ask that you pray for Ryan's family at this difficult time. His father had been Mayor of Maplewood and his son followed in his footsteps in service to the community. Such is the unexpected life of a first responder. You never know what will happen. You just have to keep going and hope that what you do will help.

It is believed that the owner of the house where the shots came from, 52 year-old Mark Knobbe, died in his house after setting it on fire. Human remains, now positively identified as Knobbe were recovered, alone with the remnants of three long guns. Knobbe had been estranged from his family and was a neighborhood recluse. No one knows what happened to set him on his course that day. We only know he did do it and now we have lost a good man.

Remember a firefighter in your prayers today.

How the electorial map might look...

America has an interesting system in which we do NOT directly vote for our president. We instead vote for electors who then vote for president. This archaic system was devised due to the distances and poor communication that existed in the era when the Constitution was wirtten. It also presupposed that the averave bumpkin farmer was unable to think for himself. While there have been attempts to repeal this bizarre system, all have failed.

So, the game has been, what will the electorial map look like for the upcomming election. The LA Times has an interesting site which allows you to put up your own sceneraio as to how the electorial map of the US might look like. This is my take on the map:

Sportsmanship of life.

The idea today is that people need to win, not enjoy the game. There are a lot of people that need to experience life like this. Life is a game where all of us need to practice sportsmanship.

Now I've seen everything!

Yes there is such a thing as a Scottish Jew! Appologies to all my readers of the Jewish persuasion, but I jsut couldn't resist. This is from "The Forward" which is the Jewish Weekly online.

Sound the Bagpipes:
Scots Design Jewish Tartan

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Thu. Jul 17, 2008

AUTHENTIC: Rabbi Mendel Jacobs displays a certificate from the Scottish Tartans Authority and a piece of fabric featuring the design of the first official Jewish Tartan.

Rabbi Mendel Jacobs was never much of a kilt man. Although he is the only Scottish-born rabbi living in Scotland, he had always preferred suits to the traditional dress of his home country. Until now. The Scottish Tartans Authority recently registered the only official Jewish tartan, which was designed with Jacobs’s input. He plans to wear a kilt in the Jewish Tartan pattern to his sister’s wedding in November.

Tartan is the Scottish word for “plaid.” Traditionally, various clans or regions each had a unique pattern; the MacDonalds or the MacKenzies would pass down the pattern of their ancestors through the generations. The Tartan playing field has widened considerably in recent years: The Tartans Authority has registered patterns for Sikhs, Chinese, the state of Indiana and the Fire Department of New York’s bagpipe band. But it wasn’t until last year that Jacobs, a Glasgow Lubavitch rabbi, decided it was time for the members of his congregation and beyond to be able to “combine their Scottish heritage and Jewish heritage together.”

“People connect with their Judaism in different ways,” he told The Shmooze. “They might not wear a regular kippah, but they might wear a Jewish Tartan kippah.”

The Tartan is made with 100% wool, in keeping with the biblical prohibition against wearing sha’atnez, or a wool-linen mix. (It may be more than 90 degrees in parts of the United States this summer, but Jacobs said it never gets too hot to wear wool in Scotland.) All the elements of the pattern were chosen for their symbolic significance. The central colors are blue and white, representing the flags of both Israel and Scotland, and the design incorporates gold, silver and red, which represent the Ark, the adornment on the Torah and the Kiddush wine.

Jacobs has set up a Web site and an eBay store to peddle goods made with the Tartan print. Profits, he said, go to Chabad of Scotland and to other charitable organizations. Besides the hand-pleated kilts, which cost £330 (around $650) and up, gents can order cummerbunds, ties and “fishtail dress trousers,” among other sartorial items. Pens, mouse pads and Titleist golf balls — all tartan printed — are also available. Jacobs said he has shipped upward of 500 items since the Tartan debuted in May, to places as far away as Peru. In the works is a shot glass featuring the Tartan pattern and a phrase that plays on the Scottish word for “lake” and the Hebrew “To life”: “loch chaim!”

http://www.forward.com/articles/13787/

10 places I want to see before I die....

