Obama '08?

I was just and only referring to the chapters there about "fraternisation".

If that's out of the blue and similar for you to the price of tea in China, sorry.

(Didn't you write today: "Unless you learn from history, you are destined to repeat it."?)

okie's perception of history is so distorted and myopic, he really doesn't know how to relate them to contemporary times.

cice girl, liberals and democrats suffer from myopia and they
fail to understand it's long term side effects such as denial...

Prove it by any of my statements on a2k. You're a ****'n bore.

You have elevated yourself to A2Ks #1 pathetic pest... Congratulations!

I invoke the 4-hour dormancy of a thread rule on A2K. Any thread that goes that long without a response will allow me to tell a story in order to fill the void.
Feel free to skip over this.
So, CI, that pest, mentioned here or elsewhere, that he has visited something like 136 countries. That is amazing. How many countries are there? I am at 34.
My Lil Brother called from Germany yesterday. While we were talking, he was doing his tally (the always competitive little bastard). 29.
But he wanted me to ask you, CI, if you have North Korea? He does.

No on North Korea, Cuba, and several other countries around the world, many of them in Western Africa. Been to all five continents, flew to Mt Everest, dipped my feet in the Dead Sea twice, been to the southern-most city, Ushuaia, of the world a few times, and I'm not sure where my most northern point is yet.

I was going to count the number of World Heritage Sites, but got lazy and quit doing it.

cice girl, why do you return to this country... the country you obviously hate.

So my bro Jim was based in South Korea with the AF a few years ago, He went up to the DMZ, which is a couple of miles wide, filled with all kinds of defenses.
As yall know, N & S Korea never signed a truce agreement after their war some 60 years ago. Rather, they agreed to a ceasefire with talks to follow.
So, right on the dividing line, is a building, with exactly half of it in each country and a line painted down the middle of the room. The border. There is a table, half in the north and half in the south, with a microphone cable defining even that. Two armed soldiers, one from each side, face each other from a distance of 3 feet. Each wearing mirrored sunglasses.
Jim visited that building. And he walked all around that table. So, technically, he was in N Korea. He realizes that probably shouldn't count; but it is a cute story.

Thank you to your brother for serving.

My uncle was postmaster of the Texarkana post office The door into his office was in Texas but when he sat down at his desk, he was in Arkansas.

I always liked that story too.

rjb, That counts! When I was in Zimbabwe, a small group of us walked across the small bridge across the Zambizi river to get our passports stamped with another country, Zambia, and to visit the other side of Victoria Falls.

While in Central Asia last year, we were supposedly only visiting five countries, but our tour director told us we visited the sixth when we drove through another border in Uzbekistan.

There are many ways to get credit for visiting another country. I'm sure there are thousands of interesting stories out there.

on July 23, 1952, I flew with my parents on a DC-3 from Dhahran Saudi Arabia to Beirut The Lebanon and landed In Cairo Egypt on our way to Rome. when we landed in Cairo a troop of Egyptian soldiers escorted all the passengers into a hanger with the soldiers posted at all doors and surrounding the building. The Following morning the same soldiers escorted us back to our plane and we flew on to Rome. when we landed in Rome we read in the papers that King Farouk had been overthrow over night and was replaced by Nasser. It was kinda interesting but mostly boring, nothing to eat or drink except some british orange soda. In Rome I ate an omelet with tea. It was very hot and air conditioning was not available.

The 4-hour dormancy rule rocks, doesn't it?

Change you can believe in...


Ninety-five percent of blacks voted for Obama.
As of June, black unemployment stood at 14.7 percent, up from 11.1 percent when Bush left office.

Obama won the Hispanic vote by a 66-31 percent margin.
Unemployment for Hispanics in June was 12.2 percent, an increase from 8.8 percent upon Bush's departure.


On July 3, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who supported Obama for president, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "Many American supporters of Israel who voted for Barack Obama now suspect they may have been victims of a bait and switch. Now, some of them apparently have voters' remorse."

What will it take for more of Obama's staunchest backers to join other Americans who have reached that conclusion?

In so many words, CI informs us that he must be respected because he has been to nearly every country on earth. Thus, he is an expert on all of those countries, and the others, too.

Respect must be earned and as far as I can tell... cice girl has done nothing to earn respect here on A2K.

The Obama administration is now admitting that nationwide unemployment may hit 11.00%

They are also considering offering Bailout Funds for Small Businesses

The Republicans sort of got a first taste of that with President Bush's Prescription Bill for Seniors that nobody wanted but it came late in President Bush's first term. Up until then we had tolerated rising deficits and other unpleasant phenomena as a necessary consequence of 9/11. He got and retained very high marks for national security and that was a priority for most Americans.

By the second term however, his fiscal irresponsibility along with unconservative policies on climate change, immigration, and energy, and an incompetent prosecution of the war was eroding his support among his base. Those who hated him to begin with didn't care what he did. He had an "R" beside his name and was therefore despicable. His base however expected him to be conservative and he simply wasn't in several important ways. Nevertheless the thought of a President Gore or President Kerry wasn't any more appealing.

It is really early yet though for President Obama's devoted disciples to suck it up and admit they goofed. Some never will because they are too blindly partisan to care that he isn't delivering as advertised and some are too uninformed to realize it, but we can hope that there are enough bright folks left out there to put the brakes on a lot of this stuff before it is too late.

Would McCain have done better? Who knows? But I bet we'll have folks running in 2010 and 2012 who will.

Addendum to previous post. I left out one group involved and that is those who really like what President Obama is doing. He can count on their votes the next time around too.

Foxie wrote:

It's amazing how these conservatives can determine the success or failure of any president after they've been in office for six months.

It's because they have no clue; all the stimulus money has not been spent, and the Obama administration are on a learning curve (a few months into the stimulus plan), and all the yo-yos in the MAC and conservative group already know alls a failure. On the other side of the coin, they wanted all of us to wait a few years after GW Bush's term to decide whether he was a failure or not; and let the historians determine how he fared.

The MAC/conservatives rush to judgment shows how they never understood how presidents are rated; it changes even after they've been out of office for many years.