I have boxes of old diskettes loaded with CAD drawings that were compressed with DOS 5's backup utility. My installation set for that OS is corrupt, and Microsoft no longer offers (nor allows the download sites to offer) the executable file that will decompress this format.
Major ticker.
When the DA says no one is above the law, that's baloney for the public to eat.
Steve Tyler's track record is clear; he is reluctant to prosecute sex offenders. Most of all, he wanted the case against his chief of staff to go away quietly, and probably it would have had local law enforcement not told the newspaper about the investigation.
Tyler has no zeal when it comes to real criminals like rapists and pedophiles, but he'll gladly waste his department's time and budget in a rabid quest to punish men who embarrassed him in the Ratcliff exposé. Even if he continues to lose, Tyler accomplishes his goal of impugning their reputations and making them pay ruinously high legal fees.
Make no mistake, the biggest losers in this slow motion wreck are the taxpayers and the criminal justice system.
Steve Tyler fans, please ask yourselves this: why did the DA make Mike Ratcliff his liaison to churches on the problem of pedophilia when he knew his aide was under state investigation for precisely that crime?! Does that make you proud of your hero? .
The Advocate has used an opinion poll question to deliver its editorial position. This was accomplished two ways: 1. By introducing the survey question with a loaded phrase: "In these economic realities..." 2. By offering a loaded choice of responses" Yes", "No", and "Are you crazy?"
Too cute by half, Advocate. Next time run this poll:
What kind of job do you think we are doing? 1. Good 2. Needs improvement 3. You guys suck so bad we can't believe it .
Pilot confidently accuses the following co-conspirators:
"American corporations...the U.S. Mafia, Richard Nixon, Robert Vesco, Bebe Rebozo, Meyer Lansky, Howard Hughes, to name just a few, set up a Russian patsy sympathizer to plug JFK."
What? No CIA, US military, and Cuban refugees?
Whew! Sounds like someone watched the series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, and found most of the competing (and conflicting) theories to be so persuasive he chose to believe them all.
Secrets are almost impossible to keep, and the more actors who are involved, the sooner a crime is exposed. If this "unified conspiracy theory" were correct, the whole lot would have been on trial within six months of the deed.
Bobby Kennedy believed his brother's killing was pay back from Castro for all the failed hits JFK ordered on the Cuban dictator. How curious that virtually all conspiracy buffs dismiss this possibility, despite the logic and evidence that supports it. .
I don't hunt. Never have. Never will.
As a tyke I cried when the hunter killed Bambi's mom, but I went to the BBQ later. So I'm no vegan, and don't look down my nose at hunters.
Feral hog and deer overpopulation are serious problems. Anyone who thinks hunters shouldn't be part of the solution should rethink their position. On one short stretch of US77 through a creek bottom I counted fresh carcasses of five deer and two hogs on the roadsides--struck by vehicles.
Contrary to what some posters suppose, hunting through the eons has always involved selecting the most advantageous location for taking down prey. Water holes and river crossings. Closed terrain, etc. Luring quarry with bait is an ancient technique.
Of course this concept can be taken to tawdry extremes. LBJ was once invited to shoot a corralled deer by one of his big contributors. He tried to decline gracefully but was eventually pressed into it, which he said left him sick inside. A few days later he cussed a blue streak when he saw the man striding across the lawn with the mounted animal's head in his arms. .
Mike wrote:
"Are you sober?..That was the most ignorant post I have ever received.. No basis, no direction, no facts just babble. You can't stand someone that disagrees with you...That is obvious.....You stalked one female liberal blogger and you are obsessed on trying to discredit BigJ...grow up or sober up."
The rules for commenting here seem straightforward enough. But in the above quoted rant, one citizen misused this blog space provided by VicAd to suggest that another citizen is perhaps intoxicated, ignorant, immature, and dangerously obsessive. In what universe does this meet the stated requirement to "keep it civil"? If ad hominem arguments as these pass muster with VicAd, will the editors kindly explain to its readership what they consider a "personal attack" to be? Interestingly, the author of these libels in this same thread actually wrote the following:
"My disposition, my reaction to a crisis is not the issue or of any importance…I want president that is a lot better and smarter than I am, or we are in big trouble….This is what cause Bush’s downfall 1. The fiasco in Iraq caused America to take another look at him in 2000...."
