According to the Census Bureau, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, the U.S. minority population rose 2.4 million, to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Their total number has soared 25 percent since 2000 alone. The Asian population has also grown by 25 percent since 2000.
The number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent, however. Half the children 5 and younger in the United States are now minorities.
So what, Pat? It's not the quantity of the colors, it's the quality. Is the issue illegal immigration, or your sick idea that our country must be white? Look around you. He goes on:
First, while the black and Hispanic population combined is now 85 million – five times what it was in 1960 – half of all black and Hispanic kids drop out of high school. And the average math and reading scores of the half who graduate are at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels.So now your point is that whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics? You make me sick, Pat. Let's dance, Ignorant Bigot Buchanan.
I'm white too, Pat. But not like you.
THIS SOUNDS KIND OF INTERESTING:
Many respected engineers have been trying for years to bring a compressed air car to market, believing strongly that compressed air can power a viable "zero pollution" car. Now the first commercial compressed air car is on the verge of production and beginning to attract a lot of attention, and with a recently signed partnership with Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, the prospects of very cost-effective mass production are now a distinct possibility. The MiniC.A.T is a simple, light urban car, with a tubular chassis that is glued not welded and a body of fibreglass. . . .
Most importantly, it is incredibly cost-efficient to run – according to the designers, it costs less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 68 mph.
Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately 1.5 Euros, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometres.
As a viable alternative, the car carries a small compressor which can be connected to the mains (220V or 380V) and refill the tank in 3-4 hours.
Due to the absence of combustion and, consequently, of residues, changing the oil (1 litre of vegetable oil) is necessary only every 50,000 Km.
The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0 - 15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.
Adiabatic air conditioning. Cool! Er, literally . . .
If this catches on first in India and China, that's okay -- that's where the growth of auto sales is likely to be fastest in the coming decades. I wouldn't mind having one for commuting, though.
There is a verse from the Bible that is sometimes read or recited during rites of passage like this. Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.”
I bring this up because there’s often an assumption on days like today that growing up is purely a function of age; that becoming an adult is an inevitable progression that can be measured by a series of milestones – college graduation or your first job or the first time you throw a party that actually has food too.
And yet, maturity does not come from any one occasion – it emerges as a quality of character. Because the fact is, I know a whole lot of thirty and forty and fifty year olds who have not yet put away childish things – who continually struggle to rise above the selfish or the petty or the small.
We see this reflected in our country today.
We see it in a politics that’s become more concerned about who’s up and who’s down than who’s working to solve the real challenges facing our generation; a politics where debates over war and peace are reduced to 60-second soundbites and 30-second attack ads.
We see it in a media culture that sensationalizes the trivial and trivializes the profound – in a 24-hour news network bonanza that never fails to keep us posted on how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail but often fails to update us on the continuing genocide in Darfur or the recovery effort in New Orleans or the poverty that plagues too many American streets.
And as we’re fed this steady diet of cynicism, it’s easy to start buying into it and put off hard decisions. We become tempted to turn inward, suspicious that change is really possible, doubtful that one person really can make a difference.
That’s where the true test of growing up occurs. That’s where you come in...
I like this guy and Hillary too. The question (whether it's being asked out loud or not) is "Can more than half of our voting public vote for an African American or a woman?" I hope so, but I'm not so sure.
Sen. John McCain (R-Campaign Trail) missed another vote today on a resolution related to the Iraq war, skipping a procedural move on a war funding measure in favor of hitting the campaign trail in New York.
"Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.
To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War."
Trump called Secretary of State Condoleezza "lovely," but the author of the best-selling The Art of the Deal complained that she never makes any diplomatic deals.
"Everything in Washington has been a lie," Trump added. "Weapons of mass destruction, it was a total lie. It was a way of attacking Iraq, which he thought was going to be easy and it turned out to be the exact opposite of easy."
Trump doesn't believe that Bush is much of a reader, mocking, "He reads 60 books a year. He reads a book a week. Do you think the president reads a book a week? I don't think so."
Well, isn't that special?
The first lady replied: "Oh, I know that, very much. And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander in chief who has asked our military to go into harm's way --"
Curry: "What do you think the American public need to know about your husband --"
Laura Bush: "Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that's on his shoulders every single day, for our troops. And I think they do. I mean I think if they don't, they're not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are."
Curry: "It must be hard for you to watch him in this."
Bush: "Well it's hard, of course, it's absolutely hard."
First, I am deeply concerned over where we are as a nation. (fine Sheryl, leave it at this)
Fred Thompson becomes the latest conservative "thinker" to pour salt in the wounds of Virginia Tech:
One of the things that's got to be going through a lot of peoples' minds now is how one man with two handguns, that he had to reload time and time again, could go from classroom to classroom on the Virginia Tech campus without being stopped. Much of the answer can be found in policies put in place by the university itself.
Oh boy, here we go.
Virginia, like 39 other states, allows citizens with training and legal permits to carry concealed weapons. That means that Virginians regularly sit in movie theaters and eat in restaurants among armed citizens. They walk, joke and rub shoulders everyday with people who responsibly carry firearms -- and are far safer than they would be in San Francisco, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., where such permits are difficult or impossible to obtain.