I saw that Francesca had her 10 places she wanted to go before she kicked the bucket. I have a personal list I have compiled over the years. I've read a lot and found some very fascinating places aound the US and the world I want to go to. Narrowing it down to ten is hard, but I think these are the top ten.

1. Princess Juliana International Airport - St. Martin, Netherlands Antilles: I have always wanted to visit this place since I saw this picture:

There is a beautiful beach there where the planes come in and they just fly right over you. Being an airplane person, I have wanted to experience something like this all my life. Plus the Caribbean locale is a wonderful place to just sit and waste away and relax.

2. Brasilia, Brazil: I have always wanted to visit this wonder of architecture ever since I first read about it in the 70's. It like someone did what all of us as a child want to do. Build our own place. This isn't Sim CIty, but a real one that they carved out of the jungle and gave life.

3. Falkland Islands: When I was graduating High School this Island was the location of a short and bloody war which resulted in over a thousand people killed and ships on both sides of the conflict sunk. The island was changed forever. I want to tour the battlefields I have read about in books.

4. Antarctica: The last frontier and the only place where man supposedly has no claim. I want to see the ice before its gone.

5. Cook Islands: I saw pictures from this place and I want to go. Another place that will not be here for very much longer.

6. Pearl Harbor Hawaii: I want to see the place where history changed for America, where World War II started. I want to see the USS Missouri.

7. Midway Island< Hawaii: The tiny island where the Navy used to have a base Now its an eco-tourist place.

8. Nagasaki, Japan: Where the second Atomic Bomb was dropped was the center of Japanese Christianity. It had the largest Christian Church in the Orient at one time. It was also the main port of entry for all foreigners into Japan before the modern era. Many expatriots live there still to this day.

9. Melbourne, Australia: I have always wanted to go to Australia and this would be a nice place to visit.

10. Seattle, Washington: Boeing has a wonderful Museum there and has one of the three Concordes on display in the US there. The Museum is dedicated to the airliners that have flown all over the world.

I have not included such honorable mentions as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, San Francisco, the Marin County Civic Center (Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Albuquerque, Mount Rushmore, Talliesen West in Arizona and Talliesen East in Wisconsin, Oak Park, Illinois (to see all the FLW houses there), Buffalo, NY (to see Niagara Falls and the old Buffalo Terminal), New York City (to see Everything) and on and on....

Well I hope that this has given my gentle readers an insight on my character and the thigns I want to do in the future.

You have no rights - We officially live in a police state.

I am not sure what to say concerning this. Like the article says at the end, you might want to start watching what you say and write. The only thing limiting whosale detention of dissidents in the US is public support. The government wouldn't be able to effectively rule without public opinion behind it. While it has an effective propaganda arm in the corporate media, people know what is happening and the internet is a part of that. They are now trying to control the internet and the wiretapping law has allowed them to monitor the net in order to ascertain who is a dissident and who isn't. It wouldn't take much for them to start rounding up people, just one terrorist incident, maybe an assination of one of the presidential candidates. One incident is all that it would take as justification for something like what happened in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. In a strange way, our country has changed and I don't like it. I can write my congresscritters till I am blue in the face. But they keep voting for this stuff. They are intimidated and lied to in order to support things like this. If they don't listen, then what is a patrotic American to do?

Fourth Circuit Court Ruling Gives Bush Dictatorial Powers

By Steven D., Booman Tribune
Posted on July 17, 2008, Printed on July 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.boomantribune.com//91790/

Quick note from Joshua H: The headline on this piece was based on my December interview with the Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner -- who has fought like hell against Bush's claimed war powers. Ratner told me, "The difference between a police state and a nonpolice state is, fundamentally, whether the executive can pick you up and disappear you or whether you can go to a court and challenge the executive, whether you can say: 'What's the legal reason you're holding me?'"

*****

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (one level below the Supreme Court) has just ruled that Bush was granted the unlimited power by Congress to detain indefinitely anyone in the United States (you, me, your teenage son or daughter, anyone at all) merely be declaring them an enemy combatant. In a split 5-4 decision the Fourth Circuit also held that said enemy combatant was permitted to "challenge" that detention, but failed to elaborate on what form that challenge should take. From the NY Times:

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled. [...]

