Re this kerfuffle:

A recent leak to The New York Times and some other newspapers revealed a previously secret program by the Bush administration to examine foreign banking transactions in its pursuit of terrorists with ties to al-Qaida. The banking transactions mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas. This isn’t about examining our canceled checks for items that might embarrass us before prying eyes.

As they have with previous secrets of the President’s prosecution of the Global War On Terror, the only thing that stands between the safety of Americans in America and encores to the likes of 9/11, the New York Times has again aided and abetted our enemy by publishing classified information leaked to them by treasonous elements of past or present federal employees.

Yes, I say treasonous — the people who are in a position to possess the sort of information, deemed “need to know” that Bill Keller and the rest of those leftists over at NYT take such pleasure in publishing are betraying not only any oaths of confidentiality they might have taken on accepting the jobs they occupy; worse, they are betraying the American people, those of us whose taxes pay their salaries and will be supporting them through their pensions when they retire.

In my honest opinion, I believe that what the NYT has once again done, despite Keller’s lofty protests that his paper was adhering to their 1st Amendment rights and that he had done all kinds of soul searching and moral deliberation before, has been to use information leaked to them by above mentioned traitors to commit treason themselves. What else can you call it when a newspaper prints stories they have to know will alert our enemy, in time of war, to secret methods by which we are fighting that war?

Cal Thomas has it completely right:

This isn’t about the privileges guaranteed by the First Amendment. It is about the agenda practiced by the Times and some other newspapers and media outlets that clearly want the administration to fail in Iraq — and in everything else — so that Democrats will retake the reigns of government. The Times’ editorial board fears what one more Republican term could do to the left’s judicially imposed cultural realignment and wants to blunt the Bush administration’s counteroffensive.

Yes, completely right.

Read his entire column here.

A cost-of-living raise for Congress?

Congress is quietly moving to give itself a 2% cost-of-living raise next year, prompting complaints that lawmakers are trying to hide their wage boost.

A provision that would give cost-of-living adjustments to various federal officials — raising lawmakers’ pay to $168,500 next year — is tucked into a bill the House of Representatives passed this month to fund the Department of Transportation and other agencies.

Well, I suppose I can see where the cost of living has increased to the point that $168k and change might be a little tough to survive on, those lunches at the Watergate and Sans Souci and trysts at the Hay Adams can add up, and I doubt that the likes of Teddy K imbibe anything less than the best, but… I’ve always believed that some sort of merit should be attached to a pay hike, and I’m having a really tough time thinking of any reason to give Congress a raise based on merit, or based on anything else for that matter.

Of late, they’ve been behaving as though they work for themselves rather than functioning as employees of the electorate and their output has been questionable as such. Instead of giving them a raise, why not just give the money to some of the criminal aliens they want to give amnesty to, so they can send it home to help bail Vicente Fox out of some of his myriad economic failures? Or use the money for their next pork barrel “earmark”?

If it were up to me, all proposals for federal pay increases on all levels would appear on the ballot on the relevant election day and we, the voters, would be the yea’ers or nayers. We are, after all, their employers. How often do we see employees anyplace else getting to sit down and vote on their pay raises?

The legislation now moves to the Senate, where Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts are making the raise an issue.

Feingold said last week that he’ll try to stop the pay increase; Clinton has authored a bill that would tie increases in congressional pay to increases in the minimum wage. Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage — $5.15 an hour, or $10,700 a year — since 1997. During the same period, annual congressional pay has increased by $31,000.

Tom Schatz, president of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, would prefer to see congressional pay hikes tied to the federal deficit, now projected at $300 billion or more. “If we have a balanced budget, maybe then they deserve a pay raise,” he says.

It’s got to be a cold day in hell, because on this I agree with the liberals in Congress who plan to fight the raise. I don’t agree with Hillary’s proposal, her plan is merely a shrewd carrot and stick approach to giving Congress an incentive to raise the minimum wage, but as far as Feingold and Kennedy(spit!) are concerned, well….

I think Tom Schatz has the right idea: Tie congressional pay raises into their performance, their spending habits being a great place to start, since whenever they spend money, it’s our money they’re spending.

