Sunday Stuff!

We have a big time "Asshole of the Week" award for you this time around!

Texas officials investigating a potential child abuse case said on Saturday 183 children and women had been removed from a ranch that is home to a breakaway Mormon sect linked to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.

Texas authorities descended on the ranch this week in response to allegations that a 50-year-old man there had married and fathered a child with an underage girl.

The ranch is a compound for the renegade Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist group led by Jeffs until last year.

In November, Jeffs was sentenced in a Utah court to 10 years to life in prison as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old first cousin.

He is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges for arranged marriages there.

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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is proclaiming victory at last week's NATO summit in Romania after securing allied reinforcements for Canadian troops in southern Afghanistan.

The French have apparently agreed to send in more troops, and the Poles have a few choppers to spare.

Any help wherever we can get it will no doubt come as a relief to our beleaguered Canadian forces fighting on the bloodiest front lines of the Afghan conflict, their casualty rates by far the highest of any NATO country with boots on the ground.

But hold the victory parade for either Harper or NATO.

Strip away the spin, and reality is the U.S. is coming to the rescue in a war that is increasingly difficult to disguise as anything but an American-led effort.

Truth is, most NATO countries have been dutifully serving the cause in Afghanistan only as long as they didn't have to do anything dangerous anywhere their troops might get blown up by roadside bombs, or shot by Taliban guns.

The Bucharest summit didn't change that.

Even the French, who supposedly answered Canada's call for help in the dangerous southern Kandahar region, have wimped out as usual and aren't actually going anywhere near the place and so win our award for "Loser of the Day."

Instead, French troops are being deployed to the less perilous eastern area of Afghanistan, supposedly to free up U.S. forces there to join the Canadian efforts in the south.

It's not as though the Americans are so short of manpower that they need to be spelled off by anyone. At last count, U.S. forces already account for well over 32,000 of the 44,000 soldiers from the several dozen NATO countries deployed in Afghanistan.

On top of that, another full expeditionary unit of 3,200 U.S. Marines is en route to Afghanistan to mount a major offensive over the next seven months, mainly in the south where Canadian troops are fighting.

It seems clear that the Harper and Bush administrations agreed months ago they would publicly try to push the European NATO countries into doing some of the heavy lifting in the southern Afghan battle zones.

Failing that, the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to keep Canada from withdrawing.

When Harper said he was confident a deal could be reached at Bucharest to meet Canada's needs, he likely wasn't talking about NATO. No sir, it was our Winners of the Day," the United States of America!

As was reported more than two months ago, even as John Manley's advisory group was releasing its January report recommending the reinforcements and equipment Canada would need to stay in Afghanistan, the U.S. military brass was in Ottawa arranging to provide it all.

Fact is, despite all the political talk of success in Bucharest last week, NATO isn't answering Canada's call, nor is France. The Yank's are. Period.

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Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com

Losers and Assholes

We normaly don't do this article till the weekend to give the Perspective research department some time to come up with some juicy tidbits............but THIS week?

It seems there are just TOO many of them and we are going to have to run a mid-week update just to stay on top of things.

Ready, O.K. First the "Asshole of the week!"

FROM NEW YORK — (No kids, it's not the David Letterman show!) Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the nationally known do-gooder who suffered a jaw-dropping fall from grace this week after being accused of frequenting a high-price call girl ring, announced his resignation today.

In a short appearance before reporters, Spitzer said he had always demanded others take responsibility for their actions.

"I cannot and will not ask no less of myself," he said. "For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor."

"For the past few days I have begun to atone for my private failings with my wife Silda, my children and my entire family. The remorse I feel will always be with me,"

Spitzer said. "I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the people's work."
Spitzer, 48, said he was "deeply sorry I did not live up to what was expected of me," and apologized to "every New Yorker."

And then we have your plain ordinary everyday losers who seems to breed faster in the spring for some reason.

1. A company trying to continue its five-year perfect safety record showed its workers a film aimed at encouraging the use of safety goggles on the job. According to Industrial Machinery News, the film's depiction of gory industrial accidents was so graphic that twenty-five workers suffered minor injuries in their rush to leave the screening room. Thirteen others fainted, and one man required seven stitches after he cut his head falling off a chair while watching the film.

2. The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.

3. A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain.

4. Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.

5. A convict broke out of jail in Washington D.C., then a few days later accompanied his girlfriend to her trial for robbery. At lunch, he went out for a sandwich. She needed to see him, and thus had him paged. Police officers recognized his name and arrested him as he returned to the courthouse in a car he had stolen over the lunch hour.

6. Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.

7. When two service station attendants in Ionia, Michigan, refused to hand over the cash to an intoxicated robber, the man threatened to call the police. They still refused, so the robber called the police and was arrested.

8. A Los Angeles man who later said he was "tired of walking," stole a steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until an officer stepped aboard and brought the vehicle to a stop.

9. A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise's car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore -- where a tree blew over and killed him.

AND PERHAPS THE BEST ONE OF ALL!!!!

10. Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh.

Each was guiding his car at a snail's pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together.

Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren't scratched.

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

WINNERS, LOSERS AND ASSHOLES!

Karzai urges more freedoms for women: Guest post by RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan women need the freedom to pursue more education and should not be forced into marriage, President Hamid Karzai told an audience of women during an International Women's Day ceremony today.

Karzai called on men and religious leaders to promote education for females, saying Afghanistan needed more female nurses and doctors. He also called for fewer childhood marriages, a common practice in Afghanistan's countryside.

(This makes Karzai our "Winner of the Day!")

"I call on all religious leaders to advise all the people to stop violence against women, to stop child marriages and forced marriages as well," Karzai told several hundred women gathered in a high school auditorium in Kabul.

Karzai also urged Afghan families to stop using young women as currency. Family disputes in Afghanistan — particularly in the more conservative countryside — are sometimes solved by one family giving a daughter to another family.

He called for an end to child marriages.

"How can a father accept with his heart to marry his 15-year-old child with a 60 year-old-man?" Karzai said. "Again, I call on the people, they shouldn't give their daughters for money, they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages."

In the southern city of Kandahar, several hundred women — most wearing the all-encompassing burqa that most women in Afghanistan wear — met at the Kandahar Women's Association headquarters.

Unfortunately, Afghan women have a long way to go and are still "Losers of the Day!"

Rona Tarin, the organization's director, noted the hardships that Afghan women face.

"We want to give our message to all the Western women," she said. "Afghan women are facing a lot of problems. Women should have a right to education. We want to work shoulder to shoulder with men."

Under the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, Afghan women could not leave the house without a male relative and were banned from going to school. Although millions of Afghan girls are now in class and women can again walk the streets by themselves, most women still wear a burqa and most do not enjoy the same rights as males.

This also make the misogynistic men of Afghanistan, especially the Taliban our "Assholes of the week," this week and every week until things change for the better!

Rovina Jan, a 35-year-old woman who participated in another Women's Day event in Kandahar, said she had to sneak out of the house to attend the program.

"A lot of women came down here without permission from their husbands, because we knew if we told the men why we wanted to leave the house, they wouldn't let us," she said.

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com