J's Cafe Nette

Archive for July 21st, 2007

Tammy Faye (Bakker) Messner went home to heaven on Friday according to CNN’s Larry King, who said the family wanted him to announce the death.

(CNN) — Tammy Faye Messner, the former televangelist and Christian singer who battled drug addiction and later inoperable cancer, died Friday morning, according to CNN’s Larry King on Saturday night. He said the family had asked him to make the delayed announcement.

She was 65.

“She died peacefully,” King said.

Story here.

She was on the Larry King program via pre-recording on Thursday night.

She was alert at that time, and praise God her suffering is finished and now she can bask in the Glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Marine Cpl. Trent Thomas, convicted by court martial of kidnapping an Iraqi and conspiracy to make it look as though the Iraqi had been attacking the Marine squad was sentenced to a bad conduct discharge and reduction in pay but no prison time.

He could have received life in prison. I’m surprised he didn’t get a prison term but I wasn’t privy to all the evidence presented in the court martial.

Since he expressed his desire to remain in the Corps this might very well be a punishment worse than prison for him.

Thomas, of Madison, Ill., was among seven Marines and a Navy corpsman accused of snatching 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad from his house, marching him to a nearby ditch and shooting him after they botched an attempt to capture a suspected insurgent.

Prosecutors said squad members tried to cover up the killing by planting a shovel and AK-47 by Awad’s body to make it look like he was an insurgent planting a bomb.

A military jury of three officers and six enlisted Marines deliberated Thomas’ sentence for less than an hour before returning its decision.

On Thursday, Thomas told the court he wanted to continue serving.

“I’ve never been good at anything until I came to the Marine Corps,” said Thomas, who served three combat tours in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart for the 2004 siege on Fallujah. “It’s pretty obvious Michael Jordan was meant to play basketball. Tiger Woods was meant to play golf. The Marine Corps, it’s me.”

The final terms of Thomas’ punishment are subject to review by Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the commanding general overseeing the case, but he can only reduce the sentence.

Hopefully, he will be able to live a productive life outside the Corps.

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President Bush reclaimed his presidential powers from Vice President Cheney after recovering from the sedative effects made necessary by having a colonoscopy.

Five polyps were found, but none seemed to be of any danger.

This is actually a simple procedure and is done under a sedative put into your hand by IV, which makes you a little loopy for a couple of hours.

Anyone over fifty should have this procedure done at least every five years and more if there seem to be problems that are not just regular polyps. I had one done three years ago and had three polyps removed. I’ll go back in two years and have the procedure done again.

The prep for it is no fun, but you shouldn’t feel anything in the procedure.

Since I also had an endoscopy done at the same time I did feel a pinch when the polyps were removed but I think that’s because they didn’t have me sedated enough and it was just a pinch and nothing I couldn’t stand.

This procedure can help detect colon cancer early, and I strongly urge you to get one done if you are 50 or older.

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For her tenth birthday my granddaughter received an advance pay voucher for the new Harry Potter book from her parents.

The other day she called me and asked if she and I could go to Books a Million to pick up her copy at midnight Saturday, which I thought was tonight.

I stay up late anyway and this was her and her brother’s weekend to spend the night with us so I told her I would do it, but she could go to bed at her usual time and I’d go alone. She gets tired at 9 and goes to sleep at 10 on the weekends.

At 11 last night I got into the van and headed over to BAM, which is just a few minutes away.

When I got there the parking lot was full and I’m talking about this being a shopping center. I finally found a spot and walked over to the BAM store.

No one was lined up outside so I struggled to get into the store through the people milling about on the sidewalk. When I got in there the noise was so great it was next to impossible to hear myself think, much less talk. It was just the roar of hundreds of people having conversations.

I went all the way to the back of the store and all the way to the end of the wall on the right, which seemed to be where the line was.

At 11:30 someone made the announcement that we should line up behind the guy in the red shirt and snake our way through the aisles until we got to the register. All the people who had been asked all evening to push away from the registers so business could be conducted had to find a new space in line. Those of us in the back of the store and hidden by bookshelves didn’t get to see where the guy in the red shirt was.

The line didn’t move until one minute past midnight, and we didn’t even notice any movement for about five more minutes. Once it started to move it was up the aisle we were in, down the next aisle to the edge of the store and diagonally across to the guy in the red shirt and over to the registers.

Once at the registers I had to pass the voucher and they handed me a bagged book. Out the door by 12:15 am. Not bad, since there were over 800 people who had pre ordered the book and they were the only ones allowed to pick up a book last night.

Would I have done this for myself? No. I don’t read the books, but I had promised my granddaughter I’d do it so I did it for her.

I had showered before going over but felt as though I needed to shower again while there because of the heat generated by all the people in there and being between rows of books.

This store was built for about 50 people to comfortably browse in it and having almost 900 people there was a bit hot and uncomfortable. The people were fun and were having fun with the various contests and games going on.

Walking outside the store to my car I noticed people sitting on the sidewalk reading the book.

Maybe I should get the first six books and read the series to see what is so exciting about these books.

Anyway, my little pumpkin woke up to her Harry Potter book this morning and immediately started to read it. Well worth the wait and the sore back from standing so long.

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A federal appeals court ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men indefinitely.

The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants.

It was the latest of a series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some alternative to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 360 men are now being held at the United States naval base.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the detainees.

The court said meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.”

Advocates for detainees have criticized the tribunals since they were instituted in 2004 because the terror suspects held at Guantánamo have not been permitted lawyers during the proceedings and have not been allowed to see much of the evidence against them.

P. Sabin Willett, a Boston lawyer who argued the case for detainees, called the ruling “a resounding rejection of the government’s effort to hide the truth.”

Story

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