On the supposed other side of the coin:

Congressional pay has long been a sensitive matter, in part because it’s substantial. At $165,200 this year, members of Congress earn roughly four times the salary of the average American. On the other hand, they earn the same as federal district judges, deputy Cabinet secretaries, heads of major agencies and some senior federal bureaucrats. Supreme Court justices, top congressional leaders and Cabinet secretaries make more; President Bush earns $400,000 a year.

Some outside experts argue that lawmakers aren’t nearly as affluent as their six-figure incomes might lead constituents to believe. “They do have some unusual expenses,” says Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies Congress. Chief among them: the need to maintain homes in two places, one of which is in one of the most expensive areas in the country. According to the National Association of Realtors, Washington, D.C., was the 11th priciest housing market in the nation last year.

“When you take into consideration the cost of living in two cities, the salary is average at best,” says Jim Chapman, a former congressman who now works as a lobbyist.

Sure, but how many members of Congress live in middle class neighborhoods and anywhere near as modestly as most of their constituents?

I own a seven room home(not counting the laundry room, kitchen and two full baths) in a residential area in Charlotte, NC, and it costs me about $600.00 a month, give or take, to keep the bills paid, maybe another $600.00 to buy food and other necessities, and I eat well. Too well, in fact. Not counting entertainment and social issues, my annual living expenses, including homeowner’s insurance and property taxes, come in at around $25,000.00 a year, and that’s only because of a few ongoing luxuries. Unless you live in Georgetown or some other expensive area, you can live comfortably enough in DC on an income of $50,000.00 a year. So if I were a senator or representative, my annual cost of living might average, between living in both places, about $85,000.00 a year plus recreation. If I had a wife and a child or two who still lived at home, maybe 25k or so a year more.

On $168,500.00, that would leave me, after taxes, a good $70,000.00 plus for enjoyment, not to mention my unspent campaign money and the perks that come with being a member of Congress. Hmmm… Members of Congress aren’t superstars or gods, they’re merely citizens like the rest of us whom we send to DC to represent us in the running of our government. The great majority of their constituents have to budget themselves to various degrees, in fact many have little or nothing left over after taking care of “the inescapable”. Perhaps that’s what our politicians should have to do as well. It might give them a better perspective of the living situations of those they “govern”.

Further, in the private sector, most of us get paid what we’re worth to our employer, not what our personal expenses dictate. We have to adjust our lifestyles to our incomes, not the other way around. If Senator Livingston Hamilton Shmoe, lll wants to live in a fifteen room house in an upscale neighborhood back in his home state and a $5,000.00 a month apartment in DC, that’s not our lookout. We don’t pay Senator Shmoe to live like a baron, we pay him to do a job that he and most of his colleagues aren’t doing very well at the moment.

If they aren’t happy with what they’re being paid for the piss poor job they’re doing, let the bums go back into the private sector and practice Law, or whatever they were doing before they became politicians. Congress was never intended to be a career field, anyway — it was supposed to be a place to which one went for one or two terms, then returned to private life to reap what they’d sewn.

For much of Congress’ history, pay raises were enacted late at night, without roll call votes. To free lawmakers from the political embarrassment of having to vote on their own pay raises, Congress made itself eligible for the same cost-of-living adjustments as other federal employees in 1989.

Lately, including last year, the pay hikes have gone into effect quietly. During the 1990s, though, members voted five times to forgo the automatic pay hike. Some members say now’s the time to do so again, given the costs of the war in Iraq and Katrina relief. “Maybe Congress should tighten its own belt first,” Matheson says. “It would be an important symbol.”

Bravo!

Mark Steyn’s kicking some serious butt this week, and making me laugh my touchas off at the same time, with this column.

You gotta hand it to these guys: “Redeployment” is ingenious. I’ll bet the focus-group consultants were delirious: “surrender,” “lose,”,”scram,” “scuttle ignominiously,” “head for the hills” all polled poorly, but “redeploy” surveyed well with all parts of the base, except the base in Okinawa, where they preferred “sayonara” — that’s “redeploy” in any language. The Defeaticrats have a clear message for the American people. Read da ploy: No new quagmires.

Read the column and see if you don’t — heh heh — laugh your ass off at the way Steyn presents a too-true state of affairs.

Don’t drink your coffee while you read the column, or you might spew it all over your keyboard.

