Some may call this an extreme case of bad luck, but this man, Joe Berti, a software company chief executive, calls it being blessed. He explains that he ran the Boston Marathon on that fateful day of April 15th and escaped the bombings by seconds, then went back home to Texas just in time to witness the massive explosion at the fertilizer plant in West Texas.
Mr. Berti explains;
So we mentioned Donald Trump and the very stupid partisan tweet he made in the midst of a national tragedy as FBI and local Boston police were trying to capture the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. Trump joked about ObamaCare, wondering if the injured bomber would receive coverage.
You just know that Trump was not going to be the only Republican making an off-the-mark and uncalled-for “joke.” Here’s another.
State Rep. Nate Bell (R-Mena), wrote on Twitter, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”
LOLOL. Get it? Now how funny is that? Are you cracking up from all this Republican humor? Yea, me neither, and neither did a whole lot of folks. Feeling the pressure to explain himself, Mr. Bell offered this “apology” on his Twitter and Facebook page;
“I would like to apologize to the people of Boston & Massachusetts for the poor timing of my tweet earlier this morning. As a staunch and unwavering supporter of the individual right to self defense, I expressed my point of view without thinking of its effect on those still in time of crisis. In hindsight, given the ongoing tragedy that is still unfolding, I regret the poor choice of timing.”
Yea, he’s apologizing for the “poor timing.” I’m not sure when would be the appropriate timing for that “joke.” Maybe if less people died in the next attack he can try his humor again.
They just can’t help themselves. It is obviously hopeless for the Republican party if the leaders cannot figure out what’s appropriate behavior or common human decency.
Wow, America’s Sweetheart, Reese Witherspoon, was arrested last Friday for disorderly conduct in Atlanta, Ga.
Reese Witherspoon and her husband, Jim Toth, were pulled over early Friday, April 19, 2013 for suspected drunk driving. Jim Toth was driving the vehicle and made claims to the arresting officer that he only had ‘one drink for the night’, yet he blew a 0.139 into the breathalizer test which is quite a bit above the 0.08 legal limit.
Well, I guess Mrs. Witherspoon was not having any of it as she allegedly,
began to hang out the window and say that she did not believe I was a real police officer.
and
Do you know my name? You’re about to find out who I am…You are going to be on national news.
as stated by the arresting officer on the police report.
Both Reese Witherspoon and her husband were taken into custody; Jim Toth was charged with driving while intoxicated and Witherspoon with the aforementioned disorderly conduct.
Apparently, a more sobered up Witherspoon may have learned her lesson as she stated over the weekend that,
Out of respect for the ongoing legal situation, I cannot comment on everything that is being reported right now. But I do want to say, I clearly had one drink too many and I am deeply embarrassed about the things I said.
Here’s the thing though, you’re rich and a taxi/driver could have been easily called to avoid this situation.
It doesn’t matter how famous you are, folks.
Just Don’t Drink and Drive.
While you enjoy the weather- jogging, walking, biking, picnicking or chasing your kids and grandkids in the park- don’t forget to protect your skin.
Skin care simply means caring for your skin, our biggest organ, the one that protects us from an onslaught of potential hazards and diseases. Skin care has two goals:
1. Protect
2. Prevent
We can help prevent skin cancer and accelerated aging of our skin by protecting the skin from what is considered by doctors and skin experts as the skin’s number one enemy: the harmful UV rays of the sun.
Not to be contradictory, but a little bit of UV exposure is good. Natural sun light helps our bodies to make vitamin D, a substance necessary for bone strength and to fight certain diseases such as jaundice, rickets and psoriasis. Exposure to early morning light helps wakes us up and may even help ward off depression.
It’s the darn UVA and UVB rays that cause havoc on our skin.
The World Health Organization states, “Prolonged human exposure to UV solar radiation may result in acute and chronic health effects on the skin, eyes, and immune system.” The World Health Organization reports 2.5 million types of skin cancer diagnosed each year. Many are preventable.
Two types of damage harmful UV rays can incur: damage caused by sunburn (the scientific term is erythema) and the damage cause by photoaging. Photoaging is a fancy way of saying early wrinkles and sagging skin due to too much sun.
