A man walks to 5th Ave. & 42nd St. during a downpour and some how manages to get a
taxi immediately.

He gets into the taxi, and the cabbie says, "Perfect timing. You're just like Sheldon."

"Who?"

"Sheldon Cohen. There's a guy who did everything right. Like my cab being vacant during
a rainstorm. It would have happened like that for Sheldon every single time."

"Well, no one is perfect. There are always a few clouds over everybody", stated the passenger.

"Not Sheldon. He was a terrific athlete. He could have gone on the pro tour in tennis. He
could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced lik! e a Broadway star.
Handsome and sophisticated, more than Cary Grant. He had a better body than Arnold
in his prime. He was something"

"Somehow Sheldon just knew exactly how to make women happy. He had a memory like a
computer. Could remember everybody's birthday. He knew all about wine, which fork to
eat with. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse, and the whole neighborhood
blacks out."

"Wow, incredible , no wonder you remember him!"

"Well, I never actually met Sheldon."

"Then how do you know so much about him?"

"After he died, I married his wife."

H/T to Catfish

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 02:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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"The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves." ~ Arnold Toynbee

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Sir George once again demonstrates how BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) can turn otherwise at least semi-competant academics into blithering idiots.

As Sir George pointed out, for the projections of cost to be accurate, we would have to spend approximately $2 BILLION a year per (current number) wounded veteran for the next 35 years. I know that health care is expensive, (boy, don't I know it after undergoing a sextuple bypass!) but I would think that a $2 million per vet per year figure would be an unreasonably high estimate, much less a $2 billion figure.

They also cite a "slowing of the US economy" WHAT slowing? Last month all the leading economic indicators showed a rise in all areas...

They say that "the rise in oil prices is directly attributal to the war"....Sir George points out that the difference in production in Iraq was only 180,000 barrels lower than this same time last year; which on the world market isn't even a drop in the bucket. Of course, these are economists, so they don't have to provide evidence of their contentions, all the rest of us should just assume that it's gospel truth, working arcane manipulations of numbers that turn out results of past figures into something 71 times greater.

They furthur show that they don't have any conception of what they are talking about when they accuse the US of using depleted uranium bombs in Iraq...seems that they know of a sooper sekrit ordnance™ that the soldiers that use it don't. There is NO SUCH THING as a "depleted uranium bomb".

Furthur, the effects that they ascribe to DU have been shown not to exist in study after study. But, as in the case of all those afflicted with BDS, facts have little to do with their rhetoric. It takes roughly 3 tons of DU per acre to raise the normal background radiation on a given area by .002%. it would take roughly 150,000 rounds of DU PER acre to reach that level...even a raging moonbat should see the absurdity of the possibility of that.

In fact, DU is THREE times less radioactive in the U-235 ( the dangerous fraction) than occurs in NATURAL Uranium that is present in most soils. DU is used in place of lead as shielding in some Hospital x-ray facilities because it's density per ounce allows for thinner shields and it's ability to STOP radiation from passing through it. See large numbers of techs coming down with radiation poisoning?

It's used in the armor plating of some tanks and the ballast weights in some fighter aircraft...see thousands of soldiers and pilots coming down with radiation poisoning? Hundreds? ONE?

Radioactivity is the Boogyman of the uninformed...tell someone that something is "radioactive" and they flee the spot shrieking in terror. It's taylor made for the hysterical meme crowd, since so few people are really informed about it.

Yes the Iraq war IS a costly endeavor, ALL war is costly; both in terms of lives and treasure, but the cost in not seeing it through to the end would be much higher, and asertions such as those made by the authors of the article only serves to muddy the water to the greater detriment of us all.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 02:34 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I talked to my father and got an update on my mother's condition.

They have started her on a drug regimen including Cumidin to try to disolve the clot in her lung, which has led to a new, slight bleed in her brain. She has lost the ability to speak coherently and has tremors in all her upper body muscles; she seems to be incoherent most of the time. The doctors told my dad to expect this, they are monitering her closely to ensure that no permanent damage will ensue.

They have her hooked into a type of encephlograph to moniter brain activity and are giving her a new CT scan tomorrow to assess the brain in closer detail; depending on the results of that scan, she may require surgury to ensure that there will not be a more serious event...such as an aneurism blowing out. They have no way of telling until after a more complete and detailed scan.

So at present, her condition is serious, but stable, and only time wil tell what her prognosis will be.

