biden appears to be a family man

• McCain/Palin - opinion
  • I cannot stand - sm
    • Likable? If you want to go there, what is likeable - about a pitbull with lipstick?
      • Shopping and wardrobe remarks - lilsuzie
      • Pit bull in lipstick - gourdpainter
      • biden appears to be a family man - i tell you though
        • I thought the same thing. - Chele
      • At least she hasn't EVER put down her country - MSMT
        • No? - gourdpainter
          • I don't call that putting down her country....she - was not a part of that.......nm
    • she does seem angry..... - nm
      • bitter and angry - bassfishinisfun
        • What a bitter racist person you are!!!! - NM
          • bitter/angry - bassfishinisfun
            • Oh yes you are. I just hope there are no - sm
              • bitter/angry - bassfishinisfun
      • Agree....seems very bitter and angry.... - can only imagine sm
        • she 'seems' angry - yeah yeah yeah
          • Did she not say she was not proud to be American... - dnh

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so give it all a rest would you. 

September 7, 2005

Women were Being Raped, Babies were Being Killed, Alligators were Eating People, But Where the Hell was the National Guard?
How We Survived the Flood
By CHARMAINE NEVILLE

  This is a transcription of an interview Charmaine Neville, of New Orleans's legendary Neville family, gave to local media outlets on Monday, September 5.

I was in my house when everything first started. When the hurricane came, it blew all the left side of my house off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents.

I had my neighbor, an elderly man, and myself, in the house with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was coming in too fast. So we ended up having to leave the house.

We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door on the roof of the school to help people on the roof.

Later on we found a flat boat, and we went around the neighborhood in a flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school.

We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad.

By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food and no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming in our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters going across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us Hi! and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food or any water, or nothing.

Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water.

We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes. I tried to get the police to help us, but I realized they were in the same straits we were. We rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the 5th district police station. The guy who was in the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places so they could be saved.

We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.

Finally it got to be too much, I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, that I rowed them from down there in that nightmare to the French Quarters, and I went back and got more people.

There were groups of us, there were about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarter because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and that there wasn't any water. And they were right, there were phones, but we couldn't get through to anyone.

I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys, not from the neighborhood where we were, they were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and they started killing, and I don't know who these people were. I'm not gonna tell you I know, because I don't.

But what I want people to understand is that, if we hadn't been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn't have resources to get out, we had no way to leave.

When they gave the evacuation order, if we could've left, we would have left.

There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their homes in the downtown area. When we finally did get into the 9th ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th ward, there were a lot of people still trapped down there... old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping them.

And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. We would make SOS on the flashlights, we'd do everything, and it really did come to a point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire they will stop then. But that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.

Finally, I got to Canal St. with all of my people I had saved from back there.

I don't want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus, too.

Charmaine Neville is a member of the third generation of New Orleans's legendary Neville musical family. She fronts the Charmaine Neville Band.

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/08/hunter-biden-joe-biden-anthony-lotito.php

has threatened Americans again in a new audio tape, saying President Barack Obama inflamed hatred toward the U.S. by ordering Pakistan to crack down on militants in Swat Valley and block Islamic law in the area. 

You just can't win with terrorists.  No matter how nice we try to be to Muslims.....the extremists are still going to hate us and want to kill us.

You crash this board and admonish my behavior, yet you can't see the same behavior on the other board.  You're over there kissing up to them. 

Yeah.  You call them as you see them.

With your right eye closed.

You're just another lying phony crashing this board.

Disclaimer:  I am neither a Demican nor a Republicrat.  I have always voted for the guy/gal based on their stated policies, compared to actual prior performance which agrees with my mostly conservative views.  (I have sort of a peripheral friend who, about four months before the election, called herself an Obamacan.  Wonder how she's feeling right now.)

Having said that, I will add that I do know they all use the TelePrompTer and give speeches mostly written by professional speech writers. I get it.  I do not believe that any of them just make spontaneous utterances inspired by God.  Even Lincoln wrote it down on the back of an envelope on the way to Gettysburg.  But I bet he did not just READ it straight off the envelope, but extemporized a bit without getting himself in trouble.

