Our local news showed some people

who waited outside for 5-6 hours in freezing temps just to save maybe $50.  Lord have mercy.  I guess I'm thankful I don't need or want anything enough to do that!!

You're right about the me-me-me and it makes me sick.  People will kill each other for a dollar!! 

• Should Black Friday Be Outlawed? sm - m
  • no laws don;t trample people - vinnie
    • Are you serious? What makes you think - Kendra
    • These are some of the same people whose - phillygal
  • Greedy, materialistic freaking animals... - phillygal
  • No. People who act worse than animals - should be outlawed.nm
    • When I heard.............sm - m
      • News just stated they are now trying to determine - who those shoppers were. nm
  • Black Friday - woofer
    • Well-said, woofer. nm - Stardust
    • That mob mentality............ sm - m
      • I think it's a symbol of what our nation has become - gourdpainter
        • I agree 100%, GP.......... sm - m
          • Our local news showed some people - gourdpainter
            • I read on the web where.......... sm - m
              • Probably no where. n/m - gourdpainter
                • That poor man wasn't even... - Marmann

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it looks like they may have changed some of the voting locations..not sure when.  Check out website below to make sure she went to the right place.

http://www.azsos.gov/election/polling_places.htm

Hope this helps.

US is deploying anti-missle weapons to Hawaii in case N.Korea aims their newest long range missle towards Hawaii on July 4. Hopefully, Alaska is armed to the hilt.

That maniac needs to go.

are the same liberal nut jobs who like politicians to blow smoke up their butt and they follow blindly and willingly.  They refuse to hear any other side and yet they spew about how fox news is one-sided.  I'm sorry, but fox news is more fair than any channel or station I've seen or heard.  Middle of the road people watch Fox.  A lot more people are tuning into Fox than other stations that is for sure.  So keep up your whining, screaming, and bad mouthing.  People who have an open mind and want to see things from all sides, they watch Fox.  People who refuse to hear or see anything but what they want to....watch MSNBC, etc. 

As for Glenn Beck....he does get a little extreme sometimes, but he is a libritarian.  He isn't pub or dem.  He says what he means and means what he says which is a heck of a lot more than I can say for Obama and our government right now.  They are too busy talking out of the sides of their mouths.  I don't agree with everything Glenn says, but I do believe he actually cares.  I don't agree with everything Bill O'Reilly says, but he does show things from both sides.  He isn't a pub either, FYI.  Sean Hannity.....I like his show because he gets both dems and pubs on there to talk.  He is definitely conservative and I don't agree with everything he says either, but he is a good interviewer.

The people who refuse to watch Fox are also the same ones who blame pubs for everything while refusing to believe that the dems are to blame for our current situation as well.  That is how blind they are.  They are so stuck on party politics that all they can do is point fingers at the pubs and whine and refuse to hear anything else.  Both parties are to blame.

The ratings prove everything.  More and more people are tuning into Fox.  Get a clue and stop your whining.

I never would have started watching it. I didn't even know I could get Fox on my TV. During the political campaign everyone complained about "Faux News", so I got curious, found it on my TV, and started watching.

Up until then, I was watching MSNBC including Chris Matthews and other opinionated commentators (who is going to lecture 5 miles from here today), ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. 

Found out it doesn't matter if you watch the big 3 or the so-called MSNBC. They all had a sprinkling of news if it was broadcast at all, while Fox was usually FIRST with the news...and I mean real news, not just political news..They had exclusive reports and interviews with both sides, whereas the big 3 had 1-sided interviews.

Also, during the campaign, I was curious about O'Reilly, Hannity, Cavuto, and others. Started watching them to see what they were all about. Turns out I LIKE Hannity and Cavuto, but the one I really like is Bret Baier (sp).

Tried to watch Olberman and Matthews. Bitter, bitter guys and hardly truthful.

I still watch the big 3, but rely on Fox for truth and fairness. Say what you want, but view them with an open mind and you will be surprised.

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2009

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

paper that our wonderful governor (who has almost bankrupted our state) thinks he may be chosen for the Secretary of Transportation or Energy. But have no fear....he promises us he will remain our governor until 2011.

