Okay, what kind of a sick bastard does something like this? How low can a human being go?
From Stars & Stripes:
According to 1st Lt. David Cowan, in early December his 84-year-old grandmother received a phone call from a man calling himself J.D. Taylor. The man claimed that Cowan was on his way home on leave from Iraq for the holidays, but had gotten hung up and lost his wallet and military identification card.
Cowan’s grandmother, he said, was “asked by this person to wire $800, allegedly on my behalf so that I could get back home and surprise my family for Christmas.”
The claim was a scam. Luckily for Cowan and his family, his grandmother knew to be suspicious of strangers asking for money, even if they’d somehow managed to reach the relatives of a soldier whose name they knew.
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In recent years, the FBI has tracked a growing number of scams targeting military families or making false claims to prey on the public’s feelings of good will for troops.
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Investigators say Cowan handled the situation correctly. Law enforcement authorities advise people to never provide any personal or financial information over the phone or send money to a stranger on a relative’s behalf. |
I wish I could get my hands on people pulling scams like this.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Scams Targeting Troops And Their FamiliesJoseph Giordono
Stars and Stripes
December 27, 2007
Here in the Washington D.C. area, grass-roots organizations are moving to make state and local governments enforce immigration laws and cooperate with Federal authorities. It is a pity that this is what it takes to get our elected leaders to listen to us. Members of Congress and the President should have been doing this stuff years ago.
From the
Gazette.net:
Anti-illegal immigrant activists from around the metropolitan area held their first meeting Wednesday night to begin work on forming a regional coalition aimed at pressuring local and state governments to cut their support of illegal immigrants next year.
Representatives from a dozen grassroots groups in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., attended the meeting.
The focus in Maryland will be on driver’s licenses, in-state tuition and day-laborer centers, said Brad Botwin of Derwood, director of the grass-roots group Help Save Maryland. He expects to draw on lessons learned by groups such as Help Save Herndon in convincing local officials to enact tighter illegal-immigrant laws.
"Clearly, our friends from Virginia are light years ahead of us in Maryland," said Botwin, who coordinated the meeting. " ... We want to see what they can do to help us, and vice versa."
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group that hosted the meeting at its Washington headquarters, recently filed a public information request with Montgomery County to obtain all information relating to its three day-laborer centers, as well as information on all funding and grants for Casa of Maryland, the immigrant advocacy group that runs the centers.
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All major metropolitan areas should have a meeting of the minds such as this one. It would send a strong message to our elected officials that we, the people, are fed up with the illegal immigrant problem and want real solutions, not amnesty which would only create more problems for us.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Activists Opposed To Illegal Immigrant Services BandSebastian Montes
Gazette.net of Maryland
December 26, 2007
And here is some more information about Global Warming that Old Media will never tell you about.
(BTW, Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)
From the
American Spectator:
Scientists have known for years that temperature records can be contaminated by so-called "urban warming," which results from the fact that long-term temperature histories tend to have originated at points of commerce. The bricks, buildings, and pavement of cities retain the heat of the day and impede the flow of ventilating winds.
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That's also known as the "urban heat island effect," a phenomenon that has been shown to greatly skew temperature data around major cities like New York.
Michaels goes on:
Adjusting data for this effect, or using only rural stations, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with confidence that less than 10% of the observed warming in long-term climate histories is due to urbanization.
That's a wonderful hypothesis, and Ross and I decided to test it.
We noted that other types of bias must still be affecting historical climate records. What about the quality of a national network and the competence of the observers? Other factors include movement or closing of weather stations and modification of local land surfaces, such as replacing a forest with a cornfield.
Many of these are socioeconomic, so we built a computer model that included both regional climatic factors, such as latitude, as well as socioeconomic indicators like GDP and applied it to the IPCC's temperature history.
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The adjusted IPCC data now looks a lot like the satellite data. The biggest change was that the high (very warm) end of the distribution in the IPCC data was knocked off by the unbiasing process.
Where was the press? A Google search reveals that with the exception of a few blog citations, the only major story ran in Canada's Financial Post.
There are several reasons why the press provides so little coverage to science indicating that global warming isn't the end of the world. One has to do with bias in the scientific literature itself. Theoretically, assuming unbiased climate research, every new finding should have an equal probability of indicating that things are going to be more or less warm, or worse-than-we-thought vs. not-so-bad.
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Too bad Old Media isn't listening to real scientists like Patrick J. Michales but would instead give attention to charlatans like Al Gore.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Not So HotPatrick J. Michaels
American Spectator
December 27, 2007
