A1A South

Friday afternoon after work, I was wandering around slowly peering at my roosters, reaching out occasionally to catch a rooster and look carefully at his color and conformation. I need to add a couple roosters to one of my chickenhouses, so I was looking over the roosters that are on death row, awaiting their transformation into their highest and best use which is chicken and dumplings. I heard shouting off in the distance. I looked towards the gate. SwampMan was attempting to communicate with me, but was being drowned out by the chickens squawking in alarm. (He doesn’t like chickens, and the feeling is mutual.) I started ambling over in his direction. After all, the temp was around 70 degrees, it was an absolutely beautiful day, and it was Friday! Yeehaa! I was in no hurry.

“Say what”, I asked lazily, as I got closer.

“I SAID, I’ll give you $500 if you can be ready to leave in 5 minutes. I want to go to Ricco’s in Callahan before the Friday night crowd arrives!”

Well, okay, then! I dropped the feed buckets, put on shoes without chickenshit on them, and hopped in the truck. While having an excellent dinner would have been motivation enough for me, I have to confess that I collected the $500, too. After all, I was ready in 5 minutes. While it may not be worth it to ME to be ready to go in 5 minutes, it obviously was to him, and who am I to complain about what price he wants to place on it?

*sigh* I wish that I could report that I was going to use it (unexpected windfall) for something that would broaden my horizons instead of my blue jeans. Unfortunately I’m just going to save it to pay for property taxes. Or buy Christmas presents with.

Property taxes or Christmas presents…..hmmmmmm.

One of my young ewes has been having difficulty breathing for over a week. I initially thought “AHA! Pastuerella pneumonia!” because sheep acquire it when they are under stress. Stressors include changes in weather (check!) or breeding season (check!). Soooo, I treated with antibiotics for 48 hours (no change), changed antibiotics for 24 hours (no change), and then a third antibiotic (no change). It sounded to me as though the difficulty with breathing was from occluded nasal passages (D’OH)! Another cause of difficulty breathing is bluetongue virus. The only treatment is the passage of time.

Clinical signs of bluetongue in sheep include:
:: Eye and nasal discharges;
:: Drooling as a result of ulcerations in the mouth;
:: High body temperature;
:: Swelling of the mouth, head and neck;
:: Lameness;
:: Haemorrhages into or under the skin;
:: Inflammation at the junction of the skin and the horn of the foot – the coronary band;
:: Respiratory problems – difficulty with breathing and nasal discharge.

A blue tongue is rarely a clinical sign of infection.

Defra says deaths of sheep in a flock may reach as high as 70%. Animals that survive the disease can lose condition with a reduction in meat and wool production.

I hadn’t noticed any swollen head, but a couple days before she developed breathing difficulties, her ears were swollen. While her head now looked normal on the outside, on the inside she was having significant problems.

Today, her breathing problems were eased but today, while I was at work, she developed another problem. Her right eye has swollen so much that it protruded from the socket and the ewe, in great pain, apparently rubbed it against trees and popped it. Erg.

*sigh* Well, bluetongue virus is endemic here so, if a sheep is badly affected by it, I don’t want his/her genes in the flock. Normally. However, my flock was so reduced by dog attack on the pregnant ewes a few years ago that if this ewe survives, I need her in the flock. I haven’t ever had anything like a 70% mortality rate from bluetongue. I might go years before losing a sheep from the virus.

In between medicating the sheep, I was trying to transfer pullets to the newly completed chicken house for fear that they’d be blown away/drowned if left on pasture.

Heh. My little grandsons were here this weekend, and I still haven’t gotten all the toys picked up yet! I thought that they were going to be here tomorrow while school is out, but they won’t be. Guess I can finish picking up those toys tomorrow.

Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

Uh, earth to Congress: There is no way in hell that most American families will be able to afford that. I propose that we immediately confiscate the wealth/property of all Congressional members in order to assist us to pay for our health care. After all, they’re very interested in the poor, so I propose that they become the poor. No fair keeping that cushy Congressional insurance, either. That should be nationalized as well.

/And Kennedy should have been in a hospice without a doctor, as the Kennedy Memorial Health Care/Giant Fuck You America Plan will require of the rest of us.

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who’s proposed a massive overhaul of the nation’s banks. “This is fraud and should be prosecuted.”

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman’s maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

“It would look much more damaging,” Coffee said, “if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless.”

Long prison terms would appear to be called for for those that are now at the helm as well as for those former executives that are currently infesting our government. What are the odds that that will happen? They’ve destroyed more wealth than Bernie Madoff.

I’ve laid off the exercise for a couple of years since my bad case of plantar fasciitis brought on by, wait for it, too much exercise. So, I took a personal defense course that involved lots of moving, lunging, up and down, and dropping people. No problem, right? After all, I was the oldest and heaviest person there and could not admit that I couldn’t keep up with the younger, skinnier people. So I did. Take THAT, scrawny person!

I have pain everywhere. My bruises have bruises. I got a hepatitis shot today as well, so my right shoulder feels like a cow kicked it, and it wasn’t one of those happy California cows, either.