And this is the same blogger who on Feb 11 condescended to another with this boast:
Please that's poetic but so superficial....Now I would put my knowledge of Iraq any time any day..Before,during, and present day...against yours
Wow. The Iraq fiasco in 2000? What caused a self-described political junkie and modest Iraq expert to commit an error so glaring? Rather than irresponsibly speculating on what he might have had to drink (or smoke) I will stick to the facts...and the posting rules.
Dubya did not take office until January 2001, and did not "lie us into Iraq" until March 2003. More to the point, he did not lie us into Iraq.
Regime change was official US policy, approved by resolution in Congress, during the Clinton administration. As a matter of public record, WMD arguments employed by Bush in 2002-2003 were identical to those uttered over the preceding 24 months by such Democrats as Bill Clinton, Sec. of State Madeleine Albright, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Harry Reid, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, etc etc. Don’t take my word for it. Watch them for yourself. Here are the Democrats in their own words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwSDv...
Certain people figure if they keep repeating the line that Bush lied us into a war, this falsehood will eventually be believed by the masses. It's as if the Move-On crowd found a 1936 speech by Nazi propaganda meister Joseph Goebbels and adopted it as their political handbook.
After beating around the bush and dropping some GOP names for misdirection, our well-read political junkie blogger swallows hard and tackles the burning issue of the day--the millions just paid in AIG bonuses: Christopher Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee or maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner...........Follow the money.
OK, let's follow the money. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group, AIG donated a total of $854,905 to political campaigns in 2008. AIG employees as a group represent Dodd’s fourth-biggest donor during his career, the group’s research shows. The company’s political action committee, employees and immediate family members have given Dodd more than $280,000. ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pi... )
Uh oh.
But guess whose presidential campaign received $112,170 from AIG execs. Obama.
Bigger uh oh. The great myth of the 2008 Obama campaign is that it was financed mainly by many small donations from Average Joe and LaKeisha Sixpack. The truth is that out of the two and a half million donors to the campaign, almost 60% of his money came from 180,000 top dogs representing special interests including Wall Street. A mere 552 donors account for almost a full third of his campaign cash. http://www.takimag.com/site/article/e... Democrats want us to believe that the GOP is the party of rich doctors, Big Business and billionaires. It isn’t, and actually has not been since 1992. Lawyers donate Democratic at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. Tech executives, 5-to-1. Investment bankers, 2-to-1. And all those greedy yuppies Hollyweird and Jon Stewart routinely bash? They contributed to Obama overwhelmingly. Democrats not only have more billionaires, the fat cats like George Soros shell out more dough than their Republican counterparts ever did. Let’s continue to follow the money. Here is a list of financial entities and the amounts they donated to Obama’s campaign. Note the correlation between big donors and big bailout money: Goldman Sachs: $955,473 Citigroup: $653,468 JP Morgan Chase & Co.: $646,058 Morgan Stanley: $485,823 Bank of America: $274,493 Wachovia: $214,151 AIG: $112,170 Lehman Brothers: $276,088 Lehman failed before Obama took office, so it didn’t get to join the list of banks leaching off American taxpayers. ( http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/con... )
Remember all those promises about how Obama was going change the way business is done in Washington?
In February, pro-Obama bloggers slammed Republicans for voting against a dicey stimulus package loaded with almost 9,000 earmarks. They scoffed at GOP complaints about Congress not being allowed to read what the conference committee changed in that monster before it was voted on.
Now we see that ramming unread bills through Congress can have real consequences; the biggest consequence may be the damage it’s doing to Obama's credibility.
Voters applauded candidate Obama for criticizing exactly this tawdry Congressional technique of rushing bills through blind. They also cheered when he promised to end the practice of larding up appropriation bills with earmarks. But once in office, Obama could not resist the temptation to exploit our financial crisis by stooping to the same dirty trick of railroading a bill through, a bill riddled with earmarks.
