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LinkedIn This is a reminder that on September 15, Upton Bell sent you an invitation to become part of their professional network at LinkedIn. Follow this link to accept Upton Bell's invitation. https://www.linkedin.com/e/isd/740498739/sQYH6v03/ Signing up is free and takes less than a minute. This is a reminder that on September 15, Upton Bell sent you an invitation to become part of their professional network at LinkedIn.
> To: webmaster3866.uptonbell@blogger.com [webmaster3866.uptonbell@blogger.com]
> From: Upton Bell [upton13@aol.com]
> Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
> I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
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> - Upton
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Welcome to the land of milk and honey, and Big Macs and Cheese, and large fries, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Frappicinos, and diet (what a joke) Coke, and super-size me portions. In a country dotted from coast to coast with McDonalds, Burger Kings, Hardees, Wendys, Popeyes and Dunkin Donuts - to mention just a few, we clog our arteries and add pound upon pound from cradle to grave. We drink more and eat more than any society in history. Just this past week, we learned that 36 percent of African Americans are obese and not far behind are Hispanics at 29 percent followed by white Americans at 22. It was pointed out by the Center for Disease Control that the racial differences in the obesity rate have been reported before. These percentages surely should make us face the reality that we have become a national medicine ball. Part of the reason that we have a health care meltdown in this country and the costs that come with it is the lack of personal responsibility for our lives and our health. The reason more hospitals, doctor's offices and clinics are filled with sick people at a younger and younger age is our disgusting eating habits. Just this past week at President Obama's appointment of Dr. Regina Benjamin as Surgeon General, we saw a picture on our television screens of a clearly overweight to obese person appointed to preach to us about our national health. The problem is she looks exactly like us - fat! We have become a country that adores our chefs and not our doctors. Have you ever seen so many food shows? We have on a local level, Billy Costa and the TV Diner and The Phantom Gourmet. On a national level, we have The Food Network and too many other shows to count. Every day, we adore Rachel Ray as we once did Julia Child. In fact, Julia who I truly loved, will soon be portrayed in a new movie starring Meryl Streep. In trying to answer why our nation is so fat, I've taken it upon myself to go to as many health and fitness clubs as possible and observe the people who work out. Bally Total Fitness is one of the places I have chosen and to my surprise over a period of a year, most people gained weight instead of losing it and seem to be there more to socialize and go through the motions. Some of them, after working out, seem to get fatter. When I asked them why that happened, they said they worked out so they could eat more. Which brings me to the people I think should be our role models. For example Jesus of Nazareth was slim and in good shape and preached against the abuse of the body. i.e. gorging. Mohammed was skinny and preached abstinence. Budha, although he was a little rotund, preached meditation and fasting. Just this weekend, Tom Watson, 59 years old and hoping to become the oldest player to win a major championship, shows people how to live by his example of discipline, weight control and dedication. The whole sporting world is rooting for him and maybe he could be the next role model for us instead of Valerie Bertanelli. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the National Belly League, otherwise known as the National Football League, with most of their offensive and defensive linemen weighing at least 300 pounds and looking more like Paul Belly instead of Paul Bunyan. What kind of message do you think that sends to a television audience every Sunday in the Fall? What we need to remember is one of the seven deadly sins is sloth. My final example of a role model for all of us is Nelson Mandella whose 91st birthday was celebrated at Madison Square Garden this weekend. Behold a dignified, ramrod straight and slim world leader who probably learned how to diet when he was in prison on Robben Island for 27 years. I know you're probably thinking President Obama's slim himself ,but remember, he loves big juicy hamburgers. In closing, my advice to all of you obese people is if you can't discipline yourself, call Count Wensky at Staples and order their stomach staple operation. I'm sure it will be on sale very soon. PS - I'm 5'11", 155 pounds of pure steel and haven't had a Whopper in years!