The court effectively reversed a divided three-judge panel of its own members, which ruled last year that the government lacked the power to detain civilians legally in the United States as enemy combatants. That panel ordered the government either to charge Mr. Marri or to release him. The case is likely to reach the Supreme Court.

How helpful the decision will be to Mr. Marri remains to be seen, as the majority that granted him some relief was notably vague about what the new court proceeding should look like. In that respect, Tuesday's decision resembled last month's decision from the United States Supreme Court granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Marri is the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant. The government contended, in a declaration from the defense intelligence official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, that Mr. Marri was a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system. [...]

Jonathan L. Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, called the Fourth Circuit's decision deeply disturbing.

"This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country -- citizen or legal resident -- and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial," Mr. Hafetz said.

This is a "deeply disturbing" opinion, even though it comes from only one appellate court, and one of the more conservative ones at that. It points up the danger of allowing Republican Presidents to appoint judges to the Federal bench who have authoritarian and partisan leanings. I have little doubt that the same justices who signed off on this grant of unlimited power to the Executive Branch would have seen the matter very differently if a Democrat held the office of President.

Of course, Congress can resolve this issue simply by passing legislation limiting the effect of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (the AUMF, for short). I doubt those in Congress, which passed the AUMF shortly after 9/11, ever intended to grant the President the unlimited power to detain Americans merely by declaring them "enemy combatants." On the other hand, I seriously doubt that our current crop of Democrats will have the political courage necessary to revise the AUMF to limit the scope of the President's authority. Certainly not in an election year. They've already shown their cravenness in the debate over the amendments to FISA when they caved in to President Bush's demands. It's highly doubtful they would suddenly develop a spine on this matter, regardless of Bush's massive disapproval rating among Americans. Mention the wqrd "terrorism" and they all seem to cower in fear for their political lives, despite all the evidence that Republicans and their policies are loathed by a majority of Americans.

So, in effect, we are at the mercy of Justice Kennedy, the one conservative member of the Supreme Court who has shown himself willing to vote with the more liberal justices on issues involving the rights of individuals detained by the Bush administration as enemy combatants. Kennedy was the justice who wrote the most recent majority opinion which held that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had the right to invoke the writ of habeas corpus to challenge their detentions. If and when this case reaches the Supreme Court he will be the one who decides what rights, if any, persons detained by Bush will have.

We already know how the other eight justices will vote. Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia demonstrated in the dissenting opinions written in the Boumediene v. Bush that they would have granted President Bush any authority he deemed necessary to indefinitely imprison individuals suspected of terrorist sympathies without any right of habeas corpus review in the federal courts.

Similarly, we know how the so-called "liberal" Justices Stevens, Ginsberg, Souter and Breyer will likely vote on the matter. They will probably decide that Bush cannot imprison American citizens or non-citizens without giving them the rights to (1) challenge their detentions in federal court, (2) be presented with the evidence against them, (3) cross-examine their accusers, and (4) present evidence showing that there is no basis in law or fact for their detention. It's also likely that these four justices would refuse to countenance the notion that the AUMF gave Bush a free hand to imprison anyone he saw fit. So, in the end, it will all depend on how Justice Kennedy interprets the Constitution and the AUMF. Only his opinion matters as to whether or not Bush is free to detain you or I as enemy combatants, and the extent to which we could challenge that detention in the federal courts.

Until that happens, be very careful what you say and to whom. For who knows what constitutes evidence of terrorist allegiance in the minds of our national security professionals. Mr. al-Marri still doesn't know what precise information landed him in prison as a suspected Al Qaeda sleeper agent. All he knows is that someone at the CIA signed an affidavit claiming that he was a terrorist. Because that is all it takes, my friends, to put you in prison and deprive you of your liberty. The opinion of one man. And until Congress or the Supreme Court holds otherwise you live in a police state, different from that of the former Soviet Union or Argentina under the rule of the Generals only by the degree to which that authority has been exercised -- so far.

© 2008 Booman Tribune All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.boomantribune.com//91790/

The myth of the Liberal Media - John McCain's Marriage Vows.