I always liked Bush's more folksy way of speaking.  When he would veer from his canned text you could usually tell, and it appeared genuine to me.  Example: He addressed criticism of what some were calling his 'cowboy swagger' saying 'In Texas, we call that.......walking.'  Sorry, it just broke me up.  I don't even mind a few malapropisms, as it only adds to the impression that this is a genuine guy.

I compare that to Obama, Mr. Smooth.  I get no sense of warmth from the man and when he gets away from his canned text, I can just see his handlers cringing.  Example:  Why didn't he get a dog for the Whitehouse as he had been talking about during the campaign?  'Guess that was just another campaign promise. Heh, heh, heh.' 

I believe that it is in those unguarded moments, off script, you get a glimps of what's inside of a person.  What do they consider funny?  What do they poke fun at?  Themselves?  Or Special Olympics?

So my puppet remark was directed toward Obama, sorry if I was too indirect. 

I was in Gulfport, MS before, during and after Katrina.  About a year after, all the rent on the coast went sky high (was paying $425 for an efficiency, raised it to $800).  I was working 7 days a week at two hospitals (many MTs had already left the coast), and I had to leave too, leaving them even more short handed.  There have been many articles regarding the majority of the rebuild on the coast is new casinos and high-end housing.  I have no idea how they expect anyone in the service industries to live there without affordable housing.  You cannot have tourist industry without people that support it - casino workers, fast food folk, maids, low-end hospital jobs.

What drove me nuts is the way they portrayed the people in the media - as if we were all illiterate crackheads.  I worked with many fine people at those hospitals, and it would take pages to descibe their suffering.  It disgusts me how there will always be money to accomodate the disposable income players, while the backbone of the community, hard working, serious, responsible people, were left with a trashed out house with no roof, a mortgage to pay and an insurance company that said they didn't have to give them a dime to rebuild.

college and everything......yepper, by golly

       www.sfgate.com        Return to regular view

(08-05) 19:27 PDT DENVER (AP) --

A decade ago, John Roberts played a valuable role helping attorneys overturn a Colorado referendum that would have allowed discrimination against gays — free assistance the Supreme Court nominee didn't mention in a questionnaire he filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The revelation didn't appear to dent his popularity among conservative groups nor quell some of the opposition of liberal groups fearful he could help overturn landmark decisions such as Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a right to an abortion.

An attorney who worked with Roberts cautioned against making guesses about his personal views based on his involvement in the Colorado case, which gay rights advocates consider one of their most important legal victories.

"It may be that John and others didn't see this case as a gay-rights case," said Walter Smith, who was in charge of pro bono work at Roberts' former Washington law firm, Hogan & Hartson.

Smith said Roberts may instead have viewed the case as a broader question of whether the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited singling out a particular group of people that wouldn't be protected by an anti-discrimination law.

"I don't think this gives you any clear answers, but I think it's a factor people can and should look at to figure out what this guy is made of and what kind of Supreme Court justice he would make," Smith said.

On Friday, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans released two memos by Roberts when he was as an assistant counsel in the Reagan White House. In one, Roberts argued that President Reagan should not interfere in a Kentucky case involving the display of tributes to God in schools.

In the other, Roberts writes that Reagan shouldn't grant presidential pardons to bombers of abortion clinics. "The president unequivocally condemns such acts of violence," he wrote in a draft reply to a lawmaker seeking Reagan's position. "No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals."

Meanwhile, the Justice Department denied a request by Judiciary Committee Democrats for Roberts' writings on 16 cases he handled when he was principal deputy solicitor general during President George H.W. Bush's administration. The department also declined to provide the materials, other than those already publicly available, to The Associated Press and other organizations that sought them under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We cannot provide to the committee documents disclosing the confidential legal advice and internal deliberations of the attorneys advising the solicitor general," assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote Friday to the eight committee Democrats.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's senior Democrat, said Roberts made decisions whether to pursue legal appeals in more than 700 cases. "The decision to keep these documents under cover is disappointing," Leahy said.