Now Obama gets to pay the political price for his hypocrisy. Two more questions were raised in this thread:
Could the stimulus package passed weeks ago already be turning the economy around?
That idea is laughable. So little of it has been spent. Most won't be spent for years. That's it's fatal flaw. It doesn't stimulate the economy now.
Should Obama take any blame for the state of the stock market?
His every public utterance from Fall 2007 until 12 days ago could hardly have been worse for the market. He has habitually, reflexively bad-mouthed the economy. (So much for HOPE.) Plus he botched his most important appointment -- the expert who supposedly will guide the nation out of this financial nightmare. It came late. It was the wrong guy. And the key deputy positions needed at Treasury remain vacant.
Former Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, called the present situation at Treasury is a "disgrace". Hey folks, Volcker is head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board!
Not to worry, Obama has the perfect scapegoat for all this -- his tax-dodging Treasury Secretary. Yesterday the President said he has complete confidence in Tim Geitner. Which translated from Washington-ese means Timothy will be under the same bus as Rev. Jeremiah Wright within ten days. Too bad he can’t throw Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Franks under the bus too.
It's been a bumpy start for the Obamanistas, but the well-read political junkie remains upbeat by imagining how much worse things would be had the Republicans won, and by wondering if those who dare gainsay his wisdom in VicAd blogs have stopped beating their wives. .
. Beneficial as a shield law would be, getting the bill through this Lege is unlikely.
One thing the AG could do to help the free flow of information would be to keep his promise to punish government officials who flout the Texas Open Records Law.
For decades local governments have ignored Freedom of Information requests, or issued refusals to comply "pending a review of the particular request by the Attorney General".
When Gregg Abbott took office, one of his first acts was to put elected officials and local government entities across the state on notice that he means to put an end to that tactic. A bulletin prepared by his office informed governments that virtually everything in their possession is subject to examination by citizens on request. He explained the few exceptions to disclosure, and issued a press release warning officials there would be penalties for violating this basic right.
We have a serial offender right here in Victoria County. Big surprise, it's Criminal District Attorney Stephen Tyler. He has repeatedly denied open records requests and repeatedly been forced to comply by the AG. Tyler even has an AGO with his name on it for refusing to obey an open records request.
If Mr. Abbott needs to make an example out of an FOI violator, we have his perfect target. .
. Uh oh, someone didn't take statistics in college, did she? True the field involves math, but rocket science it isn't.
Say you want to do a random survey that is accurate with a margin of error of 5% If the total number of people are in your target population is 100,000, then to conduct a survey with a confidence level of 95%, you must you must take 383 samples. For higher confidence, say 99%, you would need 659 samples.
The more samples in the survey, the more accurate your results.
However, drawing a conclusion from the presence of Bud cans at two crimes scenes in Victoria County has an accuracy level of, well effectively zero. Your conclusion is total horse hockey.
Scientifically unfounded beliefs about use of this type of alcohol or another, are widely held. Back in the corrupt old days of New York City's Tammy Hall, one of the biggest crook politicians in town, Jim Plunkett, told a newspaperman that he could always tell when a German has fallen into rough company if he forsakes beer and takes to drinking whiskey with Irishmen.
My own belief based on purely anecdotal evidence is that people who drink gin are the ones most prone to go mean and violent when inebriated.
As for beer, the great Chicago newspaperman and muckraker of political scandal, Mike Royko, wrote that to him all beer tastes like the secret brewing process involves running it through a horse first. (Royko was a scotch drinker.) .
.
. . . . . . . . . . .It's 10 pm; do you know where Steve Tyler's former chief-of-staff is?
.
A senior editor at Rocky Mtn News is a friend of 25 years. I phoned her Thursday afternoon to offer condolences. No leads on a new job. The sudden closing plus being interviewed about it on camera by a Denver TV crew she said felt like an out of body experience.
By coincidence in college I knew William Dean Singleton, owner of the surviving Denver Post (and the 4th largest chain of papers in the nation). Singleton grew up in a tiny shack and is living proof that in America one can succeed with raw ambition and nothing else. .