Please, beg the O not to offer the job to him or he will do the same thing to the country as he did to our state. Our state is in worse shape than before he took over. He has not kept 1 promise to us except that he would get casinos in here to help with property taxes and yet, we have yet to see our taxes lowered.

(Yeah, you know, ‘’flyover country.’’

As part of the stimulus package, President Obama rescued our recent police academy graduating class.  The City had run out of bucks and Mayor Michael (Don’t Question My Manhood*) Coleman threatening to lay these 25 recruits off – one week short of graduation.   The stimulus package provided the money to let them graduate and to let them enter their probationary period on the street.

The president even spoke at the graduation ceremony 03/06/2009 and said in part:

So for those who still doubt the wisdom of our recovery plan, I ask them to talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan. I ask them to talk to the nurses who are still able to care for our sick, and the firefighters and first responders who will still be able to keep our communities safe. I ask them to come to Ohio and meet the 25 men and women who will soon be protecting the streets of Columbus because we passed this plan. (Applause.) I look at these young men and women, I look into their eyes and I see their badges today and I know we did the right thing.

These jobs and the jobs of so many other police officers and teachers and firefighters all across Ohio will now be saved because of this recovery plan -- a plan that will also create jobs in every corner of this state. Last week, we announced that Ohio would receive $128 million that will put people to work renovating and rebuilding affordable housing. (Applause.) On Tuesday -- on Tuesday I announced that we'd be sending another $935 million to Ohio that will create jobs rebuilding our roads, our bridges, and our highways. (Applause.) And yesterday, Vice President Biden announced $180 million for this state that will go towards expanding mass transit and buying fuel-efficient buses -- money that will be putting people to work, getting people to work. (Applause.) 

There was much more self-congratulatory oratory, the link is: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/obamas_remarks_at_columbus_pol.html

What’s wrong with this picture?  Well, the City is still broke.  A 25% income tax ballot proposal was defeated in the May primary.  Mayor Coleman now says that unless it is passed when it is put back on the ballot in August, 250 public safety jobs (police and fire) will be eliminated.   So much for saving the recruit class of  2009!

Why is it that the first thing a politician (and I include Republicans along with Democrats - Coleman just happens to be a Dem) does when he wants money is threaten vital services?  Coleman insists that this is not a power play.  But, of course, whenever a politician says he is not lying I have only to watch his lips.  If they are moving, I know he is full of it.  We all can think of dozens of  less-crucial departments or programs that could more easily be cut, but that would not have the emotional appeal that jeopardizing citizens’ lives by cutting police and fire services. 

Another issue on the ballot was for the parks system, a bond issue to operate existing parks as well as acquire lands and  build several new ones.   The issue passed, but should we really be spending money on new parks when THE CITY IS OUT OF MONEY??  No accident that both expenditures were on the same ballot issue.  Had we been given the choice of voting on the operating and construction funding separately, the outcome may have been different.  Had the issue been defeated, the City could have threatened to close existing parks and put the issue back on the August ballot. 

*Don’t Question My Manhood/ great moments in radio

In spring 2005 Columbus made national news (difficult as that is to imagine) over the story of a mentally-challenged girl who was sexually molested by several boys in a public school.  What made this a scandal, is that the school and school system, rather than report this to the police, covered it up.  When the story broke, Glenn Beck gave it lots of air time, asking why Michael Coleman, as mayor of Columbus, had done nothing about it.  Coleman (foolishly) agreed to go on the air to discuss it.  (Operating strictly by memory here, I am not sure if a transcript of the full interview can be obtained anywhere, but it really was a side-splitter.)  As I recall, Coleman said running the school board was not in his job description....

Beck, 41, said he wanted to talk to Coleman because he assumed the mayor would be as ''outraged as I am.'' Instead, he said, when Coleman got on the air, ''all I heard was blah, blah, blah. He was being a politician. . . . I wanted to talk to him as a dad, not as a politician.''

In the interview, Coleman and Beck continually talked over and past each other. The result was verbal chaos.

As Beck began one question by saying, ''I’m asking you as a man and a father...'' Coleman cut him off and said, ''Don’t question my manhood. Don’t you ever question my manhood.'' Coleman later said he misheard the question.

