I have all but given up. I am constantly amazed at what happens here in the valley. I may not be the smartest brain or brightest bulb, but what has become of plain common sense? If recycling costs the same for every week, that it cost for once a month then ,”duh”why the heavy handed effort to kill it? Just a bad dream, right? If we spend all this time and energy over our recycles, then God help us on any larger issues we are facing. Speaking of larger issues, how much do you suppose the Nuclear Lobby is spending on Zack and Lamar? Now we know the reason behind Lamar's effort to kill wind energy legislation this past year.
Maybe Zack , Lamar and the Nuclear energy lobby will incinerate us and end all this anyway. So what if we become the dumping ground for nuclear waste? Yes, yes, I know the waste is for the recycling project. So if the process can be done here,
please explain why it cannot be done in situ, why must the waste be hauled here.
Is there something special preventing Nevada from recycling at Yucca ? Maybe the money is just too powerful a lure. Lets see 16 million is a lot of zeros to the left of the decimal point. Of course that is chump change compared to the 20 to 40 billion that is being dangled in front of everyone. I mean a national laboratory of Oak Ridge status surely can develop a means of making nuclear waste safe. Yea right I forgot,in maybe a thousand years it will decay to less than lethal. In the mean time we get to live near the countries waste dump. That make sense to me. I am once again reminded of why I vote for green party candidates.
I know you are dismayed and disheartened at the results
of last week's election. You're worried that the country is
heading
toward a very bad place you don't want it to go. Your 12-year
Republican Revolution has ended with so much yet to do,
so many
promises left unfulfilled. You are in a funk, and I understand.
Well, cheer up, my friends! Do not despair. I have good news
for you.
I, and the millions of others who are now in charge with our
Democratic Congress, have pledge we like to make to you,
a list of promises we offer you because we value you as our
fellow Americans. You deserve to know what we plan to do
with
our newfound power -- and, to be specific, what we
will do to you and for you. Thus, here is our Liberal's
Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives:
Dear Conservatives and Republicans, I, and my fellow
signatories, hereby make these promises to you:
1. We will always respect you for your conservative beliefs.
We will never, ever, call you "unpatriotic" simply because you
disagree
with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.
2. We will let you marry whomever you want, even when
some of us consider your behavior to be "different" or "immoral."
Who you marry is none of our business. Love and be in love
-- it's a wonderful gift.
3. We will not spend your grandchildren's money on our
personal
whims or to enrich our friends. It's your checkbook, too,
and we will balance it for you.
4. When we soon bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq,
we will bring your sons and daughters home, too. They deserve
to live. We promise never to send your kids off to war based
on either a mistake or a lie.
5. When we make America the last Western democracy to
have universal health coverage, all Americans are able
to get help when they fall ill, we promise that you, too,
will be able to see a doctor, regardless of your ability to pay.
And when stem cell research delivers treatments and cures
for diseases that affect you and your loved ones, we'll make
sure those advances are available to you and your family, too.
6. Even though you have opposed environmental regulation,
when we clean up our air and water, we, the Democratic majority,
will let you, too, breathe the cleaner air and drink the purer water.
7. Should a mass murderer ever kill 3,000 people on our soil,
we will devote every single resource to tracking him down
and bringing him to justice. Immediately. We will protect you.
8. We will never stick our nose in your bedroom or your womb.
What you do there as consenting adults is your business.
We will continue to count your age from the moment you
were born, not the moment you were conceived.
9. We will not take away your hunting guns. If you need an
automatic
weapon or a handgun to kill a bird or a deer, then you really
aren't much of a hunter and you should, perhaps, pick up
another sport. We will make our streets and schools as free
s we can from these weapons and we will protect your
children just as we would protect ours.
10. When we raise the minimum wage, we will pay you --
and your employees -- that new wage, too. When women
are finally paid what men make, we will pay conservative
women that wage, too.
11. We will respect your religious beliefs, even when you
don't put those beliefs into practice. In fact, we will actively
seek to promote your most radical religious beliefs
(Blessed are the poor, Blessed are the peacemakers,
Love your enemies, "It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom
of God, and Whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers of mine, you did for me."). We will let people in other
countries know that God doesn't just bless America, she
blesses everyone. We will discourage religious intolerance
and fanaticism -- starting with the fanaticism here at home,
thus setting a good example for the rest of the world.
12. We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and who
are bought and paid for by the rich. We will go after any
elected leader who puts him or herself ahead of the people.
And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on
our side FIRST. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it.
Simply because we are in power does not give us the right
to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray.
Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition.
I promise all of the above to you because this is your country, too.
You are every bit as American as we are. We are all in this
together. We sink or swim as one. Thank you for your years
of service to this country and for giving us the opportunity to
see if we can make things a bit better for our 300 million
fellow Americans -- and for the rest of the world.
Signed,
Truly
Found this on Michael Moore.com and thought how absolutely accurate.
VS 
Tune to ABC at 3:30 on the 12th for great game of football !
]]>
VS
Tune in Sunday night at 6pm on ESPN2 for the next game.
Remember to wear black.
Americans might feel comforted by the fact that the president and the Congress limited the removal of habeas corpus to foreign citizens and did not apply it to Americans. If so, they know little about the history of government oppression. Once people accede to the cancellation of judicial protections for “other people” – a grave wrong in and of itself – it is just a matter of time before the cancellation is extended to include them. After all, American officials would argue at the height of a new crisis, what is the difference between a foreign terrorist and an American terrorist? Shouldn’t they be treated the same? Aren’t they equally dangerous? Of course the suspension of habeas corpus should be extended to American terrorists, the argument would go. After all, aren’t American terrorists also traitors?