Newsletter
I have boxes of old diskettes loaded with CAD drawings that were compressed with DOS 5's backup utility. My installation set for that OS is corrupt, and Microsoft no longer offers (nor allows the download sites to offer) the executable file that will decompress this format.
Major ticker.
When the DA says no one is above the law, that's baloney for the public to eat.
Steve Tyler's track record is clear; he is reluctant to prosecute sex offenders. Most of all, he wanted the case against his chief of staff to go away quietly, and probably it would have had local law enforcement not told the newspaper about the investigation.
Tyler has no zeal when it comes to real criminals like rapists and pedophiles, but he'll gladly waste his department's time and budget in a rabid quest to punish men who embarrassed him in the Ratcliff exposé. Even if he continues to lose, Tyler accomplishes his goal of impugning their reputations and making them pay ruinously high legal fees.
Make no mistake, the biggest losers in this slow motion wreck are the taxpayers and the criminal justice system.
Steve Tyler fans, please ask yourselves this: why did the DA make Mike Ratcliff his liaison to churches on the problem of pedophilia when he knew his aide was under state investigation for precisely that crime?! Does that make you proud of your hero?
.
The Advocate has used an opinion poll question to deliver its editorial position.
This was accomplished two ways:
1. By introducing the survey question with a loaded phrase: "In these economic realities..."
2. By offering a loaded choice of responses" Yes", "No", and "Are you crazy?"
Too cute by half, Advocate. Next time run this poll:
What kind of job do you think we are doing?
1. Good
2. Needs improvement
3. You guys suck so bad we can't believe it
.
Pilot confidently accuses the following co-conspirators:
"American corporations...the U.S. Mafia, Richard Nixon, Robert Vesco, Bebe Rebozo, Meyer Lansky, Howard Hughes, to name just a few, set up a Russian patsy sympathizer to plug JFK."
What? No CIA, US military, and Cuban refugees?
Whew! Sounds like someone watched the series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, and found most of the competing (and conflicting) theories to be so persuasive he chose to believe them all.
Secrets are almost impossible to keep, and the more actors who are involved, the sooner a crime is exposed. If this "unified conspiracy theory" were correct, the whole lot would have been on trial within six months of the deed.
Bobby Kennedy believed his brother's killing was pay back from Castro for all the failed hits JFK ordered on the Cuban dictator. How curious that virtually all conspiracy buffs dismiss this possibility, despite the logic and evidence that supports it.
.
I don't hunt. Never have. Never will.
As a tyke I cried when the hunter killed Bambi's mom, but I went to the BBQ later.
So I'm no vegan, and don't look down my nose at hunters.
Feral hog and deer overpopulation are serious problems. Anyone who thinks hunters shouldn't be part of the solution should rethink their position. On one short stretch of US77 through a creek bottom I counted fresh carcasses of five deer and two hogs on the roadsides--struck by vehicles.
Contrary to what some posters suppose, hunting through the eons has always involved selecting the most advantageous location for taking down prey. Water holes and river crossings. Closed terrain, etc. Luring quarry with bait is an ancient technique.
Of course this concept can be taken to tawdry extremes. LBJ was once invited to shoot a corralled deer by one of his big contributors. He tried to decline gracefully but was eventually pressed into it, which he said left him sick inside. A few days later he cussed a blue streak when he saw the man striding across the lawn with the mounted animal's head in his arms.
.
Mike wrote:
"Are you sober?..That was the most ignorant post I have ever received..
No basis, no direction, no facts just babble.
You can't stand someone that disagrees with you...That is obvious.....You stalked one female liberal blogger and you are obsessed on trying to discredit BigJ...grow up or sober up."
The rules for commenting here seem straightforward enough. But in the above quoted rant, one citizen misused this blog space provided by VicAd to suggest that another citizen is perhaps intoxicated, ignorant, immature, and dangerously obsessive.
In what universe does this meet the stated requirement to "keep it civil"? If ad hominem arguments as these pass muster with VicAd, will the editors kindly explain to its readership what they consider a "personal attack" to be?