Link to Columbus Dispatch article:

http://www.dispatch.com/live/contentbe/dispatch/2005/04/22/20050422-A1-05.html

HIDDEN  ENEMY :

HSUS – The Humane Society of the United States

Reptile breeders should feel pride in the progress they’ve helped achieve over the past several decades.  We’ve unraveled many of the mysteries of inducing our animals to reproduce in captivity, and have made ‘Captive-Bred’ ( = 'CB' ) a common adjective in the hobby and industry.  CB applied to herps is now understood to reflect ‘quality’ and ‘hardiness’ as pets.  The percentage of CB herps available today dwarfs what we had just ten years ago, and is already making up a significant proportion of herps sold in pet shops. 

Just as it seems obvious to us close to the herp industry that this natural evolution is proceeding well, new threats to our freedom to keep herps looms in the form of three ‘new’ enemies – the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), The Fund For Animals, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).  The PETA are presently under scrutiny by the F.B.I. as a terrorism network because of their admission of funding extremists who have destroyed several facilities by fire.  These closely-aligned organizations have remained largely hidden from our notice until recently.  They have now set their sights on the reptile hobby and trade, their ultimate goals being to stop it completely. 

The HSUS is a familiar group to most people.  Its name seems to imply it all – humane treatment for animals.  In the past, the group took in abandoned cats and dogs, prosecuted farms that allowed livestock to starve, and went after people who mistreated animals in some way.  It created animal shelters, promoted spay-neuter programs, and developed modern euthanasia protocols.  We all applauded the old HSUS efforts and supported it with our donations.  We believed in what it stood for and helped make it a huge and powerful organization. 

The HSUS was wildly successful in its efforts.  The public was educated and abuse cases dwindled.  Nowadays, it’s headline news when a rare case of neglect or other atrocity against animals is uncovered and prosecuted.  Anyone who may have allowed care of an animal in their custody to become substandard is now frightfully aware of the consequences of such unacceptable behavior. 

Why is this seemingly worthy organization a problem now?

Since 1954, the HSUS has grown into a huge bureaucratic organization with 200+ employees and well over $200,000,000 (by 2005) in their bank accounts.  The money is stock-piled, and not one dollar of it is used to help the many ‘Humane Society’ shelters in cities across America .  The HSUS long ago separated itself from all the smaller regional societies around the country, sharing no funding at all with them now.  You are doing nothing to help your local community animal shelter by donating money to the Humane Society of the United States ! 

The HSUS got fat and prosperous capitalizing on our concern for the plight of homeless animals by bombarding us with tear-jerking fundraising campaigns.  Its assets naturally attracted humaniac extremist groups like PETA that wished to tap into the war chest of funds.  Radical animal rights proponents thoroughly infiltrated the HSUS and instilled their idealistic views as representing the whole organization’s doctrine.  Then a subtle ‘coup’ occurred in 1973, warranted by the changing leadership because “the costs of running a local animal control operation [was] drawing off funds needed elsewhere”.  (< That quote is from the HSUS’ own website!)   They literally declared that supporting the small Humane Society shelters across the U.S. was 'stealing' the money needed to pursue their own new humaniac agendas.

The HSUS split away completely, dropping financial support of all the smaller state ‘Humane Society’ groups.  But they did it quietly to leave everyone with the logical impression they were now just the national headquarters coordinating all ‘their local chapters’.  They have purposely done nothing to erase that illusion of ‘umbrella organization’ to insure receiving all the same donation monies you thought were still supporting your home town animal shelters.  The HSUS’s coffers swelled because they didn’t have to share the wealth anymore.  It was a pretty sneaky and wildly successful move on their part!

The HSUS grew into a rich monster that basked in the glory of its past accomplishments of conquering cruelty to animals.  But with that war largely won, the ‘new’ HSUS had a different agenda to set its sights on.  Most importantly, it had to continue evoking sympathy donations from the public to keep the money flowing in.  Creating a new, visible enemy became a necessity.  They chose to refocus on non-traditional pets largely because the ranks of people in the bird, reptile and fish hobbies / industries were less unified, easier targets.  This is why reptile-keeping has come under attack.  We’re the new excuse – the new bad guys – to keep their paychecks coming in steadily.

