-
Some of the great words of our current "president"
2003-05-17 11:51:31
I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.
I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.
You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.
No, I know all the war rhetoric, but it's all aimed at achieving peace.
My mom often used to say, "The trouble with W" -- although she didn't put that to words.
In 1994, there were 67 schools in Texas that were rated "exemplorary" according to our own tests.
I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe -- I believe what I believe is right.
Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.
I understand small business growth. I was one.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream. -
A Mistake on my part...
2003-05-17 11:42:07
A friend of mine just e-mailed me and pointed out that the Julius Ceaser quote I put on my last Journal entry was an internet hoax.
Therefore, I wanted to make sure that people who are reading my journal know about this error. -
Quotes related to George W. Bush
2003-05-17 02:55:47
"You know, I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything.
I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business.
But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office."
george dWi bush in 1989
Dumbya Yesterday : "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our Number one priority and we will not rest until we find him!"
--- September 13, 2001
Dumbya Today : "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
--- March 13, 2002
"It's funny to watch this clueless man go through the motions. It would be even funnier, of course, if he turned out to be better than advertised, but this is a long shot."
Garrison Keillor
It's about time conservative idiots like Steve Kelly and Rod Musgrove got a dose of reality. Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama. His presidency was going nowhere. He wasn't elected by the American people, but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative supreme court. The economy was sliding into the usual Republican pits and he needed something on which to hang his presidency. For them to accuse Democrats of being "sleazy" is laughable. Isn't it ironic that Kelly begins his inane babble with a reference to Monica Lewinsky? How many people died because of Monica Lewinsky? And for Musgrove to call the assertions "contemptible" is another joke. Funny how he manages to make disparaging remarks about President Clinton, as well. Face it people, Bill Clinton was a great president. This guy is a joke. What is sleazy and contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain. The Democrats asking pertinent questions is their duty as public servants."
US Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Butler
"It took his brother, his father, his father's friends, the Florida secretary of state and the Supreme Court to pull it off. His entire life gives fresh meaning to the phrase 'assisted living'."
Garry Trudeau
"This is a guy who could not find oil in Texas."
Al Franken
"George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd.
A moron - if you'll pardon the expression."
"He is a thug. He is dull and dangerous
Martin Sheen
"We all need to take a deep breath and think about being a Bush daughter and having that cross to bear. I'd go out and have a couple of drinks too."
Julia Roberts
"You can be Vice President in the most prosperous time in America, run against a dumb guy, get more votes and still lose."
"Many strategists think that Al Gore would be the best Democratic candidate for President in 2004. He is experienced, he knows Washington, has foreign policy understanding and he already beat Bush once!"
David Letterman
"These guys -- Joe McCarthy, Bill O'Reilly -- die like everyone else. And when they do, their legacy is one of damaging the spirit of good things, and they become rather broken, pathetic figures. And that is going to happen to him."
Sean Penn
"Patriotism is voluntary. It is a feeling of loyalty and allegiance that is the result of knowledge and belief. No law will make a citizen a patriot."
Jesse Ventura
Have you heard the news from Argentina? They have had five presidents in two weeks. Why don't they do it how we have elections here – count the votes and the guy that loses wins.
Craig Kilborn
"Resistance to the Bush/Cheney regime is a patriotic act."
Mark Crispin Miller
"We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy. Two years ago, President Bush "promised to enforce the civil rights laws". We knew he was in the oil business -- we just didn't know it was snake oil."
Julian Bond
"You've been a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter and a cry baby... for the sake of all that is decent and sacred take leave immediately and bring some honor to your all-important family name."
Michael Moore
"He seems to be an idiot."
"In the United States, anybody can be president. That’s the problem."
George Carlin
"He's gonna do a lot of damage ... he's sort of like this great symbol of inversion to me -- the inverse of the truth. It's like the ethics of the new millBush means Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and all these [expletive deleted] crypto-fascists are gonna get in and start carving up the pie and handing in all their markers to the Republican Party that's been itching to get back into power."
John Cusack
"When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke. This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully -- he can't even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I'd be very happy to stay in London. There's nothing in America that I would miss at all."
Robert Altman
"Clinton's advisors met nearly weekly on how to stop bin Laden ... I didn't detect that kind of focus from the Bush adminsitration."