I think I’ll go ahead and head to bed. I dunno why because I think I’m too tired and sore to sleep. I’ll probably just toss, turn, and groan a lot, thereby annoying SwampMan who is already asleep. Maybe I better stick to the La-Z-Boy or couch tonight.

If I stayed in the den, I won’t have to actually ambulate. My legs are telling me that I better just get a (very) tall bucket because (a) they’re not going to be able to carry me to the bathroom, and (b) good luck bending my knees if I should happen to stagger in there.

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — Clay County authorities report that the body of a small child was found in a landfill near Folkston, Ga., where Orange Park’s garbage is dumped.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed later Wednesday the body is that of a girl. Investigators said an autopsy will be performed Thursday morning in Savannah, Ga.

“We hope and pray that it’s not the body of Somer (Thompson), but the garbage that was in that area was collected from Orange Park,” Beseler said.

Seven-year-old Somer Thompson disappeared while walking home from school Monday afternoon. A massive search of Orange Park has been under way since Monday evening.

Clay County Sheriff Rick Beseler announced at a news conference late Wednesday afternoon that the body of a child had been found at a landfill near Folkston, Ga.

Clay County detectives found the body about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday at a the Chesser Island Landfill in Charlton County. Sgt. Dan Mahla said the scene at the landfill has been contained, and evidence technicians will process the scene as much as possible overnight.

The FBI, GBI and the Charlton County Sheriff’s Office are all at the landfill investigating.

“This was just a hunch — a standard investigative practice — and discovered what we feared we were going to find,” Beseler said. “Everyone in Clay County, everyone in Florida grieves for this family right now.”

Beseler announced the grim news at an afternoon news conference that was delayed for about 20 minutes because of a “major development.”

Gov. Charlie Crist was on hand hoping to rally efforts to find Somer and the Justice Coalition was set to announce a $30,000 reward for Somer’s safe return.

Instead, that reward will be for information for the capture and conviction of whoever is responsible for putting the body of the child in the trash.

Sheriff Rick Beseler said the garbage dumped in this southeast Georgia landfill where investigators found the body of a girl arrived Tuesday afternoon.

“Everybody’s just terribly, terribly sorry and your heart goes to the family,” Crist said.

Beseler said Dumpsters in the area are emptied on Tuesdays, and that particular garbage investigators were searching was dropped off Tuesday afternoon.

“Tuesday morning, one of my detectives, Bruce Owens, came forward and said, ‘You know, I think it’d be a good idea to follow those garbage trucks and let’s look at the garbage on the front end rather than waiting and maybe later on trying to go and uncover something,’ which was a stroke of genius,” Beseler said. “It was a precautionary thing. We didn’t have any idea at that time that this would come about. But it was just a really good move.”

State Attorney Angela Corey arrived in Orange Park late Wednesday saying she was there to assist the sheriff and the other law enforcement agencies working on the case.

“It’s always a tragedy when we lose a citizen,” Corey said. “It is especially so with someone who’s a little angel like Somer. It just elevates everything that we do to a new level.”

For those unfamiliar with the story, she was a darling dimpled little girl who got in an argument with another child (some reports say her twin brother) on the way home from school, and when told to stop by her sister, she ran ahead of the group. She was abducted/snatched somewhere in the mile-long walk from home. Seventy five sex offenders that lived in a 5-mile area were interviewed.

I would think that it was somebody familiar with the neighborhood, probably somebody she knew.

Whoever did it will be sentenced to death, but that isn’t going to be any consolation to the bereaved family. Personally, I would prefer all pedophiles be put to death.

Just got word this evening that a woman in her 20s that formerly lived in our town is in the ICU with double pneumonia and had a heart attack during the C-section.

The baby is doing fine. The mother is extremely ill.

I feel stunned. It is hard to believe that this young woman happily anticipating the birth of her second child could become so ill so suddenly.

For me, it boils down to this: Do I want to entrust the decisions for my health care to some nameless bureaucrat that will get incentives for saving money, or to me? Who do I think will make better decisions regarding my life, me or a government employee who cannot be sued if he/she makes a decision that will end my life?

If the government wants to “save money” on my retirement and health care, they can just send me all the money they’ve forcibly deducted from my paychecks thus far (for my future well-being, of course), and I’ll invest those funds for myself and get a helluva insurance policy from a private company. Oh, wait, I already have one because I’m working in a job I’m not particularly fond of because of the insurance benefits. If I blow my retirement funds by investing in Vegas, well, I’ll be a Walmart greeter. My decision, my money, my consequences.

KABUL — Bomb attacks have killed three more US troops in Afghanistan, the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force said Saturday.

“Two US service members were killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in eastern Afghanistan October 16, and one US service member was killed in an IED attack in southern Afghanistan on the same day,” it said.

It gave no further details.

Homemade IEDs, often buried on roadsides, have become the scourge of the eight-year war against Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, where 100,000 foreign troops are under US and NATO command.

Western leaders have said IEDs account for a growing proportion of foreign soldiers’ deaths, already above 400 so far this year, with more than half of them Americans.

During the Bush administration, this news would have been promulgated by headline news stories screeching about “grim milestones” and national news coverage. Now, the Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winner-in-Chief dithers and makes empty speeches, and the news anchors ignore the deaths instead of getting all teary eyed over their noble sacrifice.