Way back when I was a kid {and I mean way} we weren’t “overprotected”. We did all the stuff you do at playgrounds over a concrete or pebble filled asphalt ground, monkey bars, swings, see-saws and all. No built-in rubber mats underlining whatever venue we were playing on. No bicycle helmets, knee pads and so forth. In the winter, we went flying down long hills of snow and ice laying prone on low slung, narrow wooden sleds on steel runners. We climbed trees, we built tree houses, we played with solid hardballs in Little League baseball, bashed the hell out of each other in Pop Warner football and bombarded each other with projectiles that were big rubber balls in games of dodge ball. We went to the local pizza shop and gorged large slices of thick, doughy Sicilian pizza and loved the heck out of enormous ice cream sundaes that housed every kind of fattening agent known to man. We dove off of high diving boards. We weren’t mollycoddled by society, we were permitted to be kids.

Now, all is liability.

Liberal trial lawyers have managed to instill terror in the hearts of cities, states and business concerns — the mishap that results from someone’s clumsiness has become the fault of whoever owns the property on which an accident occurs. In many ways, similarly to the denutritionalisation of bread, they are bleaching a lot of the fun out of growing up….

Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal sums it all up rather well, using as his vehicle the veritable extinction of… the diving board.

I’ll leave you to it….

One of the downsides of our technological age is the large inventory of security vulnerabilities it has brought with it. Like all advances in technology from the primitive to modern day, the new invariably phases out the old so that it eventually becomes a necessity, especially in business and government.

Electronic data storage isn’t new, but as it has evolved, so have the computer skills of criminals who know how to make use of data they steal. This has created a collosal and still blossoming branch of the Protection Industry called Information Security that attracts many of the best and the brightest in the computer field.

Unfortunately, even in these days of heightened security awareness, many companies that possess confidential information fail, for any of a number of reasons, to adequately address security concerns and as a result, a lot of confidential data, much of it criminally usable personal information on people who have no affiliation with the companies in question and therefore no “say” in how their information is secured, is stolen.

Here’s one government contractor that practically offers up its proprietary information to anyone who steals any of five thousand laptops from employees’ homes.

A laptop containing personal data — including Social Security numbers — of 13,000 District workers and retirees was stolen Monday from the Southeast Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, the company said yesterday.

ING, which administers the District’s retirement plan, known as DCPlus, notified the city about the theft late Friday.

The company is mailing a letter to all affected account holders to alert them to the risk of someone using the information to commit identity theft, spokeswoman Caroline Campbell said. The company is also telling customers that it will set up and pay for a year of credit monitoring and identity fraud protection.

The laptop was not protected by a password or encryption, Campbell said. Encryption safeguards information by scrambling it into indecipherable codes.

The letter should open something like this:

Dear Fragonard and Elise Boosprinhoffer;

Some time ago, your city government entrusted us with a quantity of your vital personal information, for whose security we automatically assumed responsibility. This letter is to inform you that we’ve screwed the pooch, and that your information is now in the hands of person or persons unknown.We are very sorry we didn’t even bother using security encryption in the 5,000 laptops containing your confidential data, scattered to hell and gone among employees nationwide….

A Social Security number can be used by thieves to open new lines of credit in the victim’s name. In the past 15 months, more than 85 million U.S. consumers have been told that their personal or financial data might have been compromised because of data breaches, disgruntled employees or incompetence.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced that the personal information of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel was endangered after a laptop and external hard drive were stolen from an employee’s home in Montgomery County.

I must say, laptops with peoples’ confidential information on them are a hot item these days.

There is no reason in the universe for this kind of stupidity, and it really does demonstrate how seriously many firms don’t take security, especially yours and mine. A competent security director, unless he was constrained from so doing by the fine folks in the executive suite, which happens more often than many people realize, would centralize all the confidential data in one place, where it could be safeguarded much more easily, and according to their work needs, employees could access it via a password protection system, each with his or her own password. Further, access could be both monitored and restricted to individual employees’ specific need-to-know datum. All of that is within the range of modern security technology.