It’s Easy to Keep Skin Beautiful and Protected
We’ve all heard the statistics. But do you know how easy it is to take avoid preventable skin cancer and early wrinkles and sagging?
It takes about two minutes to protect skin in the morning and at night. You need two minutes twice a day and some very basic skin care products: a cleanser, toner, and moisturizer. There are other helpful products but these three are the essentials. Look for products that are free of alcohol, paraben and added fragrances. These products are more gentle and nourishing.
Protecting the skin- specifically your face and neck where most of the exposure hits- entails is washing the face, using a toner and basic protective moisturizer and an eye cream. Make sure the day cream has a SPF in it (or use a SPF on top of the moisturizer). Day creams act to protect the skin while night creams work to restore the stress of the day and heal the damage of the day.
We have enough on our plate to worry about. Skin cancer and premature aging don’t need to be among our list of concerns.
Beauty = healthy. Healthy is clean and protected. Wash, Tone, Moisturize. Two minutes. Easy and breezy and done.
Melissa AuClair works by day as a skin care and cosmetic consultant and a blogger and writer moving towards a location independent lifestyle by night. You can follow her on Twitter @melissaauclair or on her blog http://www.launchyourcreativelife.com/blog
It has been reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Boston Suspect #2, is awake, in stable condition, and responding to questions through writing.
Tsarnaev is recovering from wounds at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where earlier on Sunday, law officials claimed that Tsarnaev was not speaking due to being sedated because of his serious condition.
Now, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is awake and according to law officials,
responding sporadically in writing to questions … about other cell members and other unexploded bombs.
This is potentially great news as many were hoping he would be caught alive so that vital questions could be answered.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stated last Saturday,
We are hoping, for a host of reasons, that the suspect survives…Because we have a million questions, and those questions need to be answered.
It is expected that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be charged with criminal terrorist activity and this may include charges on both the state and federal levels.
Whether or not the death penalty will be involved is unclear depending on if Tsarnaev will be charged on a federal level as Massachusetts has no death penalty.
Older brother and Bomb Suspect #1,Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died early Friday after a police shootout while attempting to escape. Tamerlan Tsarnev’s 6-month stay in Dagestan, Russia last year is currently being highly scrutinized and investigated as a possible connection to the Boston bombing attacks.
I’m at a loss of words on this one, so I’ll let the so-called “pastor” explain.
His rant on the roles of men and women really got interesting somewhere around the 51 minute mark in his sermon, where he went out of his way to explain that men are not better than women. But after making that point, Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona explained that he is a dictator in his home and that his wife is happy to play the submissive role. She “was born to be submissive and subject to me,” he said.
Here’s the transcript and the video is below.
When it comes to authority, there is no equality. You say, “How does your home run?” A dictatorship. Any questions? It’s a monarchy, okay? Mono. One boss. Okay? That’s how my home is run. That’s how every biblical home is run, by the way, okay? And you say, “Oh, your wife must hate you!” No, women love that. Because they were born to fill that role. Just like I was born to be the husband and the leader, my wife was born to be the wife and to be submissive and subject to me. And she’s gonna be most happier doing what God created her to do, just like I’m going to be most happy doing what God created me to do!
And, you know, you say, “Well, that’s not true, because I talk to all these women that are just, you know, they just want to be a feminist and stuff…” You know what? Here’s what I’ve found over the years: The women who are screaming the loudest that they want to be a feminist and that they don’t want a man telling them what to do, on the inside, are really screaming the loudest, please tell me what to do. Please put me in my place. And, you know what? If you don’t believe that? You’re just ignorant. It’s that simple.
And, yeah, I’m sure that there are some reprobate lesbians out there that have a different view. But let me tell you something: A normal woman, on the inside, wants to follow a leader. She wants to follow a husband. She wants a man there that she can look up to, not look down on…
Here it comes.
Immediately after one of the most harrowing, frightening, wierdly compelling and sweat-inducing weeks in our recent history, the political backlash is rearing its ugly head. It’s emotional and knee-jerk and patently American.
First up is the argument that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a terrorist and thus should be treated as an enemy combatant, as opposed to a citizen criminal. The Senators pushing this line, Lindsay Graham, John McCain and Kelly Ayotte are reacting from pure emotion. There is no defending what the two brothers did or the dastardly effects of their action in a major American city, but can we at least step back a bit and consider the full range of options? Here is a 19 year-old, probably in thrall to his older brother, and probably not as committed to a radical path, who commits murder. By all other accounts, he’s a law-abiding person. There are circumstances. Let’s calm down.