From Richard (bomb them back to the Stone Age) Nixon and Henry Kissenger, to Lyndon Johnson and Robert (the cold-blooded statistician) McNamara, to Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, to George W. Bush and Donald (lightening-warfare) Rumsfeld, Dick (Dr. Strangelove) Cheney, Carl (any war is good for re-election) Rove and George "It's a slam dunk!" Tenet, our leaders have perfected shading the truth to down right lying especially in the art of making war. Of course, our leaders are not the only ones through history that have used the art of lying to start another war. Remember the old adage about wizened politicians sending young men, and now young women, to die for their country? This still applies today except the wounds are all the more severe and the accumulated death toll is appalling. For example: Take our last two American wars - Vietnam and Iraq. Both were trumped up by politicians and aided and abetted by their co-conspirators, the CIA. First there was the Vietnam War that ran from the Eisenhower administration through President Kennedy with its final apotheosis under Lyndon Johnson and his numbers man, Robert McNamara (who died recently). McNamara was the trigger man who made the figures work so Johnson, along with the generals, could continue to lie to the public. Now some 40 years later in the documentary The Fog of War, and other pronouncements, McNamara said that he was wrong, terribly wrong, about the war. As we found out later, McNamara and Johnson knew the war was lost early but continued the cover up by sending more and more troops. If it were not for people like David Halberstam of the New York Times and Walter Cronkite on CBS, more bodies might have piled up and more years might have been spent on a fruitless effort that cost America more than 58,000 dead men and women and most were young boys. Of equal importance was the big lie perpetrated on an American public still reeling from 9/11. George W. Bush and his masters of intrigue, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Carl Rove and slam dunk George Tenet of the CIA put together a game plan that would have made Bill Belichick blush. The plan called for a beginning and no ending - Shock and Awe. Between this foursome, they cooked up a phony story about the threat of Al-Qaeda. A gullible public and press bought it hook, line and stinker. In a scene out of a Monty Python movie, slam dunk Tenet and the CIA, along with other co-conspirators, supplied a scenario that would help Bush declare war. The real casualty was Colin Powell with his charts and graphs and maps appearing before the United Nations and making a plausible argument for invasion. Even though Powell, in his heart, didn't believe any of the pablum, he still went ahead and made his presentation out of loyalty to the President instead of to the American public. It cost us a great general and him, a great American, his career. So after six years and counting, we still have not left Iraq and, believe me, we will be there for a long time. Here are the real figures: More than 4,000 American men and women are dead plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens. This war brought us car bombs, beheadings, Al-Qaeda, Abu Garib, water-boarding, secret spying on American citizens and weapons of mass destruction that never existed. We are now widening the conflict in Afghanistan and President Obama has sent in 21,000 more troops which he says is not a surge. History tells us that neither the British, the Russians, or for that matter any foreign nation, has been able to conquer Afghanistan. After President Obama said 21,000 troops was all he was going to send, just this week, General McCrystal has said he thinks we need more troops. Sound familiar? In fact, we have now also learned that there could be a possible investigation into war crimes committed in this country. Every time I hear a sitting President or politician applaud our men and women in the armed forces as serving their country bravely, I recall that old refrain from World War I - "It's the war to end all wars."
Sarah Palin - From Beauty Queen to Also-Ran
Our long political nightmare is over, maybe. The Republican version of Saturday Night Live ended on a low note Friday night when Tina Fey, I mean Sarah Palin, delivered her rambling incoherent Nixonian rage against the world, including her best punching bag - the press. From her back porch, surrounded by a few Wasilla natives and Sarah Palin -- From Beauty Queen to Also-Ran Our long political nightmare is over, maybe. The Republican version of Saturday Night Live ended on a low note Friday night when Tina Fey, I mean Sarah Palin, delivered her rambling incoherent Nixonian rage against the world, including her best punching bag - the press. From her back porch, surrounded by a few Wasilla natives and grazing moose, and just a stone's throw from the Russian border and her friend, Vladimir Putin, Sarah delivered a halting somewhat nervous, somewhat opaque, somewhat whiney speech that had no beginning and no ending. To quote the immortal George Will, "I read her speech twice and watched her interview and I still don't know what she said." Some defenders like William Kristol of The Weekly Standard think that this is a clever move because it would get her ready for the 2012 presidential race. You've got to be kidding me! This is the ex-basketball player who was constantly talking about teamwork who quit in essentially the second half of the game and left her team with no substitutes. This is a woman who couldn't or wouldn't take the pressure of all the barbs and all the investigations (which now number 12 and counting) on the possible abuse of power while in office. Maybe she should learn a lesson from Hillary Clinton when she starts her whining about how she and her family have been treated. Secretary of State Clinton for eight years was subject to some of the worst abuse and ridicule by the media, her critics and also, by the way, David Letterman. Please read in Vanity Fair an article by Todd Purdum who wrote, among other things, "that the McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And, there's no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy." Here are some other quotes from Purdum's article who, by the way, said that he liked Sarah Palin: "Purdum learned as he traveled in Alaska while reporting on Palin that the Governor's erratic and egoistic behavior had been a source of concern for people here." "Several people told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- 'a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy' and thought it fit her perfectly." My take on all of this is that the above definition more appropriately describes the behavior of some of the leaders of the Republican party such as South Carolina's loopy Governor Mark Sanford and his "soul mate" Senator John Ensign of Nevada . It used to be that the Democrats would be the party of self-inflicting wounds but nobody has come along in political life that would be comparable to - well - Sarah Palin. Remember the Republican National Convention when Sarah Barracuda, who by the way, was poorly vetted by the McCain Campaign, made her debut with her whole family in tow, including the pregnant daughter, Bristol, and her boyfriend, Levi Johnson, to the cheers of the Convention and a national TV audience. She didn't mind telling everybody her life story, warts and all, but as soon as the presidential race was over, Levi Johnson was axed from the family and described as white trash and, of course, the poor Governor from Wasilla with all of those family values of frugality was asked like Cinderella to return her $160,000 wardrobe. But why quibble over the small things, I think the most important thing for us to know on this July 4th holiday as we prepare for Tuesday's Michael Jackson extravaganza is that Sarah Palin, who once referred to Barack Obama as "hanging out with terrorists", quit on her state, quit on her party but didn't quit on her lucrative book contract. Now you know what Donald Trump would say about Sarah Palin's performance?
"Sarah, you're fired!"
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