Interestingly, the author of these libels in this same thread actually wrote the following:
"My disposition, my reaction to a crisis is not the issue or of any importance…I want president that is a lot better and smarter than I am, or we are in big trouble….This is what cause Bush’s downfall 1. The fiasco in Iraq caused America to take another look at him in 2000...."
And this is the same blogger who on Feb 11 condescended to another with this boast:
Please that's poetic but so superficial....Now I would put my knowledge of Iraq any time any day..Before,during, and present day...against yours
Wow. The Iraq fiasco in 2000? What caused a self-described political junkie and modest Iraq expert to commit an error so glaring? Rather than irresponsibly speculating on what he might have had to drink (or smoke) I will stick to the facts...and the posting rules.
Dubya did not take office until January 2001, and did not "lie us into Iraq" until March 2003.
More to the point, he did not lie us into Iraq.
Regime change was official US policy, approved by resolution in Congress, during the Clinton administration. As a matter of public record, WMD arguments employed by Bush in 2002-2003 were identical to those uttered over the preceding 24 months by such Democrats as Bill Clinton, Sec. of State Madeleine Albright, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Harry Reid, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, etc etc.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch them for yourself. Here are the Democrats in their own words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwSDv...
Certain people figure if they keep repeating the line that Bush lied us into a war, this falsehood will eventually be believed by the masses. It's as if the Move-On crowd found a 1936 speech by Nazi propaganda meister Joseph Goebbels and adopted it as their political handbook.
After beating around the bush and dropping some GOP names for misdirection, our well-read political junkie blogger swallows hard and tackles the burning issue of the day--the millions just paid in AIG bonuses:
Christopher Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee or maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner...........Follow the money.
OK, let's follow the money.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group, AIG donated a total of $854,905 to political campaigns in 2008. AIG employees as a group represent Dodd’s fourth-biggest donor during his career, the group’s research shows. The company’s political action committee, employees and immediate family members have given Dodd more than $280,000.
( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pi... )
Uh oh.
But guess whose presidential campaign received $112,170 from AIG execs. Obama.
Bigger uh oh.
The great myth of the 2008 Obama campaign is that it was financed mainly by many small donations from Average Joe and LaKeisha Sixpack. The truth is that out of the two and a half million donors to the campaign, almost 60% of his money came from 180,000 top dogs representing special interests including Wall Street. A mere 552 donors account for almost a full third of his campaign cash.
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/e...
Democrats want us to believe that the GOP is the party of rich doctors, Big Business and billionaires. It isn’t, and actually has not been since 1992. Lawyers donate Democratic at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. Tech executives, 5-to-1. Investment bankers, 2-to-1. And all those greedy yuppies Hollyweird and Jon Stewart routinely bash? They contributed to Obama overwhelmingly. Democrats not only have more billionaires, the fat cats like George Soros shell out more dough than their Republican counterparts ever did.
Let’s continue to follow the money. Here is a list of financial entities and the amounts they donated to Obama’s campaign. Note the correlation between big donors and big bailout money:
Goldman Sachs: $955,473
Citigroup: $653,468
JP Morgan Chase & Co.: $646,058
Morgan Stanley: $485,823
Bank of America: $274,493
Wachovia: $214,151
AIG: $112,170
Lehman Brothers: $276,088
Lehman failed before Obama took office, so it didn’t get to join the list of banks leaching off American taxpayers.
( http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/con... )
Remember all those promises about how Obama was going change the way business is done in Washington?
In February, pro-Obama bloggers slammed Republicans for voting against a dicey stimulus package loaded with almost 9,000 earmarks. They scoffed at GOP complaints about Congress not being allowed to read what the conference committee changed in that monster before it was voted on.
Now we see that ramming unread bills through Congress can have real consequences; the biggest consequence may be the damage it’s doing to Obama's credibility.
Voters applauded candidate Obama for criticizing exactly this tawdry Congressional technique of rushing bills through blind. They also cheered when he promised to end the practice of larding up appropriation bills with earmarks. But once in office, Obama could not resist the temptation to exploit our financial crisis by stooping to the same dirty trick of railroading a bill through, a bill riddled with earmarks.