Some of you who read my blog might remember this story I posted from a British newspaper concerning Senator McCain's commitmemnt to marriage:

http://spacestevie.multiply.com/journal/item/580/Interesting_story_I_found.

Well, the American media finally picked it up. However, no other paper other then the LA Times published it. One blog reports that some other papers have reposted the story. However, the rest of the media has ignored it. The networks haven't reported anything about it. So, the character of a candidate, which the Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours to prosecute during the Clinton adminstration apparently has been given the collective shrug by the media. Maybe all those reporters don't want to get thrown off the "Straight Talk Express" Bus, or the liberal media is truly a myth. Meanwhile, the image of Senator Obama in a turban has been given front page news.

So, once again, the myth of the "liberal" media is once again disproven. The liberal media is only as liberal as their conservative corporate masters will allow.



http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-divorce11-2008jul11,0,2177702.story?track=rss

From the Los Angeles Times

McCain's broken marriage and fractured Reagan friendship

The nature and timing of his divorce from Carol Shepp alienated key friends -- and his version doesn't always match that in court documents.

By Richard A. Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

July 11, 2008

Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain and offered a significant -- but less than exuberant -- endorsement.

"Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed," the Republican matriarch said in March. "Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party." They were the only words she would speak during the five-minute photo op.

In a written statement, she described McCain as "a good friend for over 30 years." But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain's decision to divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans, and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona beer distributorship.

The Reagans rushed to help Carol, finding her a new home in Southern California with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.

McCain, who is about to become the GOP nominee, has made several statements about how he divorced Carol and married Hensley that conflict with the public record.

In his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For," McCain wrote that he had separated from Carol before he began dating Hensley.

"I spent as much time with Cindy in Washington and Arizona as our jobs would allow," McCain wrote. "I was separated from Carol, but our divorce would not become final until February of 1980."

An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had "cohabited" until Jan. 7 of that year -- or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.

Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.

Until McCain filed for divorce, the Reagans and their inner circle assumed he was happily married, and they were stunned to learn otherwise, according to several close aides.

"Everybody was upset with him," recalled Nancy Reynolds, a top aide to the former president who introduced him to McCain.

By contrast, some of McCain's friends, including the Senate aide who was at the reception where McCain first met Hensley, believed he was separated at that time.

Albert "Pete" Lakeland, the aide who was with McCain at the reception in Hawaii in April 1979, said of the introduction to Hensley: "It was like he was struck by Cupid's arrow. He was just enormously smitten."

As the pair began dating, Lakeland allowed them to spend a weekend together at his summer home in Maryland, he said.

The senator has acknowledged that he behaved badly, and that his swift divorce and remarriage brought a cold shoulder from the Reagans that lasted years.

In a recent interview, McCain said he did not want to revisit the breakup of his marriage. "I have a very good relationship with my first wife," he said. In his autobiography, he wrote: "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity. The blame was entirely mine."

Tucker Bounds, a McCain campaign spokesman, said: "Of course we will not comment on the breakup of the senator's first marriage, other than to note that the senator has always taken responsibility for it."

Carol McCain did not respond to a request for an interview.

About all she has ever said is this to McCain biographer Robert Timberg: "John was turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again."

After leaving the White House, Carol McCain worked in press relations in the Washington area, retiring about five years ago after working for the National Soft Drink Assn. She now lives in Virginia Beach, Va., and has not remarried. She has two sons from an earlier marriage: Andy, a vice president at Cindy McCain's beer distributorship, and Doug, a commercial airline pilot.

Carol and John McCain had a daughter, Sidney, who works in the music industry in Canada.

John McCain, who calls himself "a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution," said in his memoir: "My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy . . . was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.

"I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship."

Joanne Drake, spokeswoman for Nancy Reagan, did not return phone calls seeking comment.



The first Mrs. McCain

McCain met Carol Shepp through a mutual friend and fellow midshipman at the Naval Academy, from which McCain graduated in 1958. That friend, Alasdair E. Swanson, married her in 1958. In the early 1960s, the Swansons lived in Pensacola, Fla., where Alasdair Swanson and McCain served as Navy pilots.

