Bharat Rakshak

Two and a half million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[–]JulietOscarFoxtrot 13 points 4 hours ago

Generally when you turn yourself in for a failure to appear, you're only in jail until the judge reviews your case and sets a court date. I've done it a few times for traffic tickets->failure to appear. You really just sit in the drunk tank for a few hours. The food's terrible though. Definitely eat before you go in if you plan on sitting out your warrants.

[–]tajeadreams 22 points 3 hours ago

Don't go in on a Friday. My buddy went in on a Friday for a failure to appear and ended up having a Monday court date so he was stuck in county all weekend.

[–]mistersippycups 16 points 2 hours ago

Oh god, don't go on a Friday and go as early as you can that way you might get on the docket for that day instead of the next day.

Source: been there done that. A couple of times . . .

[–]b0wz3rx 10 points 2 hours ago

Fugg that. You go in late and sleep til morning get credit for time served. (If the county allows it)

[–]mistersippycups 2 points 2 hours ago

good point

[–]Fuhgetabotit [score hidden] an hour ago

serious LPT there

[–]platypus_bear [score hidden] 37 minutes ago

I would think that would really only apply if it's something you're actually looking at having to serve some jail time for

ramana wrote:Very good link to understand US foreign policy

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/

Economic liberalization has also led to a vast increase in corruption, which has now become all-pervasive. The BJP is no different from other parties in this regard. Rent seeking is now common among Indian politicians and bureaucrats, who enrich themselves at public expense. This is unlikely to change under a BJP regime. Corruption often prevents implementation of economic programs, as the funds are siphoned off into private hands and not invested in their stated projects meant to benefit the public.

Criminality among Indian politicians is also increasingly common. 17% of India’s current MP candidates face criminal charges, including rape and murder. This is a long-term trend in Indian politics. The Indian electorate seems indifferent, as Indian politicians are elected to office even after their criminality is made public.

The governance problems are exasperated by the low and declining quality of government officials and politicians. Many Indian MP’s are elected because of nepotism and celebrity and do not take an active interest in governance.

These structural problems will hamper the implementation of Modi’s economic policies. He has made many promises that will be very difficult to keep. Over the course of time, the high expectations of the Indian population will become increasingly disappointed and public resentment will mount. The Indian “anti-incumbency” factor will then begin to kick in.

The Congress-led opposition will be in disarray for some time. This will provide Modi with a long honeymoon period, but structural and ideological shortcomings will prevent him from taking advantage of this opportunity. There will eventually be a political shift. The Congress and its allies will start to form a more cohesive opposition that will oppose Modi wherever possible. He could well see his chances of winning second term wilt away

a woman in the United States allegedly stabbed a pregnant woman in the stomach and removed her unborn baby from the womb when the expectant mother had gone to her house to buy baby clothes advertised online.

UlanBatori wrote:No comment on what memories this brings. Where is Arundhoti Whineroy I wonder

a woman in the United States allegedly stabbed a pregnant woman in the stomach and removed her unborn baby from the womb when the expectant mother had gone to her house to buy baby clothes advertised online.

The investigation involves the FBI, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the United States Attorney's office. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is also involved.

The Business Plot was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler as leader of that organization. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims.[1] In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible.[2] No one was prosecuted.

At the time of the incidents, news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax".[3] While historians have questioned whether or not a coup was actually close to execution, most agree that some sort of "wild scheme" was contemplated and discussed

Rony wrote:Hindu prayer opens Senate; seven senators stay outside chamber

More juicy details about the maturity for the civilized senator and his constituents who support him

Hindu prayer draws fire from North Idaho senator

Sen. Steve Vick, R-Dalton Gardens, says he'll walk out if a Hindu prayer opens the Idaho Senate on Tuesday morning.

"They have a caste system," Vick said. "They worship cows."

He acknowledged that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows any kind of prayer, but said he thinks the Hindu one shouldn't be allowed to open the Senate, as the United States was "built on the Judeo-Christian not only religion but work ethic, and I don't want to see that undermined."

"I'm very supportive of the way this country was built, and I don't want us to move away from it," Vick said.