Two Star General Donald Kerrick
"The whole country is broke and bogged down in some dubious foreign war that our children will be paying off for another 99 years. Our national economy is in ruins, Harvard-trained crooks have destroyed the roots of investor confidence , public-school systems from Maine to California are downsized to death by greedheads, our baseball-loving President comes back to work after a weekend of unspeakable football adventures with a nasty-looking puncture wound on his face. "Who needs that kind of berserk crap in this hour of national crisis? It is exactly the kind of sleazy , Third-world behavior that we have always denounced as 'unacceptably corrupt' when it happens in primitive banana republics like Haiti and South Texas."
Hunter S. Thompson
"I think that if you are the leader of planet Earth, you should be smarter than me. You just get the feeling, don't you, in the Oval Office that Dick Cheney is working behind the big desk. And then off to the right there is a little collapsible card table where George has like airplanes and stuff. Then every once in a while he looks up and says, 'I've discovered that if I shut my eyes, I can disappear.'"
Darrel Hammond
All of Washington is shut down. Congress is in recess. Bush is gone. Cheney is gone. It is so lonely in DC the NRA and tobacco companies are just handing money to each other.
President Bush is continuing with the endless summer vacation he's on. We need a new holiday in the country, we need 'Take Your President to Work Day'
President Bush spent Labor Day giving a speech to the Teamsters in Detroit. He really is dyslexic. He is the only guy I know who takes a whole month off and works on Labor Day
Jay Leno
"Cheney goes 0-9 in his attempt to overthrow a government in the Mid East. Why didn't he stay home where he can overthrow a government 5-4."
Bill Maher
"I'm not sure he really understands a lot of issues.
He seems to be given his lines by other people."
Sting
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Some related thoughts
"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."
Isaac Asimov
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
Theodore Roosevelt
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done."
Julius Caesar, nearly 2 millennia ago
-
Article
2003-05-16 20:58:57
Sacramento -- The U.S. Department of Justice has threatened to criminally prosecute California's top firearms official over the state's continued use of a federal databank to hunt down illegal gun users, The Chronicle has learned.
The threat marks a significant escalation in the war between California law enforcement and U.S. officials over gun control and background checks. State officials said that until John Ashcroft became U.S. attorney general in 2001, California's use of the databank was not questioned.
Federal authorities believe the list of convicted felons, drug dealers, suspected terrorists, spouse beaters, illegal immigrants and others should only be used to help gun dealers determine if someone is allowed to buy a gun, not police investigating other gun-control violations.
Gun-control advocates say it's part of a pattern.
"At a time when Ashcroft is pushing for maximum police powers in almost all areas of our lives, the one exception is guns," said Luis Tolley, Western regional director with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "They are going in the opposite direction."
Now, in an unprecedented action, the chief of California's firearms division says he was threatened with federal action for a criminal violation if California continues to use the federal database to search for illegal gun users who violated the law in other states.
"We understood it as a potential criminal action," said Randy Rossi, firearms chief for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, "and our response back to them was we understand what you are saying and we think public safety is paramount and you take whatever step is necessary."
If U.S. authorities deny access to some of the FBI's computers, state officials believe they will be forced to return guns to violent criminals. Thousands of background checks would be prohibited every year, state officials said.
THREAT CAME IN CALL
Lockyer's office said the threat of legal retaliation came from an attorney in the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division during a conference call several weeks ago with Rossi and other California officials.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has requested an explanation from FBI Director Robert Mueller on what she called a restrictive interpretation of the law that overturns a "long-standing history of conducting such checks."
The FBI wrote back acknowledging there were differing opinions and promised a further review by U.S. Department of Justice attorneys. Spokesmen for Ashcroft, who controls the FBI, did not return a call seeking comment.
The central dispute is over California's use of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. The computer system was installed in 1998 to allow firearms dealers to check, supposedly within 30 seconds, whether someone is prohibited from owning a gun.
The state uses the system to conduct background checks for the gun dealers but also to determine if a confiscated weapon should be returned or if someone has a large number of illegally owned firearms.
California has its own databank of people prohibited from owning guns. But law enforcement also checks NICS to see if a suspect has legal problems in other states. Lockyer's office checks the NICS nationwide system about 5,000 times a year on behalf of police, sheriffs and their own investigators.
DATA FROM OTHER STATES
A suspect may be clear in California but convicted of offenses in another state or federal court, but law enforcement would not find that out in many cases, gun-control advocates and state officials fear.
"There needs to be one central depository of felonies, of people who are prohibited, the mentally disturbed and the like," said Tolley with the Brady Campaign.
