BAGHDAD, Iraq — Senior Iraqi government officials said Saturday that a U.S. Special Forces counterterrorism unit conducted the raid that killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, touching off a high-stakes diplomatic crisis between the United States and Iraq.
The incident puts an added strain on U.S.-Iraqi negotiations to draft a Status of Forces Agreement, a long-term security pact that will govern the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq. Members of the Iraqi government and security forces said the raid only deepened their reluctance to sign any agreement that did not leave Iraqis with the biggest say on when and how combat operations are conducted.
McClatchy-
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Bill Gates Logs Off - Devotes more time to his philanthropic endeavors
Better late than never - An acknowledgement a little over due
King of geeks, the face of a genius, makes the rest of us look quite stupid...
Bill Gates Retires
Bill Gates - Looking Back Play on your WMP (First video here, 15 minutes long is a great place to start)
The original 13
Bill Gates influence on life as we know it today is unmeasurable. His philanthropic work earned him and his wife Times Man (and Woman) of the year. Now Bill is retiring .... and how can we not mention it, since we're mentioning it, here, because of him?
A list of Bill Gates Top 10 Hits and Misses from Engadget.
The idea of creative capitalism combines business interests with philanthropic interests and is related to social entrepreneurship, which seeks the same goals.
Bill Gates influence on China continues
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together in 2007
This video highlight seems to focus more on Jobs than Gates so here's a link to ftbotsb's Youtube page where more of this conference is video taped. This is truly history in the making to watch. You have one of the inventors of the home pc and the guy who brought you the everyday software, that made pc's user friendly. The king of Apple and the king of Microsoft make these videos quite entertaining to watch.
Noted by Wired and according to Forbes - (While you're not considered hip unless you use a Mac, which costs 2x more and gives you half as much as any pc/laptop running Windows), it's notable that Steve Jobs, your founder and CEO of Apple, the 67th richest man in America and 194th richest in the world - is not even listed on the list of philanthropic donors, (nor is his wife), while Bill Gates and his wife are the top donors to philanthropic charities around the world, most noted their work in Africa and the plights of people dealing with AIDS.
Bill's last days:
King of geeks, the face of a genius, makes the rest of us look quite stupid...
Bill Gates Retires
Bill Gates - Looking Back Play on your WMP (First video here, 15 minutes long is a great place to start)
The original 13
Bill Gates influence on life as we know it today is unmeasurable. His philanthropic work earned him and his wife Times Man (and Woman) of the year. Now Bill is retiring .... and how can we not mention it, since we're mentioning it, here, because of him?
A list of Bill Gates Top 10 Hits and Misses from Engadget.
The idea of creative capitalism combines business interests with philanthropic interests and is related to social entrepreneurship, which seeks the same goals.
Bill Gates influence on China continues
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together in 2007
This video highlight seems to focus more on Jobs than Gates so here's a link to ftbotsb's Youtube page where more of this conference is video taped. This is truly history in the making to watch. You have one of the inventors of the home pc and the guy who brought you the everyday software, that made pc's user friendly. The king of Apple and the king of Microsoft make these videos quite entertaining to watch.
Noted by Wired and according to Forbes - (While you're not considered hip unless you use a Mac, which costs 2x more and gives you half as much as any pc/laptop running Windows), it's notable that Steve Jobs, your founder and CEO of Apple, the 67th richest man in America and 194th richest in the world - is not even listed on the list of philanthropic donors, (nor is his wife), while Bill Gates and his wife are the top donors to philanthropic charities around the world, most noted their work in Africa and the plights of people dealing with AIDS.
It's suggested that Jobs (may) make numerous donations anonymously of course...But great wealth does not make a great man.
Giving USA Foundation, a philanthropy research group which publishes an annual charity survey, said Jobs does not appear on lists of gifts of $5 million or more over the last four years. Nor is his name on a list of gifts of $1 million or more compiled by Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy.
Jobs' wife is also absent from these philanthropic lists, although she has made dozens of political donations totaling tens of thousands of dollars to the Democrats...
Bill's last days:
Barack spends Father's Day bashing blacks to win over whites
To make himself acceptable to whites, Obama finds it necessary to shout out how unacceptable he finds the conduct of other Blacks.
Even the New York Times could see through Obama's transparent bid for white approval at Black people's expense
The Democratic presidential nominee-apparent seldom speaks directly to Black people, but when he does it is usually to denounce individuals once close to him or to criticize The Race in general for some moral failing. Thus it was no surprise that Barack Obama used the occasion of Father's Day to give Black males the back of his hand, no doubt to the delight of millions of potential white supporters.
Black Agenda Report
Obama - More hope you can't believe in
From the Boston Globe
Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy
The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.
The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.
But it's not safe to live here.
About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.
Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.
full story at the link above
Media too busy sucking Obama's ____ to do their jobs
"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."
-- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007
That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.
Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.
Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.
Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.
Obama's long march to the center has begun.
And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.
As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.
The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
Op Ed from Krauthammer
-- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007
That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.
Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.
Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.
Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.
Obama's long march to the center has begun.
And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.
As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.
The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
Op Ed from Krauthammer
Friday, June 27, 2008
Unlike zombie obamabots, Blogger allows free speech - so I'm back
Obamabots are pathetic unamerican little weasels.. small values, small brains, small insight. You tried to shut me down and you did for a few days, but alas I'm back. You losers are no better than bush sheep, you are exactly alike... blindly following your messiah. Whatever he does is aok with you. He LIES about accepting public financing and hey, you're ok with that! He plays a part in taking away your privacy rights and hey, you're ok with that! Anything this guy does is aok with you cuz hey man, he's your messiah! Whatever this prick does is going to be ok with you just like everything Bush did (does) is ok with his sheep.. because you're all ignorant. Instead of looking at who Obama has (really) been his entire life you take him at face value, whatever he says must be the truth.. forget his half white - half kenya heritage.. play him up as a black so he can be the first (fake) black president... that's all that counts right? Forget the terrorists in his life, the corrupt figures in his life, the church of white hate he belonged to for 20 yrs (along with Rev Wright being called one of his close mentors).. you don't really give a shit do you ? After all, he said "CHANGE!" and "HOPE!".. and being the little brained zombies you are you fall for all the bullshit because you're zombies. Such Hubris this arrogant empty suit presents and you drivel over him.Today we hear that Barack and the bitch he's married to each donated $2300 to Hillary's campaign debt.. What the fuck is that supposed to do, buy us off? FUCK THEM BOTH... and fuck the obamabots.. No unity, no Obama, and fuck the DNC.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Pictures are worth a thousand words, but sometimes a few words say a lot
Pictures are worth a thousand words, but sometimes a few words say a hell of a lot!
We have an AA blog in one great post, telling us Obama is a ‘calculated and cynical’ S.O.B.:
Gotta admire Brotha Barack for getting all his ducks in a row and stealing prominent Jewish fundraisers like David Geffen and George Soros away from Hillary. He plays political chess masterfully and executes his moves deftly. Anybody who still believes that the brotha wasn’t planning a run for President from the moment he stepped on the national stage in 2004 is a damn fool. This shit didn’t just happen, it was methodically planned like a new Microsoft product launch. His flacking for Israel and his votes on the Senate floor are as calculated and cynical as every word in the Audacity of Hope.
To say Hillary (or Bill) doesn’t care about AA’s is the biggest line of sh*t. Bill’s office is located in Harlem. This AA blogger seems to be speaking code to AAs to expect hands out if Obama is elected:
Think STRATEGICALLY!(read: Whites voting for Obama are SUCKERS!)
Obviously Obama would have no choice but to help the black folks out if he becomes president. Otherwise, we’d all bash him. Hillary could care less about us and she doesn’t have to since she’s white.
Look, if you really think Hillary would be better for us than Obama, then support her. That’s your choice. But just remember, we’re never going to get this chance again in our lifetime, having a bro in the whitehouse, using his power to help uplift our community, all while white people swoon over him!
What does “if you think Hillary would be better for us” mean? Aren’t all people supposed to be equal? Or, is he expecting favoritism based upon race? Reparations maybe?
Plus:
Obama is a manufactured leader who has allowed himself to be advanced by a cabal of media elites and “DLC centrist” political actors determined to choose an alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Those of us in the progressive black blogosphere have ample reasons to be suspicious of brotha Barack. While it is important to examine what a politician stands for, it is just as important to examine who stands behind them pulling the strings.At least he admits Obama is a puppet, and there is a puppet master elsewhere pulling Obama’s strings.
Obviously, they haven’t figured out yet that Obama is not as progressive as they thought when they voted for him in the primary.
The AAs better be prepared when they figure out Obama’s REAL agenda.
from TWP
Monday, June 23, 2008
What are Obama's plans for dealing with inflated gas prices?
Don't ask Minnesota Senator and Obama surrogate Kathy Saltzman - she has no idea either. Just another surrogate who has no answers. Another clueless politician who actually supports Obama and can't specify what his plans are on one of many important issues.
MTP gets a new host
George Carlin has died at the age of 71, and speaking of obamabots, Tim Russert's replacement on Meet the Press is going to be Tom Brokaw.
The man tried to retire repeatedly but without him there is NO CLASS anywhere in the tv media. He left, Dan Rather was booted and Peter Jennings went and died on us. The nightly news hasn't been the same without them all.
The man tried to retire repeatedly but without him there is NO CLASS anywhere in the tv media. He left, Dan Rather was booted and Peter Jennings went and died on us. The nightly news hasn't been the same without them all.
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