But that marriage ended in June 1964 after Carol sued for divorce, alleging that her husband had been unfaithful.

According to McCain, he started seeing Carol shortly afterward. They were married in Philadelphia, her hometown, in July 1965. McCain adopted her two sons, and they had a daughter together. Then in October 1967, McCain's plane was shot down and he was captured by the North Vietnamese.

She became active in the POW-MIA movement. A former model, she dedicated herself to her children and kept the family together, friends said, while awaiting his return.

"She had the perseverance to carry on," said Melinda Fitzwater, a cousin of McCain's who later worked with Carol McCain at the White House. "She had a little baby and small kids. She was a great, unique person."

On Christmas Eve 1969, while she was driving alone in Philadelphia, Carol McCain's car skidded and struck a utility pole. Thrown into the snow, she broke both legs, an arm and her pelvis. She was operated on a dozen times, and in the treatment she lost about 5 inches in height.

After John McCain was released in March 1973 and returned to the U.S., he told friends that Carol was not the woman he had married.

Reynolds, working for then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, said she first met the couple in San Francisco at a reception for ex-prisoners. She later introduced them to the Reagans at their home in Pacific Palisades.

"They were just an attractive couple," Reynolds said. "The Reagans had great admiration and respect for John."

In 1974, Reagan invited McCain to speak at a governor's prayer breakfast in Sacramento. The former prisoner of war told the story of a fellow captive who had scratched a prayer on a cell wall. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were reduced to tears. It was "the most moving speech I had ever heard," Reynolds said.

In the next few years, family and friends said, there was no sign that McCain was unhappy in his marriage. Fitzwater recalled visiting the family on Thanksgivings, and McCain seemed content barbecuing a turkey on his outdoor grill near Jacksonville, Fla.

Navy officers in the squadron McCain commanded in 1977 said they did not know anything was wrong. "When I went to parties at their home, everything seemed fine," said Mike Akin, a naval flying instructor. "They seemed to be a happily married couple."

But two years later, while on a trip as a Navy liaison with the Senate, McCain spied Hensley at the Honolulu reception. In a recent television interview with Jay Leno on the "Tonight Show," Cindy McCain joked about how the Navy captain had pursued her. "He kind of chased me around . . . the hors d'oeuvre table," she said. "I was trying to get something to eat and I thought, 'This guy's kind of weird.' I was kind of trying to get away from him."

John McCain was 42; she was 24. During the next nine months, he would fly to Arizona or she would come to the Washington area, where McCain and Carol had a home.

Carol McCain later told friends, including Reynolds and Fitzwater, that she did not know he was seeing anyone else.

John McCain sued for divorce in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., where his friend and fellow former POW, George E. "Bud" Day, practiced law and could represent him.

In the petition, he stated that the couple had "cohabited as husband and wife" until Jan. 7, 1980.

His wife did not contest the divorce, and Day said that the couple had reached an agreement in advance on support and division of property. By then she was living in La Mesa, in San Diego County, with the family of Meese, a close Reagan aide and future attorney general.

"We knew John and Carol both since he came back from Hanoi in 1973," Meese said recently. "They have been friends of ours ever since.

"She was with us for maybe four or five months. Their daughter and our daughter were friends, and they went to school together."

Carol McCain was distraught at being blindsided by her husband's intention to end their marriage, said her friends in the Reagan circle.

"They [the Reagans] weren't happy with him," Fitzwater said. Carol McCain "was this little, frail person. . . . She was brokenhearted."

By that time, Nancy Reagan had come to Carol McCain's aid, hiring her as a press assistant in the 1980 presidential campaign.

When the Reagans moved to Washington, she was named director of the White House Visitors Office.

"Nancy Reagan was crazy about her," Reynolds said. "But everybody was crazy about Carol McCain. . . . And the Meeses were very generous and helpful and comforting to her."

Fitzwater said that living in Southern California and working on the Reagan campaign helped Carol McCain move past the loss of her marriage.

"It was perfect for her. She was traveling, and it took her mind off a very, very sad time for her."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

ralph.vartabedian@

latimes.com