NewMexiKen

Tom Burka on the latest terror threat:

Citicorp employees collectively railed against the fact that the Bush Administration yesterday announced an “orange alert” for a threat to their building which, it turns out, was based upon documents that were three or four years old. Employees were angry because, they said, they should have been given the four years off while higher-ups “worked to counter the threat.”

“Do you know what I could have done with that time?’ said Sally Ackerman, who works in Accounts Receivable.

“Dude,” said Larry Hammerman, a 28-year-old filing clerk, “I coulda probably finished, like, playing the entire PlayStation 2 catalogue.”

Citicorp has a little known policy that employees may take “emergency leave” during a bomb threat. “And the way I see it is, this is like a bomb threat that has been goin’ on for like four damn years,” said Hammerman.

NewMexiKen prays these threats continue their role as straight lines.

NewMexiKen also remembers working at a couple of places that received serious bomb threats. It’s no fun when it’s serious, though on a nice day we did occasionally remark that the threatening call had come in over the internal phone lines.

A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains.

The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: “Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep”; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.

There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.

From The Atlantic:

Looking at the gambling boom years of the 1990s, when casino revenues more than tripled nationally, the researchers conclude that counties with casinos suffered individual bankruptcy rates more than double the rates in demographically similar counties without casinos. But the bankruptcy rate for businesses in these “casino counties” was 35 percent lower than in their betting-free counterparts.

Remember Bill Nevins, the Rio Rancho High School teacher who claimed he was fired for supporting free speech; specifically for helping organize a poetry club and because a student wrote an anti-Iraq, anti-Bush poem? NewMexiKen reported on the story in May. And then someone commenting here said maybe he was just not re-hired (which I guess is different than being fired).

Well, the Rio Rancho district settled with him for $205,000 according to The Albuquerque Tribune.

Gen. JC Christian, patriot has written Tom Ridge. Don’t miss it!

From The New York Times:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.