Dang!!!

Our work softball squad is 1-2. The 1 game we won I wasn't there for - Am I bad luck? I can make contact sometimes..... My competative nature doesn't like losing much less not contributing. How does 0-3 sound. DAMN. I'm really unhappy with thydelf right nizzzle.

Aaron McKie

Not the most exciting but he might fit really well with the squad. Looking forward to the first games....

Hey Robertson these are Christian Morals?

I wasn't taught this in Sunday school...

STORY

Venezuela VP Slams Robertson's Call for Chavez Assassination
From Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's vice president accused religious broadcaster Pat Robertson today of making "terrorist statements" by suggesting that American agents assassinate President Hugo Chavez.

On Monday, Robertson said on the Christian Broadcast Network's "The 700 Club": "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."

"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said Venezuela was studying its legal options, adding that how Washington responds to Robertson's comments would put its anti-terrorism policy to the test.

"The ball is in the U.S. court, after this criminal statement by a citizen of that country," Rangel told reporters. "It's huge hypocrisy to maintain this discourse against terrorism and at the same time, in the heart of that country, there are entirely terrorist statements like those."

The U.S. government distanced itself from Robertson's comments.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, appearing at a Pentagon news conference, said when asked: "Our department doesn't do that kind of thing. It's against the law. He's a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called Robertson's remarks "inappropriate."

"This is not the policy of the United States government. We do not share his views," McCormack said.

There was no immediate comment from Chavez, who was winding up an official visit to Cuba on Tuesday. Scores of journalists awaited Chavez at the airport, where he was to board a plane for a trip to Jamaica to discuss a Venezuela initiative to supply petroleum to Caribbean countries under favorable financial terms.

Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Rangel called Robertson "a man who seems to have quite a bit of influence in that country," adding sarcastically that his words were "very Christian."

The comments "reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times," Rangel said.

Robertson's remarks appear likely to further stoke tensions between Washington and Caracas. Chavez has repeatedly claimed that American officials are plotting to oust or kill him -- charges U.S. officials have denied.

The United States is the top buyer of Venezuelan crude, but Chavez has made it clear he wants to decrease the country's dependence on the U.S. market by finding other buyers.

Chavez has survived a brief 2002 coup, a devastating two-month strike that ended in early 2003 and recall referendum in 2004. The former army paratroop commander, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, is up for re-election next year, and polls suggest he is the favorite.

Rove is one grimey fella

I've been following this whole Plame outing quite closely for a while now. I've read many articles, summaries, opinions etc. I just read about a future article being published in Vanity Fair and I'm looking forward to it. Seemingly, the author of the story is critical of the news media and it's really about time someone applies pressure to these so called "journalists" who are covering up for the White House. Have these folks lost all sense of reality? Are they fit to keep "reporting"? What kind of standards are they living up to? It's a crime. At any rate read the following:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081205Y.shtml

"'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal
By Greg Mitchell
Editor & Publisher
Thursday 11 August 2005

New York - In an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news media - principally Time magazine and The New York Times - who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been "one of the biggest stories of the Bush years." Not only that, "they helped cover it up." You might say, he adds, they "became part of a conspiracy."

If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his "crime," he adds, it would have been "of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have presaged the defeat of the president, might have even - to be slightly melodramatic - altered the course of the war in Iraq." In doing so they showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers.

And their source was no Deep Throat, not someone with dirt on the government - the source "was the government."

So in the end, he concludes, "the greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt." And why did they do it? Well, "a source is a source who, unrevealed, will continue to be a source."

Even after the news first emerged last month that Rove had leaked to Cooper, the media still waited days to even ask the White House press secretary about it. It was a story, "in full view, the media just ignored."

The title of the Wolff article is "All Roads Lead to Rove."

Wolff mocks Time's Matt Cooper and Norman Pearlstine and can't seem to make heads or tails of "genuinely spooky" Robert Novak. He holds off full judgment on the Times' jailed reporter Judith Miller, while noting the "baloney" she retailed for the White House. But he pointedly notes, concerning Miller, that reporters are born "blabbermouths" and even when they don't write or print a certain story they are prone to "serve it up to everybody they know.

He closes with a frontal blast at the media, many members of which will soon be exposed, he predicts, for having "lined up for these lies" spun by the White House.