jump to navigation

Sabbath 21 June 2009

Posted by marisacat in Divertissements.
trackback

mermaiddancers

Employees of a marine park perform an underwater mermaid dance routine inside a giant aquarium in Manila, Philippines on June 5, 2009. (JAY DIRECTO/AFP/Getty Images)

hey… beats incense and candles – and homilies from on high…

[thanks to Madman who sent round a wonderful boston.com Big Picture link... enjoy!]

About these ads

Comments»

1. marisacat - 21 June 2009

LOL cue that old time Bushwhacked religion.

McClatchy

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration’s presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they’re being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who’ve volunteered say they’re not being properly equipped.

In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.

snip

Agents said supervisors told them that working in dangerous countries is part of their job requirements, but Offield’s Sacramento-based lawyer said such compulsory duty violates a 2008 federal law that requires civilian personnel to serve voluntarily.

“The DEA is not only violating the law,” said attorney Richard Margarita, a former DEA agent and county prosecutor. “They could very well be sending Dan Offield to his death.”

The Obama administration has said it doesn’t expect problems with finding volunteers for Afghanistan missions, despite an ambitious strategy that calls for sending hundreds of additional civilian personnel. The plan already faces long odds in a country of resurgent Islamic militants, endemic corruption and widespread opium trafficking. snip

Wars wars wars wars wars – war forever.

Reply
marisacat - 21 June 2009

HA! More from the McClatchy article…

Offield, 47, alleges the harassment began soon after he told a colleague that he’s gay, although he said he’s generally chosen not to discuss his sexual orientation with his colleagues.

The retaliation, he said, became worse after he appeared on an MSNBC news program, where he told reporters that he didn’t think the DEA was winning the battle against California’s marijuana cultivators. Although he got clearance to appear on the show, Offield said his comments hardened the resolve of his superiors to punish him.

About a month later, he was told he was going to Afghanistan although he’d requested to go elsewhere.

Reply
2. n69n - 21 June 2009

good morning.

Reply
marisacat - 21 June 2009

Hi dear! How are you?

Reply
3. marisacat - 21 June 2009

Apparently some Federal death penalty cases may be headed for Ob’s big ol’ desk within a few months.

Reply
4. catnip - 21 June 2009

FBI tried in vain to stop ‘Deep Throat’ film

MIAMI – When the FBI investigated the landmark 1972 porno movie “Deep Throat,” the case touched the highest levels of the FBI, even its second-in-command W. Mark Felt, the shadowy Watergate informant whose “Deep Throat” alias was taken from the movie’s title.

The FBI documents newly released to The Associated Press reveal the bureau’s sprawling and ultimately vain attempt to stop the spread of a movie some saw as the victory of a cultural and sexual revolution and others saw as simply decadent.

Agents seized copies of the movie, had negatives analyzed in labs and interviewed everyone from actors and producers to messengers who delivered reels to theaters.

“Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government — local, state or federal — being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” said Mark Weiner, a constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law. “The story of ‘Deep Throat’ is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream.”

The papers are among 498 pages from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, who directed the movie and died in October. Released this month following a Freedom of Information Act request by the AP, they are just a glimpse into Damiano’s roughly 4,800-page file. More than 1,000 additional pages were withheld under FOIA exemptions and because they duplicated other material; the balance of the file has not yet been reviewed and released.

Many parts of the released files are whited out and the FBI’s ultimate targets are unclear, but the seriousness with which the agency treated the investigation is unquestionable…

Your government at work.

Reply
marisacat - 21 June 2009

Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government — local, state or federal — being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,”

well today it is the Drug War. Esp on MJ.

Geesh how dumb it all is…

Reply
5. Madman in the Marketplace - 21 June 2009

Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against Obama Administration’s School “Turnaround” Plan

In May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared the Obama administration’s intent to close and “turn around” 5,000 “underperforming” public schools in poorer neighborhoods across the country. Duncan’s last job was CEO of Chicago’s public schools where he shut down dozens of neighborhood schools, practically all in lower income areas, and dismissed thousands of committed and experienced teachers, the vast majority of them African American women.

When the Chicago Teachers Union made no effort to reach out to parents, students or their communities, refused to organize teachers to oppose the wave of school shutdowns and privatizations, teachers organized what they call CORE, the Coalition of Rank & File Educators. CORE has now filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education, charging that the mass dismissal of hundreds of mostly black veteran teachers and their replacement with uncertified and generally underqualified white teachers is racially discriminatory.

“We looked at the number of teachers who lost their jobs in these ‘school turnarounds,’” CORE research director Carol Caref told BAR, “and we looked at the number of African American teachers who were employed in those same schools or in the charter schools which replaced them and there was a huge discrepancy which couldn’t be accounted for by chance. The fired teachers are disproportionately African American, and the newly hired teachers are not.”

“Even if it’s inadvertently discriminatory, it’s still discriminatory because the majority of the teachers wiped out in these turnarounds are African American,” offered Chicago teacher Wanda Evans. The fired veteran teachers, CORE also maintains, are being replaced by a much younger, much whiter and much less experienced corps of instructors graduated from a handful of accelerated programs funded by Boeing, the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bradley, Walton Family, Rockerfeller and other foundations, and favored by City Hall and the Commercial Club. “The new teachers are paid half or less what experienced teachers with advanced degrees were making.”

Reply
6. marisacat - 21 June 2009

Madman and catnip out of Moderation… sorry you were stuck there for a while…
:oops:

Reply
catnip - 22 June 2009

PARTEH! (no problem)

Reply
7. catnip - 22 June 2009
8. marisacat - 22 June 2009

hmm Supposedly, so says Ambinder, the Dems, privately, are worried about the unemployment numbers.

Really?

Really really?

The more important point question Democrats are asking themselves: when will the trend turn? When will Obama be able to argue that he has created jobs — or a single job?

But he claims, or Biden, point man for Stumble Bill, already claims to have saved created or whatever’d 150K jobs.

So……………………LYING? Do ya think?

But none of Ob and Oblings projection numbers have been anywhere in the ballpark. NONE of them.

Reply
9. marisacat - 22 June 2009

gnu thred…

LINK

…………. :roll: ……………

Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 115 other followers

%d bloggers like this: