Let the fallout begin…

George Bush may soon regret his poor choice of words. Or, knowing George Bush, maybe not… His cheap shot (and fear-mongering tactics) directed at Barack Obama and the Democratic Party may very well come back to bite him in the ass. This man is so very short-sighted.

With great power comes great responsibility. What this man did while representing the United States of America was totally irresponsible. There can be consequences for words used carelessly or maliciously. There may well be fallout, with unintended consequences… Words matter.

Bush An “Appeaser,” Says Egyptian Press - CBS News

Egypt’s state-owned press opened fire Saturday on U.S. President George W. Bush as he arrived for talks with regional leaders at the conclusion of a five-day Mideast tour.

The newspapers, whose management are all appointed by the government, criticized Mr. Bush’s speech Thursday in front of the Israeli Knesset for being overly supportive of the Israelis and not mentioning the Palestinians’ plight.

“The Torah-inspired speech of Bush raised question marks over the credibility of the U.S. role in the Middle East,” wrote Mursi Atallah, the publisher of Al-Ahram, the flagship daily of the state-owned press. “Bush aims to do nothing but appeasing Israel.”

Mr. Bush’s tour, which included stops in Israel and Saudi Arabia, represents another effort to push Mideast peace talks forward as his time in office winds down.

In his speech marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, Mr. Bush reiterated the U.S.’s close ties to its regional ally, and dismissed the notion that the Jewish state should have to negotiate with its armed adversaries.

A front page editorial in Al-Gomhouria, another Egyptian state-owned daily, described Mr. Bush as “a failed president who delivers nothing but a lousy speech.”

Akhbar Al-Youm also on Saturday published a picture of Mr. Bush hugging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and captioned it “lovers.”

The paper also ran a front page cartoon showing an Egyptian peasant consoling President Hosni Mubarak for having to meet with “this burdensome guy who will be leaving soon,” in reference to Mr. Bush.

Read entire article…

(AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Music Night - Bewitched and belated

CCR: Who’ll stop the rain

Andrea Bocelli/Chris Botti: Italia

Steely Dan: Reeling in the years

Elton John/Luciano Pavarotti: Live like horses

NEWSFLASH - Ted Kennedy rushed to Hospital with stroke like symptoms.

(CNN) — Sen. Edward Kennedy was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts Saturday morning, a well-informed, prominent Democratic source in that state told CNN.

The source said the 76-year-old senator had “symptoms of a stroke.”

Kennedy was taken to the hospital around 8 or 9 a.m. from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis, according to the source. The source said the senator would be transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

That hospital said it had no information on Kennedy.

Full story…

Trash day..

All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle Editorial Cartoonist and Animation Artist.
For Nick’s animations, visit Nick Anderson: Animation Archives.
For Nick’s cartoons, visit Nick Anderson.

The Boy in the Bubble

The Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight, Tonight

I don’t normally listen to this kind of music, but the video is fascinating..

Unseen: The Rest of the O’Reilly Rant

from www.barelypolitical. posted with vodpod

Bush+Nazi Germany=Profits!

The Bush family fortune may be based, at least in part, from war profiteers dealing with Nazi Germany.

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

Bush tossed out oblique slurs about appeasement, but his grandfather actually helped the Nazi war effort!

Ecstatic!

If you’ve never experience qawalli music, you should, and there is no better place to start than the world’s greatest master, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

You can leave your hat on…

Tom Jones….baby. 

On special request: Al Green - Let’s get married

Enjoy!

Happy Hour Music with Al Green

Let’s stay together

How do you mend a broken heart

Still in Love with You

People Get Ready

Bush’s appeasement speech angers Europeans, too.

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Without even a hint of any sense for history Bush went to the Knesset of all places to utter political slurs, that have no roots whatsoever in historical facts. Well, what would we expect from him, after the last years. It took someone like Matthews to point out the utter cluelessness of people propagating this nonsense.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed in European newspapers either and they are not lost for words over this:

The Guardian voices its outrage most prominently, calling Bush a “President without Shame”:

It is outrageous for an American president to use the term “appeasement” in describing the policy of an opponent when speaking before the parliament of a foreign nation. Democrats have rightly reacted with deep anger to this affront. It seems that when it comes to American traditions, George Bush is content to play Samson and topple the pillars of the temple in order to smash precedents he dislikes. What he forgets is that Samson not only killed his enemy, the Philistines, but himself as well.

Bush’s interminable and self-destructive presidency will continue to be so till the bitter end. And if he can topple the campaign of his political enemy, he’s prepared to bring the walls down on himself as well. So ends one of the most shameful of American presidencies.

The Telegraph was in the process of commenting on the lapel pin controversy they were carried away enough to post an update to call Bush’s slur outrageous:

Midday update: Mr Obama has just started to speak in South Dakota. He is denouncing President George W Bush’s frankly outrageous appeasement slur in Israel. And yes, he’s wearing an American flag pin…

The Independent is hardly less outspoken:

On yesterday’s evidence Mr Bush is prepared to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to do whatever it takes to keep Mr Obama out of the White House.

Even The Times is nothing if not vitriolic commenting:

I can’t help but think that all this might be proof of something Newt Gingrich suggested a couple of weeks ago. if Republicans think they can win this election by attacking Obama on the usual grounds that he’s a weak-kneed friend of terrorists and appeasers, they are sorely wrong. The Republicans’ own record on national security is now so badly damaged that for them to claim that the Democrats can’t be trusted sounds to most ears like that old definition of chutzpah - the child who murders both his parents and then claims the law’s protection because he’s an orphan.

Well, its some 248 days left (+ 37 hrs, I think) and if he keeps voicing his inanities, he’ll digg deeper, faster and more effective than anyone before him. Oh and take the red button away from the guy, please!

Math Test 2 - Updated

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Good job everyone. The guys at reddit solved it and you have been thinking in the right direction. Here is how it’s actually calculated:

In a closed circle there is the equal number of spaces and posts.

135 *5.5m = 742.5 m

742.5m / 6 m = 123.75 spaces

123 spaces a 6 m
+   1 space a 0.75 * 6m = 4.5 m
_____________________________

124 posts

Its 124 posts and the last space is 4.5 m

Another one ? This one’s easy:

Laura and her dad want to plant a hedge using 55 bushes (I am not kidding you, this is a translation of the actual text). Dad plants 15 shrubs in an hour, Laura takes 6 minutes per bush.

a) How long does it take the two of them to plant all 55 bushes (hrs and minutes)

b) Mom helps after Laura and dad have planted 15 bushes. She works as fast as dad does. How much earlier have they finished their job with mom’s help?

Enjoy!

UPDATE: The answer is below the fold..

Math test!

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My eleven year old son has today received a letter telling him he has successfully passed the admission tests to the Swiss public grammar school. I am very proud of him. One of the nine math problems, he had to solve goes like this:

A farmer collects 135 posts of a fence surrounding a field in fall. The distance between the posts was 5.5m. In spring as he wants to rebuild the fence, some of the posts have been broken, so he increases the distance by half a meter. After he has finished setting up the remaining serviceable posts, he realizes the distance between the last post and the first is smaller that the other distances.

a) How many posts did he use in spring?
b) How far is the gap between the last post and the post at the beginning of the fence?

No pocket calculators permitted!

Give it a try! There were 9 problems to be solved within an hour and this is not the hardest. You will find the results in another post.