A lot of security people are in working environments in which, if permitted to do their jobs properly, they would have to “inconvenience” employees like “ladeedah” Larry the Latte Man, who wants to take home some confidential documents, breaching security policy, because it’s oh so much easier to work in his office at home, an employee who “accidentally” left his or her company ID at home, but is almost late and has to run. “Sorry, ma’am, I see you every day, but for all I know, you might have quit or been terminated yesterday, and policy requires that I check. Please be patient while I confirm that you still work here, and then I can issue you a one day pass.” Unfortunately, companies often require their security personnel to “look the other way once in a while” without actually documenting these requirements, all part of “promoting an employee friendly work environment”. Then there’s the PC factor that’s forced on people whose job is often anything but PC friendly. Protectors cannot protect if they are not given both the needed resources and the authority to do what they have to do to protect their principals.

However, in not taking security as seriously as it is needed — as in ING U.S. Financial Services, taking the path of least resistance, as it were, companies invite infinitely more costly problems down the road.

Isn’t it nice that thousands of people can take your confidential information home with them? What are the odds that ING and the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs {one a city government contractor, the other a federal agency} are the only two such entities in the entire country that observe this practice? Not very good, I’m afraid.

I love this part:

ING executives say that they believe that their computer was stolen for its value as hardware and that thieves may not have been aware of the data it contained. ING said it is working with District police and has hired a private investigative firm.

How silly is that?

What they are really saying is, “We haven’t a clue, this incident has thoroughly embarrassed us and the lack of confidence it has no doubt inspired will cost us a lot of new business and very possibly a number of our present clients, so in an effort to circumvent any kind of uproar at our incompetent security measures, we’re feeding you this line of transparent bullcrap.”

ING executives say that they believe that their computer was stolen for its value as hardware and that thieves may not have been aware of the data it contained.

A. What evidence do they have to support that “belief”? How do they know it wasn’t stolen for the data within? It could as easily have been a dishonest friend or an ex with an axe to grind who knew what the employee brought home with him, because he had told them.

B. Even if the thief had stolen the laptop for its ‘value as hardware’, um, chances are that he or someone he fenced it to (there are computer savvy people in all walks of life, from flophouses to mansions) might discover the data and, both obviously possessing a criminal turn of mind, might either use it themselves or, if they weren’t that expert, bring it to someone who knows how. Maybe some computer wiz kid from the suburbs who occasionally buys crack from one of them, someone’s brother or someone’s aunt, for that matter. Or a nine year old who lives down the street and spends all his free time in front of his computer, hacking into places he doesn’t belong. This is a new age, friends, a real world remake of Alice In Wonderland, only rated R (and in some places, XXX).

C. Efficient crooks work just as hard at their respective trades as the rest of us do. Some use burglaries as camouflage for other crimes. To momentarily digress, I’ll relate an example from my casino security days when I lived in Nevada:

One of the charges we made a lot of arrests for was called “Uttering A Forged Instrument” and dealt, among other things, with cashing or attempting to cash checks that weren’t… well, weren’t made out to the casher by the party or company whose name appeared on the checks. Casino cages cash payroll checks all the time, knowing that at least some of the money will find its way into their slots, across their tables or into the cashiers’ windows in Race & Sports.

That said, there was a group of criminals in the city who bought up found or stolen IDs, passports and driver’s licences from street people, pickpockets, etc. Their “gig” was burglarizing small businesses — they would steal a couple of computers, whatever cash they found…. and then go into the business owner’s book of blank payroll checks, removing a few pages of checks from the bottom where nobody would discover they were gone for possibly months. The owner would call the police, they would take a report and the stolen office hardware would disappear into a lake or someplace.

Next, they would draw from the pool of street people(in Las Vegas or Reno, the only way a homeless person can live with even minimal “dignity” is by staying clean and respectable looking, and they find ways to do it) local druggies and other petty crooks, matching faces to IDs as closely as possible and making out stolen pay checks in the names on the IDs. The checks averaged $800.00 to $1200.00 in amounts, and the deal was that the casher got to keep half of the amount. This was very well organized, the only flaw being the inevitable one when a lot of people are involved — we were able to persuade a few of the cashers we caught to roll over on the people giving them the “work”.

My point being, if ING doesn’t know who pulled off the theft, how can they know the motive behind it? The employee from whom the lap top was allegedly stolen could, himself, have committed the “theft” in partnership with an identity thief who knows what he’s doing.

Monday’s burglary has prodded ING to analyze whether any of its other 5,000 laptops in circulation across the country lack adequate protection, Campbell said. Steve Van Wyk, the company’s chief information officer, said he did not know how many of its computers lacked security measures but believed it was a small number.

“For us, this is very unfortunate,” Campbell said. “But we’re moving forward, we’re very focused and committed to find any other laptops that don’t have encryption software and to fix that. This incident revealed a gap.”

It wasn’t the first time, however. Two ING laptops that carried sensitive data affecting 8,500 Florida hospital workers were stolen in December, and neither was encrypted, said Chuck Eudy, an ING spokesman.

Emboldening mine.

So it happened to two (count ‘em, 2) of their other unencrypted laptops about six months ago, and they didn’t fully(assuming they are telling the truth about most of their laptops being encrypted) address the problem then. There are still a few Lone Rangers out there with the laptops from hell.

To my thinking, this is a double whammy. Not only didn’t ING have competent information security policies in place before the first hit, but they didn’t correct the vulnerability that the incident had flung right in their face.

I believe, also, that some blame goes to the DC city administrators that placed this data in the hands of ING without first having competent, experienced Protection professionals do a security survey on the firm and see that such vulnerabilities were addressed adequately. This was, after all, citizens’ personal information their agency was sharing with a private sector company.

One thing about the Post article that shows someone, somewhere is thinking — just in case it was merely a “hardware theft”, they were smart enough not to release the employee’s name and address. The DC cops are also totally right in not releasing any information on their investigation.

Read This!

Yeah, liberals can be quite amusing, despite the danger they pose to this country now and that which they’ve exposed this country to in the past.

It’s funny in a tragic way, for example, that they have so conned minorities into believing they have their best interests at heart. Let’s see now… In the 1950s and the 1960s, liberal justices on the Court began pushing an agenda of blaming the crimes of violent black criminals on all of society instead of on the perpetrators, tampering with the rules of evidence so as to protect the guilty and liberal judges began cutting defendants loose left and right. This phenomenon emboldened would-be violent offenders to become active as such, seeing that the teeth had been removed, by general consent, from the criminal justice system.

So who was actually helped by this liberal legal trend? If you guessed the law abiding, inner city black communities, you’re dead wrong; When potential perps realized that they could commit all the mayhem they wanted to commit without “getting in any real trouble” because any crimes they committed were “officially the white man’s fault”, they did just that, but they didn’t do it very much in white neighborhoods, they brought it home, instead, to their own. They turned low income black neighborhoods into war zones, terrorizing their neighbors, defacing the ‘hoods, robbing small businesses repeatedly and rendering the neighborhoods unsafe for respectable citizens to even leave their homes to buy groceries. This turn of events had very little effect on whites or white neighborhoods, the victims were almost exclusively blacks in black neighborhoods.

The public schools in these urban areas turned into the same quagmire of drugs and gang violence as the rest of the ‘hoods, driving away most effective teachers, and the children in these schools were thus denied the same quality education the liberals’ children, in their white neighborhoods, enjoyed.

And the liberals told, and continued to tell, the mostly law abiding members of these beleaguered neighborhoods that the gang violence and street crime were the white man’s fault, more specifically, the “racist” Republicans.

To this day, liberals pat themselves on the back for completely fucking over black communities everywhere by playing guardian angel to their criminal elements, yet masterfully exercising the truth so as to maintain a strong black constituency.

The liberal intellectual feels, despite the murder and misery his policy has caused, that he has achieved the “moral high ground” in the matter, and therefore it is all acceptable, and besides, he still has the black vote.

Tragic, even macabre, but funny in its own bizarre way to those of us who laugh hysterically at films like Dumb And Dumber — that an entire constituency can be so naive as to fall so heavily for a con, to the point that they jump right into bed with the very people who are screwing them — hmm, there’s something of a double entendre {ugh, French, spit!} there, so to simplify what I mean, I’ll say that there is “no kissing” involved.

Meanwhile, the Dubya Administration has had blacks in key positions, such as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Good people both.

I attended a keynote session at last year’s ASIS conference where Colin Powell was the speaker, and he was awesome! The job of SecState has got to be one of the toughest jobs in the world right now, and Condolleeza Rice is doing just fine, even though I don’t think we’re being hard enough in our dealings with Iran and the Palestinian Authority.

