"I want ... I believe ... I've seen ... I've heard ... I said ... I will be ... I'm asking ... I don't know ... I challenge ... I urge ... I set ... I know ... I'm proposing ... I ask ... I took ... I made ... I would ... I intend ... I've ordered ... I will not ... I've heard ... I am eager ... I'm not ... I'm not ... I'm not ... I am ... I've proposed ... I care ... I recognize ... I'm willing ... I've proposed ... I created ... I don't agree ... I am prepared ... I hear ... I will submit ... I ask ... I will veto ... I will travel ... I call on all ... I know ... I stand..."
"The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger" What utter baloney. If you are walking down the street and you feel a gun at your head you cannot reach for the gun in your bag. So do you have to be holding the weapon all the time? And an unarmed man could overpower a woman, reach into her bag and use her own weapon to attack her! In the meantime people get shot by accident, people shoot first and think later, kids play with weapons and gun violence becomes normal in society. You only have to look at countries where gun control exists and violent crime/homicide rates are far far lower.
The International Crime Victims Survey, conducted by Leiden University in Holland, found that England and Wales ranked second overall in violent crime among industrialized nations.
Twenty-six percent of English citizens -- roughly one-quarter of the population -- have been victimized by violent crime. Australia led the list with more than 30 percent of its population victimized.
The United States didn't even make the "top 10" list of industrialized nations whose citizens were victimized by crime.
Jack Straw, the British home secretary, admitted that "levels of victimization are higher than in most comparable countries for most categories of crime."
Highlights of the study indicated that:
-The percentage of the population that suffered "contact crime" in England and Wales was 3.6 percent, compared with 1.9 percent in the United States and 0.4 percent in Japan.
-Burglary rates in England and Wales were also among the highest recorded. Australia (3.9 percent) and Denmark (3.1 per cent) had higher rates of burglary with entry than England and Wales (2.8 percent). In the U.S., the rate was 2.6 percent, according to 1995 figures;
-"After Australia and England and Wales, the highest prevalence of crime was in Holland (25 percent), Sweden (25 percent) and Canada (24 percent). The United States, despite its high murder rate, was among the middle ranking countries with a 21 percent victimization rate," the London Telegraph said.
-England and Wales also led in automobile thefts. More than 2.5 percent of the population had been victimized by car theft, followed by 2.1 percent in Australia and 1.9 percent in France. Again, the U.S. was not listed among the "top 10" nations.
-The study found that Australia led in burglary rates, with nearly 4 percent of the population having been victimized by a burglary. Denmark was second with 3.1 percent; the U.S. was listed eighth at about 1.8 percent.
The Sun - A COMMUNIST version of Monopoly has been made where players trade in bread and loo (toilet) paper instead of hotels and houses. The board game, called Queue (Line), is the brainchild of the National Remembrance Institute in Poland to show children what the country was like in the Soviet era.
Players get a list of ten essential items like bread and toilet roll and have to travel around the board joining queues (lines) to get into state owned shops.
Instead of old favourites like Chance and Community Chest, players can draw wild cards which can get them sent to the front of queues because of a Communist Party connection or having their shop closed down for "decadence".
The game's creator Karol Madaj said: "The game not only makes players understand shopping in Poland under communism. "It also teaches them what queuing (lining up) is like - something people seem to have forgotten."
After receiving threats and two suspicious letters Tuesday, the National Archives of Canada cancelled the screening of a controversial documentary that critiques Iran’s nuclear weapons program, a move that has organizers questioning the national library’s autonomy.Read more
The Free Thinking Film Society’s showing of Iranium prompted so many complaints — some of them from the Iranian Embassy — that staff thought it necessary to close the entire building at 396 Wellington St. in Ottawa, just steps from the Supreme Court of Canada and Parliament Hill at 4:45 p.m., said archives spokeswoman Pauline Portelance.
“Once we started to receive threats from the public and threats of public protest, we deemed the risk associated with the event was a little too high,” she said,,,,,,
(Click on image to, as the new word goes, "embiggen")
"Conservatives like to argue that these are isolated incidents carried out by lunatics and therefore carry no big lessons (unless the perpetrator is Muslim, in which case it's terrorism); liberals view them as opportunities to address various social ills. Obama is in the latter category and should act accordingly. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008. The same goes for a shooting spree that gravely wounds a beloved congresswoman"
"Sad to say, if Giffords had died, she would have been mourned and soon the conversation would have moved on. But Giffords lives, thank God, which offers other possibilities. We won't know for weeks or months whether she can function in public. If she can, she will prove a powerful referee of the boundaries of public discourse--more influential, perhaps, than the president himself"I did not, nor care to hear or see Obamas speech as I have never seen one, but what Alter wrote and thinks I believe Obama does no matter what he said last night. After all, what he was reading were word's of a speech writer not word's of his own.
Watching many on the right rush to congratulate the President for his supposedly compassionate speech, which included an ironic and hypocritical call for “civility” (NO LABELS, haters!) — after allowing his party and the media to spend five days suggesting that millions of Americans who happen to disagree with the Presidents policies were somehow co-conspirators to multiple murders, including that of a 9-year-old girl — it is clear to me why the GOP establishment and its supporters have consistently ceded ground to the progressives and to their agenda: they strive, above all else, to avoid being cast in a negative light by their political opponents. That is, they’re cowardly and cowed.
The rest of us don’t need to be.
To borrow from the execrable Kos (who, let’s remember, was one of the first of the progressive stampede to tie the shootings to Sarah Palin and the right), screw ‘em. Sideways. With a halibut.
“We made this film so that the people who were on the scene on 9/11 or lost family members in those attacks could have their say on the Ground Zero mosque issue,” Mawyer said. “They are the ones who will have to live with it near the graves of their loved ones and they need to be asked what they think.”
"He bridges the gap between the establishment and the grassroots. He is in the comfort zone of both. He has a private sector background that shines in comparison to anything Barack Obama ever did before elected politics.* He has the free market think tank background to reassure fiscal conservatives. He has the social conservative bona fides to reassure the social conservatives who, this year, feel marginalized"Allahpundit over at HotAir picks up on the theme and adds some further thought to the situation.
Politico - "Jersey Shore" star Snooki might be a fan of Sen. John McCain, but she apparently does not share the same love for the Arizona senator's onetime running mate, Sarah Palin.
The tanned reality star tweeted Wednesday, "Sara Palin has a reality show? ....I'm bored ... maybe ill come stir up some excitement in that Alaskan home.." more