In its distorted view (and the published rhetoric it distributes to back it), reptiles are totally unsuitable as pets.  The HSUS preaches that nearly all reptiles suffer shortened life spans when kept in cages.  It goes so far as to include all captive-bred herps in that appraisal, but not through sheer ignorance. 

The HSUS’s clever strategy is to focus the public’s attention on isolated problems it can capture in pictures or on video to invoke sympathy, then imply that those disturbing images represent the norm in the entire industry.  Recognizing the huge progress in herpetoculture over the past couple decades would not strengthen the gloomy ecological scenario it wants people to remember when filling out those donation checks.  The HSUS purposely ignores captive breeding success and how it is rapidly replacing the need for some wild-caught herps.  It's crucial the public stay duped into believing that stopping reptile-keeping is the only way to protect animals in nature.  The HSUS needs this manufactured image to focus public condemnation and thus assure continued funding of their efforts.

Another HSUS approach is to scare us into believing that reptile-related Salmonella has reached plague proportions.  Its well-paid advertising staff uses the craftiest psychology to twist facts and statistics and to publicize the ‘huge’ health threat herps pose.  It knows such tactics weigh heavily on parents’ minds, hoping those frightened parents will prohibit their children from having herps at all. 

Just how big a problem is Salmonella anyway?  Bill and I do not know, or even know of, anyone who has ever contracted Salmonella from reptiles in their entire lives.  We don’t even personally know of any Salmonella cases, period, and we know and meet lots of herp keepers!  We don't doubt that it happens occasionally, but the HSUS is blowing public health fears all out of proportion to achieve their animal rights goals.

Unlike the old HSUS, the new PETAphile leaders have declared total war on all pet keepers, intending to end the practice of owning pets completely.  They’ve stated that goal repeatedly, though they try to subtly disguise the true, hidden agenda so not to scare away contributions from cat and dog owners.  On their website’s home page (http://www.hsus.org), they state “Promoting the protection of all animals”.  What they mean is to protect ALL animals from any use by humans - as pets, as food, as leather, for medical research --- EVERYthing!   Don’t let them fool you --- HSUS and PETA are essentially synonymous today.

The HSUS is presently trying to make virtually every act of pet keeping an offense by emphasizing every imperfection in our ability to draft new species into captivity / domestication.  They subtly bombard schools with free 'animal information' that carries their propaganda, preaching their private agenda to children so their 'conservation message' is taken to heart early.  When indoctrinated while young and impressionable, they hope those children will support the HSUS as future voters / donators.  The HSUS is no longer composed of soldiers for a noble cause.  They’re more like mercenaries who must create an enemy to assure their continued employment.  The modern HSUS is an animal rights organization masquerading as an animal welfare organization.  Supporting them is like supplying terrorists with money to hurt us.

The HSUS published this book {>>>} in 2001 - a persuasive political ploy disguised as a 'scientific report'.  It was freely distributed to all U.S. governmental regulatory bodies to sway them to help their cause.  This is how donation money sent to the HSUS is put to 'good' use.  The last paragraph of the entire 'study' sums up their position:      "Finally, we recommend that [government] regulatory bodies put an end to the reptile trade:  State and local authorities are encouraged to ban the commercial collection of reptiles to protect wild populations of reptiles and ban the sale of reptiles as pets to the general public in order to protect human health..."

For more info on the dark side of the HSUS and PETA, go to http://www.animalscam.com .  Or read the book The Hijacking of the Humane Movement: Animal Extremism by Patti & Rod Strand.

IMPORTANT NOTE:   Don’t abandon the local Humane Society animal shelters in your own community – they’re still doing their commendable work as always. 

We have not suddenly become political activists.  This exposé is just an honest response to the attack the HSUS initiated upon all herp keepers.  We hope it may convince you to spread the word to friends and family.  Avoid doing anything that benefits the Humane Society of the United States, the reptile hobby and industry's new sworn enemy.  

- - -  Kathy Love / CornUtopia   &  Bill Love / Blue Chameleon Ventures