J's Cafe Nette

Archive for September 27th, 2007

A very touching story. A wise person once told me each living thing is only allowed so many breaths and so many heartbeats. I hope this little boy is granted many.

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Our site owner and friend J may decide to share her feelings with readers later in the day but for now, any of us who own an animal which we love cannot imagine our family without them.

This is what J must be feeling at this time but I want both her and her better half to know that our thoughts are with them.

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J, I love you my dear sister and wish that there was something I could say to make you feel better. Maybe this will help.

God saw you getting tired, And a cure was not to be.
So he put his arms around you, And whispered, “Come to me.”

With tearful eyes we watched you drift. We watched you fall away.
We couldn’t bear to lose you. We couldn’t ask you to stay.

A golden heart stopped beating. Shining eyes at rest.
God broke our hearts to prove to us that he only takes the best.

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Towards the end of the Democratic debate Tim Russert quoted a person who had been a guest on Meet the Press.

The statement by the unknown speaker was this:

“Imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number 3 guy in Al Qaeda. We know there is a big bomb going off in America in 3 days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and responsibility to beat it out of him?

We could set up a law where the president could make a finding or guarantee a pardon.”

Obama, Biden and Clinton were asked if they would do that and all said we should not use torture.

After Hillary Clinton gave her disapproval of the idea Russert said, “The guest who laid out that scenario for me with that proposed solution was William Jefferson Clinton, last year.”

Hillary looked a bit off-message until Russert told her Bill disagreed with her and she responded, “Well, he’s not standing here right now.”

A priceless moment. Most of the rest of the debate was centered around running against President Bush who is not on the ticket next year.

Update: It seems Hillary also said the same thing:

When Russert revealed ex-President Bill Clinton advocated such a policy on a recent NBC “Meet the Press” appearance, Hillary Clinton won huge applause from the Dartmouth College audience with a deadpan comeback:

“Well, I’ll talk to him later.”

She may have to give herself that talk, too.

Last October, Clinton told the Daily News: “If we’re going to be preparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law.”

She said then the “ticking time bomb” scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers.

“In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable,” she said.

Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to numerous requests for comment on the eye-popping contradiction.

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The Democrats seem to have a candidate for the Presidency who has a bit of a problem with being less than truthful.

For those who need a bit of a refresher course in some of Mrs. Clintons prevarications,(although I know some would call it political “spin” this should help.

As Hillary Clinton rises in the polls, her nose grows longer and longer.

To be sure, she has never had any shame about making stories up out of thin air. After 9/11, Clinton appeared on national TV and claimed that when the two airplanes hit the World Trade Center, her daughter Chelsea was going to jog at Battery Park near the towers, where she heard and saw the catastrophe unfold.

Clinton’s arrogance was so profound that she did not coordinate the story with Chelsea, who wrote an article for Talk in which she described what she had been doing that day. According to Chelsea, she was on the other side of town in a friend’s apartment on Park Avenue South. She watched the events unfold on TV.

Nor does Clinton’s hypocrisy have any limits. When asked about the recent MoveOn.org ad suggesting that Gen. David Petraeus has betrayed the country, Clinton on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 23 called for an end to such attacks. “I don’t condone anything like that, and I have voted against those who would impugn the patriotism and the service of the people who wear the uniform of our country,” she said.

Yet three days earlier, Clinton had voted against a Senate resolution to condemn the MoveOn.org ad. Her closest competitor, Sen. Barack Obama, voted earlier that day but conveniently missed the vote condemning the ad.

Now that she begins to see her candidacy in the general election as a certainty, Clinton’s prevarications — largely ignored by the media — are becoming more frequent.

Funny isn’t it that those who accuse our President of being a liar and not admitting to “mistakes”, largely choose to ignore the Senator’s tendency toward adjusting the truth to fit the circumstance?

“Hillary has a keen sense of entitlement,” Bay Buchanan, author of “The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton,” has told me. “She doesn’t admit mistakes or learn from them. She believes in her own mind that she doesn’t have to take responsibility for things she’s done in the past. She can say whatever it is she wants to say today, and it’s as if the slate is clean and nothing has occurred before this.”

At a hearing on Sept. 11, Clinton told Gen. Petraeus that “the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

In making that accusation, Clinton aptly described what our own reaction should be to her serial dissembling. If any other job candidate had such a record, only a fool would hire the applicant. If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, it will say as much about us as about her.

I could not agree more with that final statement.

If we as Americans choose another four or eight years of spinning and word manipulation, we deserve what we get.

I say we because if the Republicans do not hold together and support whomever may be our candidate, we will be literally handing the White House back to not only the Democrats but another co-presidency.

HT:<):) The Hillary Project

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In anticipation of the 2008 races, the NRSC has not only launched their new site, but are also offering a blog with up to date information for those of us who are news junkies.

This one is worth a bookmark as we soon head into what promises to be one heck of a political season.

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According to The Telegraph in the UK, a leaked Democratic poll shows the concern some in the Democratic party have over a Hillary Clinton presidential nomination.

A leaked Democratic poll has suggested that Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner in the race for the party’s presidential nomination, could lose the 2008 election because of her “very polarised image”.

The survey by the Democratic pollsters Lake Research indicated that both Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama, second in the Democratic race, trailed Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front runner, in 31 swing congressional districts.

Former President Bill Clinton whispers to his wife Senator Hillary Clinton
The private memo, leaked to The Washington Post, painted what researchers described as a “sobering picture” for Democrats who believe that President George W Bush’s disastrous favourability numbers almost guarantee they will capture the White House next year.