Vick took to social media over the weekend to vent his displeasure about the plan for a Hindu prayer in the Senate, telling his Facebook followers, "I am working to get it stopped."

He told The Spokesman-Review on Monday he's had strong support from his North Idaho constituents for his stand.

"They've all been supportive of the effort to not allow the Hindu prayer in the Senate chambers," he said.

"It goes back to my concern about the way this country was built, if you compare it to a country that was built on the Hindu faith," Vick said.

He said allowing the prayer could "send a message we're not happy with the way America is."

To be fair, if you read the comments section, many Americans (assuming they are Americans of non-Hindu background) are also embarrassed about what these senators did.

Rony wrote:Christine Fair: Pakistan, the Taliban and Regional Security

Mark Twain wrote: We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

Christian Appy, an accomplished historian of the Vietnam period, is a model case of what can be done with clear sight and commitment. Appy, who lectures at the University of Massachusetts, takes as his topic not Vietnam per se. To put it precisely, his books concern the consequences of the war for the American consciousness—or, as he put it in the interview that follows, “the broad question of the war’s impact on us as a culture and a people.”

Beyond Reagan’s famous faceoff with the “evil empire,” Star Wars and all the rest, for instance, he licensed Americans to avoid the truth of defeat and recast themselves as the Vietnam war’s victims, so entering upon the hyperpatriotism that has since prevailed. Appy lights the long, strange trip.“Reagan gave Americans psychological permission to forget or mangle history to feel better about the country,”

As I read “American Reckoning” it seemed to be four things, and I moved from one to another and then back and forth between them. It is a psychiatric study of Americans after Vietnam, and then an attack on exceptionalism, and then a treatise on the dynamic between memory and forgetting, and then a chronology of what amounts to a national neurosis born of a process of denial that began on April 25, 1975, the date I assign the fall of Saigon—or its rise, as I think of it. How do you describe the book?

It’s all of those things, but, in addition, the ambition was an act of recovery. Historical recovery. I was most interested in trying to recover what I would call the great awakening of the 1960s. Not a religious awakening but a political awakening, which challenged every kind of authority, including the war-making in Vietnam—which in my mind, even as a young kid, struck me as very positive. I thought it would change us forever for the better, naively. The other recovery I thought we needed because of the historical post-Vietnam amnesia that you alluded to is trying to recover a sense of that—now we are talking about religion—deep, fervent faith in American exceptionalism, the idea that we’re always a force for good in the world, a beacon, a supporter of democracy, freedom and human rights. Of course, that really explodes in the ’60s, this fundamental challenge to the [exceptionalist] concept. It struck me that it’s not just sort of left-wingers who think it was broken apart by Vietnam. I quote Henry Kissinger early in the book as mourning the death [of the idea].

Henry says remarkable things sometimes, doesn’t he?

He does. This was the big casualty we’re most worried about. Not the 3 million Vietnamese or 58,000 Americans. So that, along with what you’re saying, the book’s an effort to document and assess the ways Vietnam came gradually into the American consciousness after World War II and how our views changed quite radically through the ’60s, and then how the memory of the war gets repackaged in a way that’s much more palatable for American sensibilities.

But the conquest of the continent, displacement of native people, an aggressive war against Mexico, the history of slavery, the counter-insurgency in the Philippines and many other moments in our history—all of it evoked criticism and resistance. There has been a narrative of dissent throughout our history. But nothing quite challenged the [exceptionalist] idea as the ’60s did in the Vietnam context.

But when you ask Americans still if it is the greatest country on earth, you get a big majority saying yes. I think people want us to be exceptional. I think people want us to live up to our ideals, so it’s not necessarily just a kind of careful objective or empirical analysis of things as they are but what people want them to be.

I want to talk about memory and forgetting. You mention the great forgetting, and we are the world’s champion forgetters at this point. How do you see that? What do you see as the causes and, more important, the consequences?

One of the things historians of memory always say is that remembering is also forgetting because when you remember one thing you are displacing or forgetting another. So we, in the decades after 1975, found a way to remember the war that displaced many of its most troubling aspects and substituted one kind of mourning for another.

