bluree | com

On her appearance on David Letterman last night, Hillary Clinton responds to Dave’s question… “Are we going to be in Iraq forever?”  Then she goes into her Top Ten Campaign Promises.  Kinda humorous.  I liked 10, 6 and 2.

A Diageo/Hotline poll conducted by Financial Dynamics was recently completed (August 22-26, 2007) in which 604 registered Republicans across the nation were asked the following question; If the 2008 Republican presidential primary were held today, whom would you support if the candidates were [see below]?”

(should see a flash chart below, hopefully it’ll show up through blog reading applications but if not I may have to scrap it.  Leave a comment if its not behaving)

McCain released a new campaign video highlighting his military experience, footage from his interrogation when he was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison and other rambling bits.  It’s a good video highlighting his experience and background in the armed forces.  It does make you wonder why he blanketly supports Bush’s war though…

Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq said (in the first interview with a US news agency since being brow beat by US Government officials last week) that;

“The positive development in the security situation is owed to national reconciliation much more than to our security forces or coalition troops. Some would want to hide this fact, but it is a fact not to be hidden.”

So take note… whether you believe Maliki or not, he’s saying that US occupation and the US definition of “democracy” of his country will do little to qwell the issue at hand.  There are civil difference of the people of Iraq that can only be worked out with political diplomacy exercises, not brute military force.  Military force just provokes the civil violence of its people.  When questioned about being forced out of office and the turmoil within his own unstable government he responded;

“I wish to give reassurance: Those who speak about pushing out the present regime, whether Carl Levin or Mrs. Hillary Clinton or the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, who apologized for his remarks — none of these pose a real threat to the continuance of this government and the continuance of the political process,” he said.

“As for the Iraqi politicians, our partners in the Iraqi government, they pose no threat even if they called for our resignation, for they have no authority within the democratic frame to depose us.”

At one point, asked if Iraq’s parliament could agree on anything, let alone replacing him, he laughed and said, “So, the government is safe, then.”

[From their website] It’s been two years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, and still there are tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt.

There is something very specific you can do to help. Sign the petition urging the Senate to pass Chris Dodd’s Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 (S1668).  [END QUOTE]

Here’s a lovely article, published today in The New York Times going over the summation of scadal and hipocracy in the GOP;

Just when Republicans thought things could not get any worse, Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho confirmed that he had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer accused him of soliciting sex in June in a Minneapolis airport restroom. On Tuesday, Mr. Craig, 62, held a news conference to defend himself, calling the guilty plea “a mistake” and declaring, “I am not gay” — even as the Senate Republican leadership asked for an Ethics Committee review.

 

It was a bizarre spectacle, and only the latest in a string of accusations of sexual foibles and financial misdeeds that have landed Republicans in the political equivalent of purgatory, the realm of late-night comic television.

Forget Mark Foley of Florida, who quit the House last year after exchanging sexually explicit e-mail messages with under-age male pages, or Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whose dealings with the old Republican Congress landed him in prison. They are old news, replaced by a fresh crop of scandal-plagued Republicans, men like Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, whose phone number turned up on the list of the so-called D.C. Madam, or Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Representative Rick Renzi of Arizona, both caught up in F.B.I. corruption investigations.

It is enough to make a self-respecting Republican want to tear his hair out in frustration, especially as the party is trying to defend an unpopular war, contain the power of the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and generate some enthusiasm among voters heading toward the presidential election in 2008.

Mr. Craig, for his part, has severed ties with the Mitt Romney campaign, despite his public declaration on Tuesday that “I did nothing wrong.”

UPDATE: CNN spoke with Major Darryl Tolleson of the Atlanta Police Department of his experience with this type of crime and to the nature of incidents like it.  She asked “is it gay men”?  His response was in effect that correlation does not imply causation (one of my favorite latin phrases; ad hoc ergo propter hoc meaning “after this therefore because of this”, i.e. false causation)   Major Tolleson has arrested CEO’s, bank presidents, college professors and the like for doing the same thing, stating that;

“The majority of these men, they have families…  You would think that it would be a gay issue but overhwhelmingly more and more, we’re seeing that these are people with families.”

. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThGNpOpozFs

YouMail, currently in beta, is a FREE services that replaces your current mobile/wireless voicemail.  They walk you through a few set-up things on your current phone so that unanswered calls go to YouMail and not your wireless providers voicemail system.

So what IS YouMail?  Well, having just completed the setup myself and redirected my phone I can tell you that it will be a permanent replacement likely.  YouMail allows you to customize your voicemail by caller.

So, any of my siblings could call, (I won’t answer the next call I see from you) and get the greeting I picked out for them to hear.  Anyone not configured will get my standard greeting.  When someone leaves you a voicemail, you’ll get a text message and an email letting you know its there.  Simply hold down your voicemail key on your phone to call and check your messages… nothing new there.

So why is it so advantageous?  Few reasons;

• I can keep my voicemails forever.
• I have my work mobile number on permanent redirect to my personal mobile (have done so for years so I don’t have to carry two mobiles…) and now I can have a “work” greeting play instead of my standard “this is ___ leave a message”
• I can put a personalized professional greeting of something like ”Hi Donna, I’m sorry I missed your call, please leave a message”
• If you don’t have a custom greeting, when you check your message, you can create one on-the-fly for that caller for the next time they call.
• I can assign “Ditchmail” to numbers I don’t want to accept messages from and they will be played a ditch message and hung up on.

The only thing you’ll miss by using this service, is that you’ll be getting a text message when you receive a voicemail, not your traditional voicemail indicator icon on your phone.  YouMail has a huge collection of “greetings” you can choose from or naturally, you can record your own.

They need to improve on the greeting assignment process a bit and allow you to upload a collection of greetings then allow you to apply them to one or more numbers… but I’m sure that’s coming.

Now, if GrandCentral (recently aquired by Google) and YouMail could get together, it would be great.  GrandCentral gives you a local phone number that acts in a preemtive way to screen and direct calls to your mobile, landlines or both AND provides custom voicemail greetings.  You have to distribute your new number for it to be effective though.  (P.S. If you want a GrandCentral invite then send me an email with your email address and I’ll send you one… since Google aquired them they went into private beta).

Miss Teen USA contender from South Carolina (Lauren Caitlin Upton) this past Friday offered up her idea on why 1/5 of Americans can’t find the USA on a map.  This is rich! 

Upton said she “completely misunderstood” the question.  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting (the question). I lost my train of thought.”

The New York Times is reporting that in about an hour, Gonzo will announce his resignation!  George W must be miffed having said a couple weeks ago “We’re watching a political exercise,”… “I mean, this is a man who has testified, he’s sent thousands of papers up there. There’s no proof of wrong.”  This should have happened months ago, but as John Edwards just released a statement concerning, “Better late than never”.

A senior administration official said today that Gonzales, who was in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., on Friday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, but said the two should talk face to face on Sunday.

Gonzales and his wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president accepted the resignation with regret, the official said.

Wasting no time, Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader said;

“Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job.  He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.”

Anyother runaway from Disney (e.g. Justin, Brittney, Christina etc…) I happened upon this song recently (it’s a year old) and it’s on heavy rotation for some reason.

Vanessa Hugens | V | Say Ok