The gay rights case involved Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment approved by Colorado voters in 1992 that would have barred laws, ordinances or regulations protecting gays from discrimination by landlords, employers or public agencies such as school districts.

Gay rights groups sued, and the measure was declared unconstitutional in a 6-3 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

Roberts' role in the case, disclosed this week by the Los Angeles Times, included helping develop a strategy and firing tough questions during a mock court session at Jean Dubofsky, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice who argued the case on behalf of the gay rights plaintiffs.

Dubofsky, who did not return calls Friday, said Roberts helped develop the strategy that the law violated the equal protection clause in the Constitution — and prepared her for tough questions from conservative members of the court. She recalled how Justice Antonin Scalia asked for specific legal citations.

"I had it right there at my fingertips," she told the Times. "Roberts was just terrifically helpful in meeting with me and spending some time on the issue. He seemed to be very fair-minded and very astute."

Dubofsky had never argued before the Supreme Court. Smith said she called his firm and asked specifically for help from Roberts, who argued 39 cases before the court before he was confirmed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in 2003.

Smith said any lawyer at Hogan & Hartson would have had the right to decline to work on any case for moral, religious or other reasons.

"If John had felt that way about this case, given that he is a brilliant lawyer, he would have just said, `This isn't my cup of tea' and I would have said, `Fine, we'll look for something else that would suit you,'" Smith said.

The Lambda Legal Defense Fund, which helped move the case through the state and federal courts, said Roberts' involvement raised more questions about him than it answered because of his "much more extensive advocacy of positions that we oppose," executive director Kevin Cathcart said.

"This is one more piece that will be added to the puzzle in the vetting of John Roberts' nomination," Cathcart said.

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, said his support for Roberts' nomination has not diminished. "He wasn't the lead lawyer. They only asked him to play a part where he would be Scalia in a mock trial," Sheldon said.

Focus on the Family Action, the political arm of the Colorado Springs-based conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, said Roberts' involvement was "certainly not welcome news to those of us who advocate for traditional values," but did not prompt new concerns about his nomination, which the group supports.

"That's what lawyers do — represent their firm's clients, whether they agree with what those clients stand for or not," the group said in a statement.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/05/national/w135401D98.DTL

Obama has shown great judgment in the people who surround him.  He picked a great VP choice, and his wife is impeccable as a helpmate and is a fantastic role model for the American children.   

She was left unsupervised at a very critical age (like the Down baby will be) and did not receive enough parental guidance to prevent this tragedy.

Barack and Michelle have been married for years with not a hint of scandal.  they have two beautiful age-appropriate children. Joe Biden has a beautiful blended family that truly loves each other. McCain dumped his gravely injured first wife for a beauty queen.  Then he was pressured into picking another beauty queen with an Down infant who obviously needs a full time mother and pregnant teenager for his running mate.  Family values, family values, family values.

They looked great to me.  Cindy McCain reached for the child, it wasn't handed off to her.  Bristol looked anything but terrified.  She looked proud of her mother.  And well she should be.  She is running for VP of the United States.  I thought it was especially sweet with the little girl licked her hand to smooth down the baby's cowlick.  Circus freaks are the last words I would use to describe this family.

of your business. I am being viciously mistreated by the press. Wait, film this.  It will get me some votes. Watch me bravely send my first born off to the endless war my political party started.

by picking O and I have been running into a lot more people including strangers who also agree.  No more freedom and some of the elderly seem to think our country is going to turn out like Germany years ago.  I guess this is what the young people want. 

There sure are a lot of people stocking up and buying ammunition too.  Afraid guns will be gone and cannot buy anymore.  Others believe to stock up on guns to use for barter exchanges down the road.  That is what some Americans are seeing how our FREEDOM country will turn out down in the future.  You can do A LOT OF DAMAGE in 4 years to this country.  Just kissed good-bye to the ole USA as of late Nov. 4, 2008.  I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK, DANG IT.