Consumed by fear that “the terrorists” are coming to get them, conquer the United States, and take over the federal government, Americans continue to blithely permit their government officials to erode their rights. Their indifference to the cancellation of the Great Writ – the writ of habeas corpus, the lynchpin of a free society – is an affront those who struggled for centuries to ensure its enshrinement and protection. It also constitutes one of the gravest and most ominous threats to freedom of the American people in the history of our nation.
]]>
The GnuLinux Image Manipulation Program is here.It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format. Check it out here.
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Scribus is available here.
This project aims to create an archive of clip art that can be used for free for any use. Check the archive here for the clip art you need.
The entire package contains over 16,000 pieces of software and counting.
Ubuntu includes a very complete Office suite,
Not just word processing but, database, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing components.
Ubuntu includes Evolution the best personal information manager, available by default.
You might be inteested to know there is a version of Ubuntu Linux that is supported by christians, it has many of the safegaurds not found anywhere else on the Net.
Ubuntu CE linux is available here.
" Let’s assume that the president involves the nation in another foreign war(read iran,korea) but this time one in which there are significant military reversals involving the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops. Congress grants the president’s request to enact a draft to replenish the Pentagon’s human coffers. Federal spending, the national debt, income taxes, and inflation soar. To compound the crisis, terrorist bombs are exploded in a few American cities.
Assume also that this time the American people are angry and outraged over the president’s and Congress’s actions. They point out that the Constitution prohibits the president from starting and waging a war without an express declaration of war from Congress. They oppose subjecting themselves and their children to a draft and another foreign war. They point out that the terrorist bombs are a retaliatory response to U.S. foreign policy. Newspaper editorials protest the war. Demonstrations erupt across the nation.
At the height of the crisis, the president announces that criticism of federal policy is helping the terrorists. Congress grants his request to criminalize criticism of the federal government (much as the newly installed regime in Iraq, which U.S. officials continue to insist is now a free country, has done). The president issues an executive order as commander in chief extending the cancellation of habeas corpus in the Military Commission Act to U.S. citizens who aid and abet the enemy.
On orders of the president, FBI agents and U.S. military personnel begin rounding up recalcitrant newspaper editors, Internet critics, and anti-war protestors as “enemy combatants” for giving moral and intellectual aid to the enemy. The action, the president assures the nation, is temporary. The detentions will last only until the war on terrorism is won.
“But they couldn’t do that,” people might cry. “The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.”
Granted, but how is that provision enforced? Editors, critics, and protestors would be languishing in some military detention center, perhaps even the one at Guantanamo Bay. What good would it do to point out that people have the constitutional right to speak their mind, criticize government policy, and petition the government for redress of grievances? The president and the military would be in charge. They might listen politely, but then again they might simply take more people into custody in order to send a message: “Remain silent.” The doors to the cells would remain locked. The prisoners would be unconditionally subject to whatever treatment their jailers wished to impose. The prisoners would be prohibited from going to court to complain or to seek redress.
That’s where habeas corpus, a legal procedure whose use stretches back to 14th-century England, comes in. Over the centuries of struggle against royal tyranny, the English people came to the realization that rights were meaningless unless they could be enforced against government officials who jailed them for exercising them.
Moreover, the English people had learned what our American ancestors had learned – that the greatest threat to people’s fundamental rights and freedoms lay not with foreign enemies but rather with their own government officials. After all, don’t forget that the reason that our American ancestors expressly mentioned Congress in the First Amendment is that they recognized that Congress was an enormous threat to people’s freedom of speech and other fundamental rights.
Thus, the English people demanded and got the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which stated that “the writ of Habeas Corpus cannot be denied.” A hundred years later, Americans, who had just a few years before been Englishmen who had revolted against their own government, inserted a similar restriction in the U.S. Constitution.
In the absence of habeas corpus, the detainee must continue languishing in prison for having criticized the government, comforted only by the notion that he lives in a country in which the Constitution says that people have freedom of speech. He has no way to get out of jail or force his jailers to treat him properly, other than to apologize, convince his jailers that he has reformed, promise that he will never do it again, and plead for mercy.
With habeas corpus, there is another alternative. The prisoner files a petition with the federal judiciary, which the Framers made a separate branch of government, equal to that of the executive and legislative branches. In the petition, he tells a federal judge, who is independent of presidential and congressional control, that he is being held without just cause. The judge issues a writ of habeas corpus, which commands the U.S. official who is holding the petitioner to appear in his courtroom post haste to show cause why he is holding the prisoner. If the jailer refuses to do so, the judge cites the official for contempt of court and issues a writ for his arrest. U.S. marshals are charged with serving the writs and enforcing them.
Under our system of government, the judicial branch’s interpretation of law, including constitutional law, trumps that of the other two branches. Once a U.S. district judge issues a writ of habeas corpus or any other judicial writ, the other two branches must comply.
At the hearing on the writ of habeas corpus, the judge hears sworn testimony. If he determines that the prisoner is being held without just cause, he orders the jailer to release him, and the jailer is required to comply with the judge’s order. In our example, the judge might say, “The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of people to criticize their government and its policies and there are no exceptions for crises or emergencies, including war. The law that converts government critics into aiders and abetters of terrorism is unconstitutional. You are hereby ordered to release the petitioner immediately.” Absent appeals, the prisoner would go free at the conclusion of the hearing. In the event of appeals, petitions for writ of habeas corpus are usually given priority over most other appellate cases. "
The bottom line of which is our representative should be tried for treason.
Fear is the mind killer.
2. Sadam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when cheny did business with him and a bad guy when bush needed a bin laden look alike to bomb.
3. A woman can not be trusted to make decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
4. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veteran's benefits and combat pay.
5. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
6. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
7. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
8. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which includes torture of enemy combatants, secret prisons inside and outside of US borders, banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.