High ticket liberals, on the other hand, feature a paucity of blacks among denizens of their respective payrolls. Well, seeing as the KKK was comprised of Southern Democrats, why should I be surprised?

But that entire example was a digression from the topic of this post.

How about all the other liberal policies, the ones that they’re still trying to force on us?

Within the last several days, I decided to try to learn, from their own “mouths”, exactly where liberals believe they are trying to take this country. I asked a handful of “serious” liberals I know personally the following question:

Let’s say that liberals won the White House and became a congressional majority(both houses) by 2008, then by 2010 had seen every one of your political, economic, immigration, education, homeland security, foreign policy and social agendas reach fruition. How do you see the U.S. in the year 2030?

My friend Mr. Ogre thinks their respective answers will be one word, “Utopia”, LOL.

So far, I haven’t received a single reply, unless you count the “crickets chirping”. My guess is that liberals don’t particularly relish looking down the road at the long term realities of their ongoing endeavors. After all, when their(and the rest of our) chickens come home to roost, they can always blame Republicans, raise taxes and expand government payrolls, perhaps create new beauracracies, right? To liberals, the tax base is the same thing as having a cigar box at home where you keep your cash, and a fairy godmother(or, perhaps, in view of their more recent political platforms, fairy godfather) who replaces the cash as fast as you spend it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that Monopoly money is our hard earned tax dollars.

Wanna know something? If the members of the First Continental Congress had somehow gotten to watch a video on liberal influence in today’s government, they would’ve stood up and left en masse, wanting no part of anything outside taking care of their own colonies. What the left is doing to our country is bringing it around on a 180 from the mission of our founding fathers. They twist the wording of the Constitution to change our laws, they turn government schools into liberal indoctrination centers that teach selective History and tolerance of perversion while accepting no religious referendums other than the study of the Koran.

They use the courts to restrict our freedom of speech — not theirs, liberals can say whatever they please and it’s great, anything a conservative says is racist.

They’ve instituted this whole PC trip in our society which I think is even beyond idiotic.

Speaking of which, another friend of mine, GM Roper, has put together a LEXICON FOR THE LEFT that demands immediate perusal.

Enjoy….

From Move America Forward we now have purely donation-sponsored(how to donate is linked below in the email alert) national TV and radio ad campaigns whose target is to get out the complete truth about our troops’ activities in Iraq and in the War On Terror as a whole, not just the whining, spun, often uncorroborated, ever-negative, one sided, politically screened “reports” we receive from the mainstream media. Most importantly, the ads will let our troops, and the families of our troops, who are fighting the War on Terror know that, despite all the Bee Ess coming from the lefty media, marxist stooges like Michael Moore and Jane Fonda, wingnuts like Cindy Shirthead — damn, how’d that ‘r’ get in there? — and an alarming number of hungry career politicians on the Hill, from both sides of the aisle, who seem to have forgotten both that they work for us, the American Taxpayer, not for themselves, and that it greatly behooves not only them, but all their constituents, when senators and representatives are patriots — that the American people are profoundly grateful to our troops for what they are voluntarily doing on our behalf, for the risks they take every day and the hardships they endure, and for their often brutal sacrifices, and to their families.

The kind of money Move America Forward has had to raise for these projects so far, especially the T.V. ads, has more than demonstrated that there are a huge number of American individuals, companies and foundations that support our military personnel and the War on Terror. To read the New York Times or watch CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN or NPR (spit), you’d think there were only a few isolated pockets of right thinkers in this country, most in hiding, and that everyone else is a staunch liberal who hates the President and condemns the War on Terror, the fact of the Bush reelection notwithstanding.

The television spot begins airing tomorrow {Thursday, 22 June}.

National TV Campaign:

“America Says Thank You”

DEBUTING THURSDAY, JUNE 22nd:

Television & Radio Ad Campaign Thanks U.S. Troops

for Service & Sacrifice in Iraq & Afghanistan

(SAN FRANCISCO) – A major multi-media advertising blitz thanking American troops for a “job well done” in the war against terrorism will begin on Thursday, June 22, 2006.