Now Obama gets to pay the political price for his hypocrisy.
Two more questions were raised in this thread:
Could the stimulus package passed weeks ago already be turning the economy around?
That idea is laughable. So little of it has been spent. Most won't be spent for years. That's it's fatal flaw. It doesn't stimulate the economy now.
Should Obama take any blame for the state of the stock market?
His every public utterance from Fall 2007 until 12 days ago could hardly have been worse for the market. He has habitually, reflexively bad-mouthed the economy. (So much for HOPE.) Plus he botched his most important appointment -- the expert who supposedly will guide the nation out of this financial nightmare. It came late. It was the wrong guy. And the key deputy positions needed at Treasury remain vacant.
Former Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, called the present situation at Treasury is a "disgrace". Hey folks, Volcker is head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board!
Not to worry, Obama has the perfect scapegoat for all this -- his tax-dodging Treasury Secretary. Yesterday the President said he has complete confidence in Tim Geitner. Which translated from Washington-ese means Timothy will be under the same bus as Rev. Jeremiah Wright within ten days.
Too bad he can’t throw Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Franks under the bus too.
It's been a bumpy start for the Obamanistas, but the well-read political junkie remains upbeat by imagining how much worse things would be had the Republicans won, and by wondering if those who dare gainsay his wisdom in VicAd blogs have stopped beating their wives.
.
.
Beneficial as a shield law would be, getting the bill through this Lege is unlikely.
One thing the AG could do to help the free flow of information would be to keep his promise to punish government officials who flout the Texas Open Records Law.
For decades local governments have ignored Freedom of Information requests, or issued refusals to comply "pending a review of the particular request by the Attorney General".
When Gregg Abbott took office, one of his first acts was to put elected officials and local government entities across the state on notice that he means to put an end to that tactic. A bulletin prepared by his office informed governments that virtually everything in their possession is subject to examination by citizens on request. He explained the few exceptions to disclosure, and issued a press release warning officials there would be penalties for violating this basic right.
We have a serial offender right here in Victoria County. Big surprise, it's Criminal District Attorney Stephen Tyler. He has repeatedly denied open records requests and repeatedly been forced to comply by the AG. Tyler even has an AGO with his name on it for refusing to obey an open records request.
If Mr. Abbott needs to make an example out of an FOI violator, we have his perfect target.
.
.
Uh oh, someone didn't take statistics in college, did she? True the field involves math, but rocket science it isn't.
Say you want to do a random survey that is accurate with a margin of error of 5% If the total number of people are in your target population is 100,000, then to conduct a survey with a confidence level of 95%, you must you must take 383 samples. For higher confidence, say 99%, you would need 659 samples.
The more samples in the survey, the more accurate your results.
However, drawing a conclusion from the presence of Bud cans at two crimes scenes in Victoria County has an accuracy level of, well effectively zero. Your conclusion is total horse hockey.
Scientifically unfounded beliefs about use of this type of alcohol or another, are widely held. Back in the corrupt old days of New York City's Tammy Hall, one of the biggest crook politicians in town, Jim Plunkett, told a newspaperman that he could always tell when a German has fallen into rough company if he forsakes beer and takes to drinking whiskey with Irishmen.
My own belief based on purely anecdotal evidence is that people who drink gin are the ones most prone to go mean and violent when inebriated.
As for beer, the great Chicago newspaperman and muckraker of political scandal, Mike Royko, wrote that to him all beer tastes like the secret brewing process involves running it through a horse first. (Royko was a scotch drinker.)
.
.
. . . . . . . . . . .It's 10 pm; do you know where Steve Tyler's former chief-of-staff is?
.
A senior editor at Rocky Mtn News is a friend of 25 years. I phoned her Thursday afternoon to offer condolences. No leads on a new job. The sudden closing plus being interviewed about it on camera by a Denver TV crew she said felt like an out of body experience.
By coincidence in college I knew William Dean Singleton, owner of the surviving Denver Post (and the 4th largest chain of papers in the nation). Singleton grew up in a tiny shack and is living proof that in America one can succeed with raw ambition and nothing else.
.