Timbuk3

Got my funds on the 5th as scheduled. Got my new computer at about 5pm that evening. I would have had it when the store opened — but — I don’t drive and I had to go to a neighboring city to get it. I started to build it — myself — but unless you’re building a monster — they’re cheaper already built. I like having the baddest — but I don’t like wasting money. We have no use for the baddest — none. The one I bought is more than bad enough for what we do.

My latest computer was an early pentium 4 — so — I’ve been slugging along in the slow lane. So — with the difference so significant– I’m having big fun! HD video starts up as easily as turning the TV on — those picture heavy Obama shrines I like to visit load instantly — I’m in heaven! I went from pentium 4 with 512 MB at 1.8ghz to 6 GB dual core multichanneling (similar to quad core but uses much less electricity and is sometimes faster) at 2.93ghz. I can do serious multitasking! And my desktop looks like a real desktop. I’ve got a 20″ real HD monitor — and it’s the bomb (more than 20 is too much for me. I can’t stand huge screens — even for TVs — I don’t know why.) Unlike older versions of Windows — “multi” tasks can actually stay on screen –so — no more constant minimizing and restoring — I can just mouse around my screen as I work!

If you knew how seldom I get “treats” like this — you’d be excited for me! And yeah, yeah — I know there’s misery going on — but guess what? I’ve been miserable while the world was going on — and I surely never wanted anybody to be miserable because I was. No matter how hard we try — no matter how “good” we become — we can’t ease all suffering and as long as we’re mortal — at any given moment there wil always be somebody somewhere suffering. If we have to suffer because somewhere in the world somebody else is miserable — there’s not reason to go on — we might as well be dead.

So — you know who you are — everybody can’t be happy everytime I am — so — I’m not waiting. I’ll be happy about whatever whenever!

I thought we got rid of this shit 40 years ago.

“The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” asserting that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … Barack Hussein Obama.”

We have two choices , Let it burn , or shoot these fuckers down like the dogs that they are.. or convince them that GAWD wants them to kill themselves
in protest because a black man is in “Their” White House.
Myself , I’d rather do some shootin” . You feelin’ me Clod ? What about you Rat ? Wanna play?

)—-Kidnappers for Jesus? A group of Evangelical church folk from Idaho, led by personal shopper Laura Silsby, Executive Director and founder of New Life Children Refuge, descended upon the earthquake ravaged country of Haiti last week, to snatch and grab 100 orphans off of the streets and from orphanages. The Baptist group’s mission statement was to “share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ.” However, they were only able to “gather” up 33, some of whom weren’t even orphans. The evangelical do-gooders became alleged kidnappers and child traffickers when they loaded the Haitian “orphans” on a bus and attempted to take them across the border to the Dominican Republic to the New Life Refuge orphanage, with no documents from the Haitian government. Well, the so-called orphanage turns out to be a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic that the group was renting.

The group of ten Americans from two Baptist churches based in Idaho were arrested at the border and are now in custody in Port-au-Prince Haiti, charged with child trafficking. And the group of child-snatching evangelizing Americans have set off an international firestorm in Haiti, with officials already fearful of child trafficking in the wake of the chaos in the devastated country.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says the ten Americans, although they may have had good intentions, are “kidnappers.” “God is the one who called us to come here and we just really believed that this was his purpose,” said Carla Thompson, one of the group’s arrested members.

The misguided Baptist church group, with their proselytizing “Great Commission” to save the souls of children from a deeply Catholic country, has also exposed the controversial practices of evangelical missionaries, who seek to religiously convert the recipients of their charity. The two Idaho Baptist churches supporting the mission, Central Valley Baptist Church and the East Side Baptist Church, made their intentions clear.

Rev. Clint Henry of the Central Valley Baptist Church told reporters, “we believe that Christ has asked us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, and that includes children.”

The 33 Haitian children from ages 2-months to 12-years “gathered” by Silsby and her evangelical rescuers, were sent to an SOS orphanage in Port-au-Prince, where they arrived “very hungry, very thirsty, some dehydrated.” George Willeit, a spokesman for the SOS Austrian-run orphanage, said that the two-month-old infant taken by Silsby’s group was so dehydrated she needed hospitalization. And one eight-year-old girl, wasn’t an orphan at all. “And she told us, crying, that she does have parents. She says she thought she was being sent to boarding school or to summer camp,” said Willeit. And some of the other children were apparently told that they were being taken for a vacation and a respite from the devastated Haitian capital.

Many children in Haitian orphanages aren’t technically orphans, but they have been abandoned by their families who can no longer afford to feed and properly care for them. The Haitian government now requires Prime Minister Max Bellerive to authorize the removal of any child from the country, to prevent child trafficking.

Bellerive said that when the Baptist “kidnappers” were stopped and arrested at the border, some of the children asked for their parents and didn’t appear to be orphans.

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Now that this deal has fallen through, I wonder who Rush will turn to to fill his order or child sex slaves.

I’m mad as hell over that Focus on the Family ad that’s supposed to run during the Super Bowl. However — I don’t care about the politics of it. I care because CBS says it’s changed it’s policies to allow “tasteful” political messages — or whatever — and that ad is hateful.

I haven’t had to go through it — but the thought of a doctor telling me that it’s likely I would die if I continued a pregnancy strikes me as one of the worst — if not the worst — decision I could ever be faced with. My heart aches at the thought of maybe having to make that choice and chosing to save myself because at one time I was the ONLY parent of my other child and my parents were dead — and in a moment that’s supposed to be nothing but fun for everybody in the country — being hit with something designed to try to encourage guilt trips.

So far — I’m not finding anybody interested in addressing that ad as a hateful message. Obviously — CBS knew there would be political disagreement when they made that decision. It seems to me that an apolitical argument might carry more weight.

The ad is insensitive and hateful and it’s driving me up the wall because I’ve been wishing and waiting for New Orleans to get to the Super Bowl since I was a teenager — but that insensitivity bothers me so much — I don’t want to watch it. It is honestly ruining the Super Bowl for me. In fact — if they do this — I may NEVER watch ANYTHING on CBS EVER AGAIN. I’ve written them and told them that.

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

“I guess we’re going to find out what the tolerance level is for people,” said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. “It’s a new day.”

Some residents are less sanguine, arguing that cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.

“How are people supposed to live? We’re not a ‘Mayberry R.F.D.’ anymore,” said Addy Hansen, a criminal justice student who has spoken out about safety cuts. “We’re the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We’re in trouble. We’re in big trouble.”

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Maybe all the Mega Churches can all just pray them up enough money get them through.
Or maybe Grover Norquist and the rest of the Republican Brain Tust can move there to see the “success” of their policies in action.