The Senators assume that a Federal Court would be an inappropriate venue for weighing Dzhokhar’s guilt (or innocence, by the way. Does anybody remember that he’s still presumed innocent?) and that only a tightly controlled military tribunal will assure his punishment. They think that reading him his Miranda rights is an affront to justice. Not true, and a dangerous assumption. Let’s let the FBI do its job. The genius of our legal system is that it must filter out emotional responses. That’s what we need to have happen now.
The case also seems to have jolted the immigration debate. Again, the knee-jerk reaction is to shut the door to all immigrants and to throw out all the illegals. It’s as if the debate we’ve been having over the past four months simply vanished. Yes, we should all have legitimate concerns about the FBI’s interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whether government security officials should have done more to follow-up on his trip to Russia and his possible radicalization at the hands of militant Chechen or al-Qaeda operatives. But how does a family that, until last week, basically followed the law and applied for legal status according to protocol get to throw an entire system into doubt?
They shouldn’t, and it’s up to pragmatic, level-headed citizens to see that. We certainly do need border security, but it’s not like the Tsarnaev family spirited themselves across the border under cover of night or lived on false papers or were outwardly hostile to the United States. We now know that at least one of them was, inwardly, but how could anyone know that he would commit this act? We can’t. That’s why it’s called terrorism. Because we don’t expect it.
And like the gun enthusiasts who said that background checks would not prevent another Newtown, closing the door would not stop another Boston (or, for that matter, another Oklahoma City or September 11). Tamerlan was here for 10 years before he acted. I’m sure there are other legal immigrants in this country who could similarly become radicalized and act in another city. Shall we hunt down all recent immigrants from every other hotspot in the world an follow them? Evict them? Where do we start? Are immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, the Central African Republic and any other area where there’s been civil unrest now eligible for government surveillance?
Speaking of the gun debate, I am extremely interested in where the Tsarnaev brothers got their guns. And whether they were registered. Or bought online. Background check? Based on the Newtown logic, I’m thinking the NRA is now going to call for all people who attend sporting events to carry guns (and for some on the left to outlaw pressure cookers). Or perhaps we should just stop having marathons. Clearly, these would solve the problem.
We need to be more diligent, to be sure, but we also need to step back and process this event logically. Only then can we look at our next steps with clear eyes.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest
The world as we know it has changed or should I say within the United States anyway. Periodically and without warning – as Americans go about their daily routines – of work, weekend fun and scheduled family activities, terror strikes leaving all of us to wonder why and how could this have happened?
With the domestic terrorism of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, the terrorist attack of 9/11, the movie theatre shooting in Colorado and the most recent attack at the Boston Marathon, we’ve become vulnerable to the threat of horror within our lives. As a matter of fact, places that we’ve been so accustomed to see terrorism like Iraq, the Middle East and Afghanistan, is slowly spreading its way to our soil. Those countries have had violence erupt on a weekly basis for so long that the residences have grown immune to the bombings and bullets flying throughout their neighborhoods.
But now, it’s here. Since the younger brother of the terrorists was captured on Friday evening, media outlets have posed the question of how can the government keep us safe from these attacks? While watching the coverage on several different news channels on Friday, a Terror Expert stated how we have been so fortunate that more have not taken place. Terror teams have intercepted so many chances by the enemy on our homeland. We just aren’t apprised of every chance taken for our own safety and to keep the masses from widespread panic.
Well we citizens have to do our part. STOP, LOOK & LISTEN. When we go to the airport, an announcement comes over the speakers to keep your luggage with you at all times. We are very observant at the airport for obvious reasons but now we need to be equally observant everywhere we go.
STOP: Be vigilant at all times. If something doesn’t appear right, notify the management team if you’re at the movies, restaurant or any event that you’ve noticed something out of sorts.
LOOK: Always be aware of your surroundings. No need to be paranoid but backpacks or bags carried now seem to be a popular carrying case of choice for those that would do us harm. If bags are left unattended, make someone aware of it.