All party preference polls show that Democrats are much more popular than Republicans. But when the names of individual candidates are used, the gap narrows considerably.

“The images of the two early [Democratic] favourites are part of the problem,” the memo said.

The leaked poll found that Mr Giuliani, a centrist Republican with liberal stances on issues such as abortion and gay rights, leads Mrs Clinton by 49 per cent to 39 per cent in the swing districts.

Senator Clinton’s negatives are high right now, and history shows as the campaign goes on the negatives of the candidates only go higher.

Almost half the American electorate right now say they would not vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. That’s not a good starting position.

I have thought for some time that if she is the nominee it will not only help elect a Republican president but it will help restore some lost seats in both chambers of Congress.

I’m not a political pundit, but this is just my gut feeling.

The next candidate to her is Barack Obama and he just doesn’t seem to have what it takes yet to become president. I think his ambition got in the way too soon and he should have given himself time to learn the issues better. The fact that he has been absent from voting on important issues the past couple of days in spite of the fact he is at the Senate and able to vote also speaks volumes. He’s afraid to take a stand on some controversial issues.

John Edwards, I think, is not even a consideration and the rest of the field are just in it for the sake of pride. It’s between Clinton and Obama and neither seems to have a winning message.

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David Schuster in one of his finest moments. Not.

Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn got a dose of tough journalism tonight on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show. Substitute host David Shuster did the honors:

Shuster: “Let’s talk about the public trust. You represent, of course, a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last solider from your district who was killed in Iraq?”

Blackburn:”The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq uh — from my district I — I do not know his name …”

Shuster: “Okay, his name was Jeremy Bohannon. He was killed August the 9th, 2007. How come you didn’t know the name?”

Blackburn: “I – I, you know, I – I do not know why I did not know the name…”

Shuster: “But you weren’t appreciative enough to know the name of this young man. He was 18 years old who was killed, and yet you can say chapter and verse about what’s going on with The New York Times and Move On.org.” [snip] “Don’t you understand, the problems that a lot of people would have, that you’re so focused on an ad. When was the last time a New York Times ad ever killed somebody? I mean, here we have a war that took the life of an 18-year-old kid, Jeremy Bohannon, from your district, and you didn’t even know his name.”

In my opinion, the arrogance of Mr. Schuster caught up with him in this interview. He had no choice but to apologize as the facts did not bear out his testimony in his original interview.

David Shuster just took to the air on MSNBC to apologize for an earlier segment, in which he asked Rep. Marsha Blackburn to name the last person from her district who died in Iraq.

Turns out Bohannon wasn’t from Blackburn’s district, but rather from a neighboring one.

“For that, I apologize for that mistake,” said Shuster.

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Verizon wireless has rejected a request from NARAL to allow text messages to its customers.

I’m a Verizon customer and have had the text messaging feature turned off when someone was sending pornographic text messages to me, but I’m still glad they are not doing this at least for now.

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

Text messaging is a growing political tool in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such sign-up programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send updates to supporters.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

“This is right at the heart of the problem,” said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan law school, referring to the treatment of text messages. “The fact that wireless companies can choose to discriminate is very troubling.”

In turning down the program, Verizon, one of the nation’s two largest wireless carriers, told Naral that it does not accept programs from any group “that seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.” Naral provided copies of its communications with Verizon to The New York Times.

In another paragraph the spokesman for Verizon says they may reconsider their position.

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It’s hard to believe the Bush twins are 26 years old already. On Friday night Diane Sawyer interviews Jenna Bush on a variety of topics on 20/20, but I just want to quote what this young woman has to say about her parents.

When asked whether she agrees with her father about the Iraq War, Bush said, “You know I’m not here to talk about that, but I’m also not a policymaker. It’s a really complicated, obviously a very complicated subject. Everybody can agree on that.”

“You know there’ve been people — [actor] Matt Damon among them — who have said, ‘Should the Bush daughters be fighting in Iraq?’” Sawyer said.

“Obviously I understand that question and see what, what the point of that question is, for sure,” Bush said. “I think there are many ways to serve your country. And I think … what’s most appropriate for me to do is to teach or to work in UNICEF and represent our country in Latin America. But you know I don’t think it’s a practical question. I think if people really thought about it, they know that we would put many people in danger. But I understand the point of it. I hope that I serve by being a teacher.”

Bush told Sawyer she doesn’t worry about her father’s poll numbers, “because nobody knows him as a person. I mean, he’s my father. I separate it, you know? He’s a different person to me than what they portray him as. He’s a totally different person. I think that’s normal, I mean, he’s my dad.”

Bush said she worries about her father, but says, “He’s doing a great job and he’s hanging in there. … I worry about him probably less than he worries about me, you know.”

As for her mother, Bush said, “She is calm and loving and supportive, and she would do anything for us. I think I’ve become more like my mom just because of what we’re both interested in, children and teaching and writing.”

Bush called her twin sister, Barbara, her “best friend.”

“We’ve gone through every single thing together, you know from the womb on. Imagine going through this alone. That would have been really difficult. We had each other to say, ‘gosh, so and so said this’ or ‘did you see this’ … we’re each other’s best support system and best friends.”

When asked by Sawyer whether there was a White House child that she always thought she’d like to emulate, Bush said, “I think Chelsea Clinton is very kind and smart and articulate. And she’s always been very friendly to us, but we just wanted to be ourselves. … She’s beautiful and poised all the time.”

It looks like they’ve raised a good girl and I’m sure her sister is just as good, regardless of the troubles they got into while in college.

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