The “America Says Thank You” ad campaign is a project of the pro-troop organization, Move America Forward (website: www.MoveAmericaForward.org). The first television ads will air on the Fox News Channel television network. The debut 60-second TV spot features a listing of major terrorist figures killed, captured or arrested as a result of the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

The ad campaign will then expand to CNN/Headline News and then on to local affiliates of the major television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, WB, UPN).

Total expenditures for the ad campaign are expected to run well into six figures, and this funding is being provided by individuals, organizations and institutions who wish to see more balanced and positive media coverage on the war against terrorism. To date more than 1,000 individuals have contributed to this specific advertising effort.

Pro-Troop Message Must Be Purchased – Media Bias Alleged

“We’re broadcasting these ads because somebody has to tell the other side of the story that’s not being reported by the news media. Our troops are making great progress in the war on terrorism, and there is a steady stream of positive developments taking place in Iraq,” said Melanie Morgan, Chairman of Move America Forward.

“Many journalists have gotten so bad in obsessing on any and all negative developments in Iraq – at the exclusion of coverage of any positive accomplishments being made – that supporters of U.S. troops are forced to buy the airtime to tell the public about the progress being made by our troops.

“We understand the mission in Iraq is a challenging one and we recognize that there are obstacles that must be overcome. However, can’t the news media tell the American people about all the good things being done there in addition to the bad stories? The good news coming out of Iraq is almost never reported,” said Melanie Morgan.

“So, until it does, Move America Forward will rally the American public to stand together and get that message out. We owe it to our troops and the military families to make sure that the efforts being made by the men and women of the United States military receive fair and proper coverage,” Morgan concluded.

The first television and radio advertisements can be seen online at Move America Forward’s website: www.MoveAmericaForward.org

The following is a description of the above-mentioned commercial advertisements.

———————————————————————————-

TV Ad: “America Says Thank You”

Description: Details the terrorist leaders who have been killed, captured or arrested by the United States and our allies in the war against terrorism. Points out that U.S. Troops are also actively involved in helping to build a free and secure Iraq. 60-second television advertisement.

View it Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvfRCwk8edg

———————————————————————————-

Radio Ad 1: “Winning the War Against Terrorism”

Description: Features Joseph Williams, father of Marine Michael Jason Williams who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Williams asserts that the war in Iraq has helped to make America safer. Also features Deborah Johns, mother of Marine William Johns, who is returning to Iraq for his THIRD tour of duty. Urges the American people to pull together as a nation to show the terrorists that we are in this fight to win. 60-second radio advertisement.

Listen to it Here: http://websrvr80il.audiovideoweb.com/il80web20028/MAF-7452_REV.mp3

———————————————————————————-

Radio Ad 2: “America Thanks You”

Description: Similar audio track to “America Says Thank You” television ad. 60-second radio advertisement.

Listen to it Here: http://websrvr80il.audiovideoweb.com/il80web20028/MAF-7456_Mix.mp3

A tip of my hat to Joe Wierzbicki.

…. You’ve gotta read this.

So it’s between 9 and 10 in the morning, and I’m doing things on-line. I have a long playlist going at MusicMatch, stuff from my own eras gone by, like

Goodbye To Love (The Carpenters), Stoned In Love (The Stylistics), Early In The Morning (Vanity Fare), Come Saturday Morning (The Sandpipers), etc, etc….

I need to run out of my office and into the rec-room for something. Simon & Garfunkels’ “The Dangling Conversation” is playing. I’ve been sort of singing along with the song, and as I get up and head for the other room I continue doing so. This is about a 70 second project.

I get back to my office, still singing along, and find that Paul, Art and I are still in perfect sync:

“Yes we speak of things that matter, with words that must be said,
can analysis be worthwhile, is the theatre really dead?”

Gives me pause for thought, am I that easily hypnotized?… then the song ends and another one I’ve liked a lot, untireably, for about a quarter of a century, commences,

A Girl In Trouble (is a temporary thing) by Romeo Void. I must admit that it’s one track I’ve never begrudged (or failed to begrudge) anything whatsoever about the subject or whatever — I just love the sax music, the instrumental theme and the way it all goes with every aspect of the vocal. I might well be able to listen to it over-and-over, without a dinner break.

What? Y’ain’t hearda’ Romeo Void!?