Free Republic

Oh my gosh, I just saw this news on Twitter. I haven’t beena frequent Freeper in recent years, but I recall so many great threads by Doctor Raoul and hilarious photos of him at the many Freeps over the years. He will be missed. May God be with his family and friends.

This idea continues the fallacious assumption that all of today’s unemployed are unskilled laborers who can live on $20,000 a year and move to wherever they are needed. A huge percentage of today’s longterm unemployed are college-educated former office workers who have mortgages and families. You are not going to get a 55-year-old financial analyst with a kid in college and two more at home to sign up for a job as a janitor in a state office building that is 100 miles away, or laying new asphalt on an interstate highway.

This idea continues the fallacious assumption that all of today’s unemployed are unskilled laborers who can live on $20,000 a year and move to wherever they are needed. A huge percentage of today’s longterm unemployed are college-educated former office workers who have mortgages and families. You are not going to get a 55-year-old financial analyst with a kid in college and two more at home to sign up for a job as a janitor in a state office building that is 100 miles away, or laying new asphalt on an interstate highway.

My wonderful teenage children agreed to go see this with their parents. We figure it will likely be the last movie we see together as a family, and we all wanted this one to be it. At the end my son, who just graduated high school, looked at me and said, "my childhood is officially over." Choked me up! I still remember reading the first book to him at bedtime. In 2007 we were among the first in line to buy the last book, at the end of our family vacation. My son read the entire book on the plane home from Chicago

We all thought the movie was wonderful. My son is quite the movie critic, and wants to be a film composer someday, and he pronounced it "nearly perfect." As a parent, I thought it was fantastic - many of the best scenes involve very moving interactions of children and parents. It reminds you that this was not a world created only for children, and that every child needs his/her parents to guide them and protect them. And the scenes involving Snape moved me to tears, which I did not think was possible with this series. Very well directed and movingly acted. Excellent scoring too.

We will probably see it again next weekend.

if you have a job odds are:

you have not sued your employer.

you are a team player.

you are not dead weight to you company.

Or, you are:
--A minority
--homosexual
--disabled
--A white male who has kept his mouth shut and emails clean so none of the above can accuse him of "creating a hostile environment"

The biggest reason employers don't want to even interview unemployed people is that most of them are straight white males. They can't say "no straight white males need apply" so they say "no unemployed." I am female and unemployed, and I recently for an interview for a job where the ad said "no unemployed candidates please."

I just had a lengthy set of interviews yesterday. Most interviewers I have encountered lately start by describing the job and then asking me to explain how I fit what they are looking for. That gets right to the point and saves a lot of time. Yesterday the second gentleman I interviewed with started out by asking "what would you say are the experiences that most shaped who you are today?" That one really took some thought!

A while back I interviewed with the Federal Reserve and spent almost three hours in a group interview where I was asked questions like "describe a time when you were not able to finish a work assignment because of a conflicting priority that arose, and what you did about it."

I took my daughter and her best friend to see this show last week for her 14th birthday! It was wonderful! I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone going to New York. Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette have amazing chemistry and are hilarious. Radcliffe can really sing and dance! The female leads are also terrific. The set designs are especially good too. The theater is very small so none of the seats are far from the stage. Larroquette came out on the street after the show and signed autographs for quite a while.

I have seen many Broadway shows and this one is definitely in my top 3.

Anywhere near a lot of farms and forests, where you can get or grow your own vegetables and livestock and hunt for meat, and chop wood for heat and cooking. I live in semi-rural southeastern Pennsylvania. I am investigating buying a windmill and a solar panel for power; it is very windy here though we do not get tornadoes or other very severe weather. I have an acre of land and I can farm all of it if necessary. The folks behind us have three acres and already have chickens and goats.

Anywhere near a lot of farms and forests, where you can get or grow your own vegetables and livestock and hunt for meat, and chop wood for heat and cooking. I live in semi-rural southeastern Pennsylvania. I am investigating buying a windmill and a solar panel for power; it is very windy here though we do not get tornadoes or other very severe weather. I have an acre of land and I can farm all of it if necessary. The folks behind us have three acres and already have chickens and goats.

Thanks so much for this! I have been unemployed a long time, I am running out of money, and very frustrated. I have been praying Psalm 31 regularly!

Yeah, I'm SURE all those GWU studenta have large Americn flags on poles in their dorm rooms! Or there were sshops open on Sunday night selling them.

No doubt Plouffe and Axelrod told Obama to hold up his speech until they could drag enough Democratic Hill staffers down there and get the flags out of their offices.

What WAS spontaneous was the USA! chants at the Phillies/Mets game tonight! I was watching the game and that's how I found out OBL was dead!

Ummmm...why not go home? They don’t have tornadoes in Mexico!

My other daughter thinks she wants to major in music. I’ve told her we won’t pay to send her away to get a major in music because it is too hard to get a job. There’s a good flute teacher at San Jose State, so my daughter is thinking she may just live at home also and go to school. I’d be okay with her doing that. I’m not convinced she’ll end up majoring in music and she’ll can still take her core classes.

UCLA has a fantastic school of music too. But with music it is most important to visit several schools, and try to get a sample lesson with the instrumental instructor. Do not pay a lot of money or go into huge debt for a music performance degree! There are substantial music scholarships at most colleges based on auditions.

One of the funny things we received during her acceptances to college was from Carnegie Mellon. Her acceptance was a one paragraph letter with a brochure of the tuition costs. The letter simply stated that these are the costs if you choose to come here and we will not accept your AP credits. We laughed most of that evening before throwing it in the trash. At least they were honest and up front that it was a business. A very expensive business at about 220K for an engineering degree.

Carnegie Mellon is unbelievable! Apparently they don't give money to ANYONE. Several of my son's friends got in there but none are goung there because of the cost. One of them got $25k from NYU and is going there.

My son is going to Belmont University this fall. He wants to be a music composer for films, TV, video games, etc. Belmont has one of the few commercial music programs in the country and is the most affordable of those that do. He also got accepted at Berklee College of Music, which is nearly $50,000 a year. We will end up paying less than $10k a year for him to go to Belmont. And it is a small Christian college with no liberal indoctrination.

My husband and I spent a lovely weekend at the Cashtown Inn 25 years ago. It was a Confederate Army headquarters before the battle.

We only have one Wegman’s in my area and it is a 15 minute drive. I am 5 minutes from an Acme. Acme has hired a lot of teens in our area, too bad they will be the first fired here.

Just printed some of those out on sticker paper. I plan to use them next time I get gas.

“Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy” is the name of that book.

Bruce Springsteen wrote that song, and recorded it on his first album years before Manfred Mann made it a top-40 hit.. He wrote a lot of excessive-lyrics songs like that in his early years.

I agree with the Simply Lemonade. That stuff is fantastic! So is the Simply Limeade.

My fave is Trader Joe's Gyoza (pot stickers.) Safeway makes good ones too. I would never attempt to make those myself. I serve them with homemade fried rice. TJ's are $3.59 for a bag, enough for 4 of us.