Posted on 10/20/2009 5:57:42 PM PDT by Mo1
894.88 on albatross overload.
1084.7 on albatross overload.
(found at Yetisports.org)
It plays impossibly slow on my system.
OUCH.
Awwwwwww! How cute!
I liked how the cultists were happy to be eaten.
An early Obama-nation..
Yes, that it is.
Her "eat less things that taste like chikin" ads, simply did not work.
My demise has already happened.
Bring on the rigor mortis.
Gnomes have rigor mortis.
They simply stand there grinning goofily.
Sounds like a certain marmot we know...........
Best rant of the day: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/call_this_horror_by_its_name_islamist_HT78Wt6NkWoCGq5HIOwlII#ixzz0WByiqsM9
I’m pretty fairly certain that Derly at least moves a little.
Ha. Size 18 marmot, that one.........
She's gotten too big from watching too much tv (Monday night foosball) and eating cheetos.........
:-)
aaaaaand... speaking of football :) Our Tigers didn’t do as well as they might against Bama (thanks in part to a very questionable call) but.... how bout our WhoDats!? dem Saints are 8-0 for the first time...in.... well, ever! I’ve not been much of an NFL fan for a number of years now but the Saints, God Love em, are about to change that for me. LOL
SEC officials won't make a public statement on the controversial non-interception call in Saturday's LSU-Alabama football game, reports the Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register. Instead, the league will communicate directly with LSU about the play. Officials ruled that LSU's Patrick Peterson did not intercept an Alabama pass midway through the fourth quarter, when the Tigers were trailing by six points. Despite replays that indicated Peterson was in bounds when he caught the ball, the ruling of an incomplete pass stood. Alabama retained possession, and then kicked a field goal in the drive to win 24-15. David Parry, the national coordinator of College Football Officiating, called Peterson's play "a humdinger." Parry told the Birmingham (Ala.) News "It was extremely tight, as I remember it. I saw that play and thought, 'Boy, whoever is upstairs has to make a tough, tough decision."
A group of die-hard fans have offered to cough up the penalty* if Coach Miles will address that bad call publically.
*Coach Urban Meyer was recently fined $30,000 for speaking out about some questinable officiating. Coach Miles has declined. The game can't be replayed so the call stands. We lost but that game is now history.
Four Little WordsReagan deliberately confronted criminal regimes with what they fear most: the publicly spoken truth about their moral weakness.
By ANTHONY R. DOLAN, WSJ
Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan's now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.
With a fervor and relentlessness I hadn't seen over the prior seven years even during disputes about "the ash-heap of history" or "evil empire," they kept up the pressure until the morning Reagan spoke the line. "Is that what I think it is?" I asked White House communications director Tom Griscom about a cable NSC Adviser Frank Carlucci had been nudging at us across the table during a White House senior staff meeting at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. (Reagan had been attending a G-8 summit there and would shortly fly to the German capital.) With a shake of his head and a smile, Mr. Griscom confirmed the last-minute plea from State to drop the key sentence.
In the Reagan Library archives, similar documents chronicling the opposition's intensity surface from time to time. I was gratified though not surprised to hear a few years back about one NSC staffer's memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell complaining that on multiple occasions, perhaps as many as five or six, I had declined as head of speechwriting—the writer talked about "a heated argument" between us—to remove the offending sentence.
And not only me. Shortly after the speech draft began making its review through the bureaucracy, the speechwriters, as Reagan true-believers, had deployed to do the interpersonal glad-handing that sometimes eases objections to speech passages. The Berlin event for us was the quintessential chance—in front of Communism's most evocative monument—to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office.
Well before a draft was circulated, I called the writer who had the assignment, Peter Robinson, and told him I was going to an Oval Office meeting.
Shortly before we walked to the West Wing, Peter told me what he wanted in the draft: "Tear down the wall." I pushed back in my chair from my desk and let loose "fantastic, wonderful, great, perfect" and other inadequate exclamations. The Oval Office meeting agenda went quickly, with little chance to pop the question. But the discussion ceased for a moment toward the end, and I crowded in: "Mr. President, it's still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech?"
Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan—he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar "well," and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: "Tear down the wall."
I had refused to talk to Peter until I was back in my office, such was my excitement. Slamming the door I shouted: "Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself."
So it was "the president's line" now. And that made it easier, though not dispositively so, for the speechwriting department to fight off objections. But this is where the Berlin address was about more than the killer sentence.
As commentators have noticed, much of the rest of the speech is also memorable, with enduring ideas and stately cadences. Mr. Robinson, a Dartmouth and Oxford graduate, had been mentored in his career by such writer-luminaries as Dartmouth Prof. Jeffrey Hart and William F. Buckley Jr. This pedigree helped him understand how Reagan's own conservatism, while less formally instructed, was powerfully ideational. Closer historical scrutiny of Reagan's writings before the presidency, as well as the extent of his involvement in his presidential speeches, has revealed that he was more than merely a Great Communicator but also a man of ideas, a cerebral president.
And part of Reagan's caring about larger ideas had to do with the nature of his foreign policy and the often overlooked rubrics he adopted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the Reagan years show that "containment" worked. In fact, Reagan explicitly and repeatedly rejected containment as too accommodationist, saying "containment is not enough."
As part of this strategy, Reagan established offensive-minded, victory-conscious rubrics like "forward strategy for freedom," "not just world peace but world freedom," and "expanding the frontiers of freedom."
Part of this was Reagan's attempt to codify while in office a Cold War narrative developed by the anti-communist conservative movement that formed him over three decades even as he helped form it. That narrative saw liberal notions about how to handle communist regimes as provoking aggression or causing catastrophe: Franklin Roosevelt's Stalin diplomacy, Harry Truman's Marshall mission to China, John Kennedy's offer of a "status quo" to Khrushchev in Vienna, Jimmy Carter's statement that we have an "inordinate fear of communism."
Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.
Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.
The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran's rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan's. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration's systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what "good vs. evil" rhetoric can do .
Mr. Dolan was chief speechwriter at the Reagan White House for eight years and served in the George W. Bush administration as special adviser in the offices of the secretary of State and the secretary of Defense.
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