There was a kind of national mourning, but it was all about what came to be known as “an American tragedy.” This allowed us to stop thinking so much about what we actually did in and to Vietnam and to lick our own wounds and think about the ways that it had divided us—all those things people like Ronald Reagan said the war had hurt, if not destroyed: our natural pride, our international prestige and most of all our power.

There was a kind of reconstruction project, and much of it took place at the level of memory and public discourse about the past. It’s amazing how successful that project was. Of course, memory can’t be defeated or completely erased. There is a legacy of dissent that continues in these decades. There is certainly an incredible proliferation of literature, much of it expressing dissenting viewpoints, but at the broad level of collective or public memory, this epic event gets reduced to a tiny set of images. Most of them focused on the American combat soldier. Some small unit of Americans walking through very menacing and dangerous jungle environments and endangered, physically and psychologically. That’s a way of worrying about what the war did to us, particularly to our own soldiers. I still have students who grew up persuaded that maybe the most shameful thing about the war was the way we treated returning veterans. That’s a classic example of how we transformed [Vietnam] into an American tragedy.

can you read, power belongs to the east, in case you did not know, india, china theres a balance in power, what are you going to do when your little cracker kids have to speak mandarin and hindu, stop sleeping with your sister and learn to read if you could you%u2019d know there no such word as n*****, its made up, like your birth certificate

The former Pennsylvania senator — who asserted last year that the separation of church and state is a communist idea – went on to argue that the left’s political survival depends on secularism.

“The left cannot be successful in a country of God-given rights,” Santorum said. “It can’t. Because they want to be the purveyor of rights, and if God is the purveyor of rights, then they lose. We have an obligation to educate, to form, within our churches to preach, within our families to educate, and to fight within our schools. Why are Bibles no longer in public schools? Don’t give me the Supreme Court. The reason Bibles are no longer in the public schools is because we let them take them out of the public schools.”

The Supreme Court ruling by which Santorum is wholly unperturbed is Abington School District v. Schempp, a 1963 case in which the Court ruled eight to one against public school Bible readings. Writing the Court’s majority opinion, Justice Tom C. Clark noted that such readings “require religious exercises,” in violation of the First Amendment. Clark proceeded to conclude that study of the Bible and religion was permissible if such topics were “presented objectively as part of a secular program of education,” although the context of Santorum’s comments make clear that that’s not what the former senator has in mind.

The Baltimore mayor's office said earlier Tuesday there were 144 vehicle fires, 15 structure fires and nearly 200 arrests in the unrest Monday. At least 20 officers were hurt, including six who were hospitalized and one in critical condition after a building fire, police said. Baltimore was under a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew beginning Tuesday, and all Baltimore public schools were closed as athletes with area ties, including Ray Lewis and Carmelo Anthony, pleaded for an end to the unrest.

UlanBatori wrote:Dang! They played that baseball match with only the players and the umpires present. At least the kept the violence from spreading from the field into the city.

a series of vitriolic tweets Wednesday by the outspoken mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, who blasted Harf in terms many view as sexist during a rant about the Obama administration's handling of the Baltimore protests.
In one of many such tweets, he wrote, "You were saying the Turkish police is using disproportionate force; where are you now, dumb blonde?"

Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, wrote in February that Harf's glasses are "the smartest thing about her."

Around the same time, the National Review referred to Harf and her then-colleague Jen Psaki as "the hapless PR duo" and "chuckleheaded cheerleaders."

While Harf turned down the opportunity to respond to Gokcek's characterization of her this week, she was quick to defend Psaki after Fox News' Bill O'Reilly said the former spokeswoman "looks way out of her depth" and "doesn't look like she has the gravitas for the job."

Harf took O'Reilly on via Twitter, saying ".@statedeptspox explains foreign policy w/ intelligence & class. Too bad we can't say the same about @oreillyfactor: http://bit.ly/WfVr6v"

Bass also raised Gokcek's tweets with Turkish officials, as did Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, herself a former State Department spokeswoman, according to State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke.

How DARE he call HER a dumb blonde WHEN I AM HERE? My hair not good enough? Duh!

What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts
English | May 17, 2013 | ISBN: 0226923118, 0226923096 | 368 Pages |

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.