Thank you all for your kind thoughts and prayers. They are a real source of strength.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 12:40 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Dam Yankee posited what WW2 would have been like if it had been played like an online gamers session.

"If World War Two had been an online Real Time
Strategy game, the chat room
traffic would have gone something like this:"

more...

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This cartoon pretty much demonstrates Sen. "Splash" Kennedy's expertise at questioning...Too bad Alito didn't respond just this way.

MaryJo Kopechni is still unavailible for comment.

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Got bad news this morning. Seems that my mother had to go to the hospital this morning. The doctors have determined that she has a blood clot in her lung and think she has had a small bleed in her brain. They induced heavy sedation to protect her brain from any further damge than may have already occurred.

The doctors believe that she came in to the hospital before any truly serious damage has occurred, but they don't know just what the extent of damage is as yet.

My parents live three hours away, and I don't have a vehicle dependable enough to make the trip, so, for now I just have to wait by the phone and glean information as I can. They may be transferring her to a hospital here in Indianapolis for treatment as soon as they determine just what they are dealing with. They are concerned, as she's been dealing with congestive heart failure for several years. It's been controlled with drugs and a pacemaker, but it does make treatment of her current conditions more problematic.

It's tough getting old, every body system just seems to fall apart a piece at a time. If you would, please add Josephine Meyer to your prayers tonight. It means a lot to us. I'm an Agnostic, but I do believe that prayers do help. That may be contradictory to you, but... call it a focusing of energy to help heal,
or a meditation of the mind..or just a comfort in time of stress.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 03:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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You should have grown up during the twenties You are cool, sophisticated and hip – even by today’s standards. You like things before they are considered cool, and you like them long afterwards. Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

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As an update on THIS POST, I found this little tid-bit at Odysseus..lets see, an analyst predicts a major terrorist attempt in the US within the next thirty days...and now we have a story about men of ME extraction attempting to buy disposable cell phones in bulk...in two widely separate locations, one of them, the President's hometown...All of a sudden the urgency of tapping those conversations seems just a little more urgent, doesn't it?

As Odysseus noted, these basicly untraceable phones (roughly 230 of them?!?) were being bought two days after the New York Slimes revealed the wiretapping program of foreign origin based communications.... Around here that's called strong circumstantial evidence.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 11:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Harlow was fixing a door and he found that he needed a new hinge,so he
sent his wife Mary to the hardware store. At the hardware store, Mary saw a
beautiful teapot on a top shelf while she was waiting for Carl,the
manager,to finish waiting on a customer.

When Carl was finished, Mary asked "How much for the teapot?"

Carl replied, "That's silver and it costs $100!"
"My goodness, that sure is a lotta money!" Mary exclaimed. Then
she proceeded to describe the hinge that Harlow had sent her to buy,
and Carl went to the back room to find it.

From the back room Carl yelled, "Mary, you wanna screw for that hinge?"'

Mary replied, "No, but I will for the teapot."

This is why you can't send a woman to a hardware store.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 10:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Mamamontezz sent me the link to this story. I can't post on it; it just disgusts me too much.

All I can say is I sincerely hope that both defendants get the maximum penalty allowed by law.

Given my choice, they would be held for life in a sealed cell that was flooded twice a day, just to the point where they could drown....good thing the Constitution has that little prohibition from "cruel and unusual punishment" to protect slime like this from people like me....good that I'm protected from sinking to their level.

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Rep. Murtha has used his status as a Viet Nam war hero to lend weight to his accusations of President Bush as, among other things, condicting an "illegal war". Rep. Murtha has two purple hearts for wounds sustained in combat, leading one to believe that he does have "gravitas" as the LSM would call it.

But DOES he really deserve that gravitas? Marc Morano and Randy Hall seem to think they have found evidence that Murtha is more like another Democratic "war hero", and doesn't deserve the medals that he received.

Mr. Murtha, unlike the other poseur, DID volunteer for service in Viet Nam, and he deserves recognition for that, but if it can be proven that he doesn't deserve the extra recognition for service that those medals represent, he shows that he too, was thinking of a future political career when he gamed the system to get them...but at least he didn't use them to avoid furthur military service.

Are the charges legitimate? I can't say, there isn't enough information as yet to be certain, but one thing that does lend credence to the charges is Mr. Murtha's refusal to release his military records that could answer the question one way or another to both sides satisfaction. What do you have to hide Mr. Murtha?

Release your records and prove the other side wrong, and you increase your standing as a critic of the war.