California officials believe Ashcroft and the FBI are intent on scuttling a new state law that allows Lockyer to investigate people who may illegally have large stores of guns that are being undetected.
The so-called armed and prohibited law targets people recently rejected for gun ownership during a background check because they have a criminal record or arrest.
Rather than stopping there, Lockyer's office is using a newly created state database and three separate federal databases to look for past gun purchases in other states -- and then going after those guns.
OFF-LIMITS TO STATE
Ashcroft's office has told Lockyer that all three federal databases -- NICS,
the National Crime Information Center and the Interstate Identification Index -- are off-limits to his agents if they are using them for the armed and prohibited program, state officials said.
For regular criminal background checks outside of the armed and prohibited program, federal authorities are allowing California access to two of the databases. But they want to deny Lockyer's office access to NICS, unless the state is making a background check for a gun dealer or pawn shop.
State authorities say they like using the more convenient NICS system because it contains all the information from the two other criminal databases under federal control, as well as unique information that other databanks do not track.
The NICS-only information includes the names of illegal immigrants, possible terrorists, people classified as mental defectives or who have renounced their citizenship, people dishonorably discharged from the military, and convicted drug addicts or dealers.
PUSHING POLITICAL POINT
Gun-rights supporters believe Lockyer, a Democrat who plans to run for California governor in 2006, is pushing the issue to make a political point and highlight the differences between the Bush administration and his own record on gun control.
The National Rifle Association said the NICS databank appears clearly designed for use by gun dealers, not for police investigating crimes. The other databanks, they said, can be used to track down criminal records in other states.
"It seems to me that they are trying to make this into a political issue," said Andrew Arulanandam, NRA spokesman.
Georgia officials say they also have been threatened by federal authorities over interpretation of U.S. law concerning criminal background checks. Georgia was denying gun purchases to people arrested for crimes but not charged or convicted.
In a letter last year to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the FBI warned that the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act and Georgia law do not allow "naked arrests" without an indictment or conviction to be used to deny a gun purchase. The FBI said it was "very interested in the status of any corrective action."
Georgia complied with the FBI, and the number of firearms denied to suspected felons dropped significantly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution estimated that every day an average of 17 or 18 people facing felony charges now are given permission to buy a gun in Georgia.
"We viewed it as a threat," John Bankhead, spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said about the FBI's letter. "We had done this for six years without an issue until the new administration came in, and they pulled this on us."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's something I don't understand.
CARS are registered... so if you own a car there are records in case anything happens one way or another.
Some asshole drove into the back of my car and then drove off, but we got him because I got his plate number and that allowed us to track down this criminal.
Now... gun registration seems to make perfect sense... it doesn't deny any rights to gun ownership and it would help police officials if they needed to track down a weapon.
Obviously... people can probably get around gun registration as easily as they can car registration... but the ideas of a system of laws is to TRY to make things better in our nation.
However... gun nuts apparently just want to be able to shoot whatever they want without any pesky laws to hinder them.
I believe in the American's right to own a weapon... but it amazes me that there are peopel out there who think there should be LESS laws on guns then there are on cars.
Cars can kill... but they are designed to transport.
Guns kill because that's what they are designed to do.
-
An exampleCorporate idiocy...
2003-05-16 17:21:23
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours.
That is the warning The Walt Disney Co. will issue this August when it begins to "rent" DVDs that after two days become unplayable and do not have to be returned.
Disney home video unit Buena Vista Home Entertainment will launch a pilot movie "rental" program in August that uses the self-destruction technology, the company said on Friday.
The discs stop working when a process similar to rusting makes them unreadable. The discs start off red, but when they are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
Buena Vista hopes the technology will let it crack a wider rental market, since it can sell the DVDs in stores or almost anywhere without setting up a system to get the discs back.
The discs work perfectly for the two-day viewing window, said Flexplay Technologies, Inc., the private company which developed the technology using material from General Electric Co.
The technology cannot be hacked by programmers who would want to view the disc longer because the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology.
However, the disc can be copied within 48 hours, since it works like any other DVD during that window.
Buena Vista did not disclose pricing plans but said the discs, dubbed EZ-D, would be available in August in select markets with recent releases including "The Recruit," "The Hot Chick," and "Signs."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Isn't this technology just going to create a LOT of waste?
2) Can't people just rip/copy the DVDs within the 2 day time period?
Oh well...
JOURNAL: UncleMilo (Jonathan Osborne)
Current server time: Jun 19, 2025 17:56:39