LISTEN: We don’t need to eavesdrop on conversations but just be observant to things that sound suspicious. Notify authorities or management depending on where you are.
Don’t take matters into your own hands. We aren’t trained for that. But, we can do our part and that is the simple steps above: STOP, LOOK and LISTEN. Perhaps by doing those three things, we could save a multitude of lives.
So be vigilant America. We really can make a difference.Our lives just may depend on it.
At the Cambridge mosque near where the bombing suspects lived, two worshipers who showed up for Saturday’s prayer service recalled seeing both men.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was thrown out of the mosque — the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center — about three months ago, after he stood up and shouted at the imam during a Friday prayer service, they said. The imam had held up slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of a man to emulate, recalled one worshiper who would give his name only as Muhammad.
Enraged, Tamerlan stood up and began shouting, Muhammad said.
“You cannot mention this guy because he’s not a Muslim!” Muhammad recalled Tamerlan shouting, shocking others in attendance.
“He’s crazy to me,” Muhammad said. “He had an anger inside.… I can’t explain what was in his mind.”
Tamerlan was then kicked out of the prayer service for his outburst, Muhammad recalled. “You can’t do that,” Muhammad said of shouting at the imam.
Still, Tamerlan returned to Friday prayer services and had no further outbursts, Muhammad said.
h/t LA Times
President Barack Obama, moving swiftly after the Senate rejected a measure to expand background checks for gun buyers, acted on Friday to patch holes in the existing database dealers use to ensure they are not selling weapons to criminals or the mentally ill.
The Health and Human Services Department will issue a formal proposal on Friday to make sure one of its privacy laws does not prevent states from reporting information to the background check system.
“While this background check system is the most efficient and effective way to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals, it is only as effective as the information that is available to it,” an administration official said.
Obama was visibly frustrated after the Senate on Wednesday defeated a bill that would have expanded background checks for guns bought at gun shows and on the Internet.
“Even without Congress, my administration will keep doing everything it can to protect more of our communities,” Obama said on Wednesday.
“We’re going to address the barriers that prevent states from participating in the existing background check system,” he said. The idea was part of a series of executive actions Obama first announced in January.
h/t Reuters
The five-minute video opens with a man cruising along in his car, cracking open a bottle of what appears to be Beck’s beer and taking a swig.
“We all know drinking and driving is against the law. You’re not supposed to do that. But they didn’t say anything about driving and then drinking,” the man says to the camera. “You just have to be learned enough to understand the symbols of drunkenness.”
The man, Richard Godbehere, posted the clip in February under the title “Let’s Go Driving, Drinking!” to LiveLeak, a video-sharing site where users can vote on and donate to videos they like.
Even so, he appeared surprised when police showed up at his house in Kapa’a, Hawaii, to arrest him on charges of consuming alcohol while operating a vehicle and driving without a license.
“It’s unbelievable,” Godbehere told CNN. He says the video was meant as a parody. “There was no beer in that bottle.” Godbehere is due in court in June, and police in Kaua’i told CNN the case will come down to whether a judge or jury believes him.
“Our traffic laws are in place for a reason, and Mr. Godbehere’s blatant disregard for those laws is the type of behavior that won’t be tolerated,” said Kaua’i Police Chief Darryl Perry in a statement.
r/t CNN
The maturity of these people are amazing. On Friday, while much of the nation was fixated on what was happening in Boston, Donald Trump used the occasion to send an inappropriate, childish and partisan tweet. But what exactly should we expect from an immature, partisan Republican? Exactly what Trump did.
What was happening in Boston on Friday was serious business. People lost their lives in the unfortunate events that began on Monday and by Friday, an entire city was locked indoors. FBI and local police was on a manhunt for someone they thought had bombs strapped to his body. Getting this person off the streets while minimizing the potential threat to the public was obviously a top priority.
But Trump, in his infinite wisdom or lack thereof, saw the perfect opportunity to attack – of all things – the President’s Affordable Health Care Program, better known as ObamaCare.
Said Trump…
Is the Boston killer eligible for Obama Care to bring him back to health?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2013
Given what we’ve come to know about Donald Trump in recent months, I guess we should be happy that Trump only attacked ObamaCare and not use the opportunity where the FBI a fugitive to demand Obama’s birth certificate.
Then again, it’s still early…