I do respect Mr. Murtha's service, but his current statments belie everything that that service stood for, and the fact he won't settle this question as easily as he could only further lessens the respect for that service that he should be accrued. Prior service only extends so far, present actions can eiter enhance that respect, or destroy it. For myself, I don't care whether the charges are true or not; Mr. Murtha's statements destroyed any respect that I felt due him.
He has let partisian politics taint what was a good record.

"Once a Marine;ALWAYS a Marine" is the Corps' (unofficial) proud credo, but I think they would like to make an exception in Rep. Murtha's case.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 09:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Lifted from GuK:

Close your eyes and make this image: It's blazing summer heat in Ar Ramadi, and the Marines have just finished an important anti-insurgent operation. A CNN reporter is "embedded", and has been covering the action, and his cameraman has just gotten a video of a Marine sniper making a kill with his M-24 sniper rifle.

The CNN reporter waits until the Marine and his spotter have stood down, and he goes up to the sniper and sticks the microphone in the sniper's grimy face. "What do you feel when you kill an enemy freedom fighter like that?" the reporter asks the Marine.

The Marine squints some dust from his eyes, looks the reporter up and down, and says, "Recoil, sir."

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 12:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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There is an interesting artical about Hal Lindsey at World Net Daily that posits that the more a Muslim reads the Quran, the more likely he will become a "radical".

You may dismaiss Hal Lindsey as a "radical/Fundementalist" Christian, but I do believe that his theory should be looked into more closely. And if the correlation can be demonstrated, it should put to rest all the assertions by apologists that "Islam is a peaceful religion".

The fact that 95% of all conflicts in the world today involve Islam as one of the primary antagonists seems to me to lend credence to Mr. Lindsey's theory.

And yes, I'm aware that ANY religion can be used as a basis for launching aggression against non-adherants to that religion, but seemingly, in the last two centurys or so, Islam is the only one to do so.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 09:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Could there be a major terrorist attack in the US in the next thirty days?

Christopher Brown, an analyst with the CIA, believes so.

He believes that he's discerned a pattern between the release of video statements by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Quida's number two leader, and major terorist activity. Mr. Brown posits that the videos are a trigger mechanism to start the countdown on planned terrorist operations.

As he puts it:
Regarding the video release pattern, "once can be an interesting anomaly, twice could be a coincidence, but three times is a pattern,"

This is even more aprepo, when you see the reaction that has ensued since it was revealed that President Bush authorized warrantless wiretapping of communications originating from known associates of terrorism in other countries into the US. These are the methods by which information can be gathered to discover and block a terror attack, yet it seems that many would rather rant about Bush as a Naziesque violater of privacy than to do the things needed to actually try to stop attacks before they occur.

These communications are by their nature ephemeral and not conducive to legalistic manuevers. That great care in effective oversight of such operations to ensure that they don't go past the line is obvious, but the argument has reached hysterical proportions, with partisianship being the base motivator, forgetting that while they argue legalisms, the enemy within is moving, preparing to kill as many of our citizens as possible.

President Bush SHOULD be faulted by allowing our borders to remain as porous to infiltration as they sadly are, but not for doing what was necessary to trying to halt the actions of the infiltrators once here.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 08:23 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Here's the story of the Arsonist Rodent... "Revenge of the Rodent"© Think it would make a good movie title?

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 12:28 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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There are civilian heroes here at home, as well as the usual servicemen doing their turn in the Sandbox. Mr. Kim fits the true definition of a hero, one who risks his own life in the defense of others.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 12:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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H/T to Lucianne

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Vice President Dick Cheney gets a round of applause after addressing troops at a rally at Fort Leavenworth Friday, Jan. 6, 2006, in Leavenworth, Kan.

"I'm using a cane today, and it's driving the press nuts. (Laughter.) They keep asking my staff what happened to the Vice President, is it serious? And so I said, no, Secretary Rumsfeld bit me in the ankle. (Laughter.) Not to worry. (Laughter.) But don't tell him I said that. (Laughter.) "

H/T to Wild Thing

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 11:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I found this over at GuyK's place, and as a legal immigrant/naturalized citizen myself, I find it particularly poignant:

I think Guy has it right when he opines that one effective way of stemming such immigration is to stop it from the emplyers side by instituting LARGE fines on those that employ illegals. No jobs, no illegals. Simple cause and effect.
It might not stop it totally, there are always those that believe that they will "get away with it", but it would be a large step forward in the border war, not to mention, providing some extra checks preventing terrorists such easy access into the country as they now have.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 07:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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