But Virginia allows such permits. So how could this have happened?
Virginia Tech administrators overrode Virginia state law and threatened to expel or fire anybody who brings a weapon onto campus.
Ah! I see!
So Virginians asked their legislators to change the university's "concealed carry" policy to exempt people 21 years of age or older who have passed background checks and taken training classes. The university, however, lobbied against that bill, and a top administrator subsequently praised the legislature for blocking the measure.
Fascinating. It's those damned public university egg-heads again!
Whenever I've seen one of those "Gun-free Zone" signs, especially outside of a school filled with our youngest and most vulnerable citizens, I've always wondered exactly who these signs are directed at. Obviously, they don't mean much to the sort of man who murdered 32 people just a few days ago.
My View is that we should consider metal detectors controlling all gun-free zones. Anybody else?
Each version of this contemptible tale shares the same fatal flaw. It requires that the remedy that was readily available -- resignation -- did not exist.
It always existed, however for a "true patriot" (and I'm not judging Tenet) it is possible that the best place he could be was at his job.The latest to trod this pathetic path is George Tenet.
Poor George Tenet. Flogging his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, on 60 Minutes, Tenet tells Scott Pelley about how his phrase "slam dunk" was misused by the Bush administration. Tenet, you see, didn't mean it was a "slam dunk" that Hussein actually had WMD, he only meant it was a "slam dunk" that a public case could be made that Hussein had WMD.
-- ...so it means that whether he has them or not, we can make the case that he does.
I can't really see that the distinction matters, but Tenet apparently does. "I became campaign talk," Tenet tells Pelley, "I was a talking point. 'Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous. Let's stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth." ...wow, Tenet suggests "we" tell the truth, because we haven't told the truth. What is the "truth," Mr. Tenet?
Great -- except he's about four years too late. Tenet seems to believe there's a major distinction between lying and standing by silently while others lie, and then proudly receiving a Medal of Freedom from the liars. -Good point, Arianna, except maybe he believed he deserved the Medal of Freedom for other reasons that we don't know about.
He could have simply resigned and freed himself to "tell the truth." Tenet acts as if resignation were not an option. But it was. And the passion and anger he displays now in the service of book sales could have been used then in the service of his country. ...Good point, Arianna, but the scenario plays like this: Tenet resigns. Tells "the truth." Is discredited by the administration, who were still (at that time) influence at its most powerful and dangerous. He is smeared by the administration... Well, I hope you get the point. There would have been no positive effects to his resignation, although today we might be saying, "Yeah, he was right. But so what?"
"It's the most despicable thing I've ever heard in my life," Tenet tells Pelley. "You don't do this... You're gonna throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection? Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me." No, George, not honorable, but expected and you should have expected it starting way before November 2000. This you must have seen coming.
The problem is, the honorable train left the station a long time ago, and Tenet wasn't on board. Maybe you are wrong, Madam. Honor, to some is found in doing your job faithfully. Sometimes in resigning. Sometimes is the important word here.
But others were. Like John Brady Kiesling, a career U.S. diplomat, who resigned from the State Department. As he wrote in his resignation letter to Colin Powell:
"I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share."
That, Mr. Tenet, is how it's done.
That, Ms. Huffington is one way, and not always the best way to do it. Pay attention, please. Paul O'Neil (remember him) resigned, seemingly for reasons similar to those of John Brady Kiesling. He spoke out. His usefulness to us diminished afterward. Perhaps Tenet remained as a force for good surrounded by negative forces. Resigning can be a proper path, but Tenet's could have been the act of a true patriot also.It's way too late for George Tenet to do the right thing. But can someone please remind Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales, as they are pathetically fighting tooth and nail to cling to their jobs, that there is another option. Not in the same class, Madam. Gonzales is incompetent, and Wolfowitz is a very smart man with ideas that don't work . They are not relevant here. Wolf and Gonzo were dragged to DC in 2000. Tenet was already there.
And how long do you think it's going to be after the end of the Bush administration before we are treated to General Petraeus' memoir explaining how the surge would have worked "if only he had been given the troops he needed to implement it properly." -- Nobody will believe him.Get real. He inherited his execution. Probably a great patriot. Who signed up for War Czar, Arianna?
So here is a plea to all Bush administration officials: Now is the time. If, like John Brady Kiesling, you're finding it hard to reconcile what you see going on around you with what you know to be the truth, do the right thing and resign. While it matters. What a useless recommendation. They will be replaced with who? WHO, Madam? Harriet Miers as AG? It doesn't get any better than this. It only gets worse. Tell me what would happen if everyone with a conscience resigned. It would be worse. My hat goes off to those competent, well-meaning officials who remain in office during this dark time.
As Tenet says on 60 Minutes: "At the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. It's all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. And when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go." --Not sure I agree totally, George, but okay.
George Tenet and I are both Greek and there is a great word for it: filotimo. -- I really don't care to know the meaning of this word, but I like Greece just the same.
There are still lives to be saved if a few administration officials have the guts to do what they know is right now -- instead of five years from now while flogging their books.
You seem to say that officials resigning will save lives. How?
