MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine police with bad teeth got something to grin about Monday when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (news - web sites)’s husband handed out free dentures to improve the confidence and public image of the national force.

Mike Arroyo’s “A New Smile for the Toothless” campaign originally focused on market vendors in Manila but was extended to police officers, who earn as little as $157 per month.

“This will boost their confidence,” said dentist Marilen Acuna Principe. “When you’re missing some teeth and you have to talk to people, then you tend to become embarrassed.”

Senate Democrats lashed out Friday against President Bush’s plan to add personal accounts to Social Security and accused his administration of improperly using the Social Security Administration to promote the plan.

Since the democrats are always bashing privatizing social security, why don’t they come up with a solution? I have not yet once heard a solution from democrats to fix the social security crisis.

Ok, this is ridiculous.

Porn star Jenna Jameson is now hawking her “moan tones.”

For $2.50 fans of the ubiquitous porno queen can choose from a variety of moans, grunts and lurid sexual noises all recorded by the blond bombshell.

They say, “sex sells.” I see it’s selling on cell phones too.

According to CNN, two men walked into a popular country store outside Atlanta and tried to hold up the place and fired shots. The two owners of the store, Bobby Doster and Gloria Turner, pulled out their pistols, opened fire and killed to two men.

The armed suspect and his partner were killed. The owners won’t be charged, according to local officials, because they were acting in self-defense.

“I just started shooting,” said Gloria Turner, 56. “I was trying to blow his brains out is what I was trying to do.”

“All hell broke loose,” she said. “I was trying to shoot and dial 911 at the same time.”

Both suspects took cover behind the store’s meat counter as the owners opened fire. Gloria Turner said she doesn’t know how many bullets were fired, or how many times the suspects were hit.

Police arrived about five minutes after receiving Gloria Turner’s call; the suspects died a short time later at a hospital.

This is a perfect example why bearing arms should be every law-abiding citizen’s right.

Imagine if the store went like this:

Two men walked into a popular country store outside Atlanta and tried to hold up the place and fired shots. The two owners of the store were shot and killed as one of them tried to call 911 for help. They had no guns to protect themselves at their place of business because state law prohibits gun ownership in private businesses.

According to John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, socialized medicine makes promises it cannot keep:

• Health care as a right: Not only do patients have to wait for care, but if they are the hundredth person waiting for an operation they are not entitled to the hundredth surgery.
• Better quality of care: Due to better access to technology, Americans enjoy two or more times as many procedures per capita — such as renal dialysis, coronary bypass, and coronary angioplasty — than their counterparts in Canada and Britain.
• Better efficiency: Among women diagnosed with breast cancer, only one-fifth die in the United States compared to one-third in France and Germany and almost one-half in Britain; similarly, Americans enjoy significantly better outcomes for prostate cancer.
• Equal access to health care: While minorities in the United States are underserved, this is also true for native populations in Canada; elderly patients are frequently discriminated against in socialized systems, which prefer to serve younger patients.

Goodman also says the American system is far from perfect.

The US court of Appeals has overturned a judge’s ruling, which dismissed a 2002 lawsuit blaming McDonalds for people becoming obese. These cases will now go back to trail. Trail lawyers are now trying to suck the last penny out of food companies and restaurants. Majority of people feel that these companies should not be sued and it is the responsibility of the individual to watch what they eat.

Trial lawyers, led by George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, are planning a wave of lawsuits trying to turn food companies and restaurants into their next cash cow. Banzhaf plans “to sue them and sue them and sue them.” Somewhere, he argues, “there is going to be a judge and a jury that will buy this, and once we get the first verdict … it will open the floodgates.”

Eighty-nine percent of Americans believe that fast-food restaurants shouldn’t have to pay for their customers’ lack of self-control, according to a July 2003 Gallup poll. A more recent survey reported that 74 percent of Americans rate these lawsuits at the strongest possible level of disapproval.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has produced a couple of ads mocking these money sucking lawyers. Click here to view them.

Here are some myths from a wide array of health, exercise and nutrition experts.

• Obesity is a disease
• Obesity kills 400,000 Americans a year
• Obesity costs the U.S. economy $117 billion per year
• 65 percent of Americans are overweight or obese
• Overeating is the primary cause of obesity
• Overweight individuals cannot be healthy
• Soda consumption causes childhood obesity

I don’t know how much of this is true or false, but I do know that overeating is not the primary cause of obesity. I have seen way too many slim/average people overeat and don’t gain weight and I have seen way too many obese people be on diets and exercise and don’t lose much weight.

And obesity being a disease, come on now.

As you guys all might know, I am pro-gun and I do feel that owning guns and having the right to carry a concealed gun (conceal carry weapons or CCW) can and will deter violence. There is a good article by Richard Munday that proves how gun ownership and carrying a conceal weapon truly deters violence. He shows how Britain long time ago was very loose with gun control and how the crime rate in Britain back then was extremely less than the crime rate of Britain now.

This article also shows that Florida new legislative trend in 1987, the “right-to-carry” permit reduced homicides in Florida. Other states followed this trend and a nation wide survey of the impact of the legislation was done by John Lott and David Mustard showed that the right-to-carry states seen an 8 percent reduction in murders, 7 percent reduction in aggravated assaults, and a 5 percent reduction in rapes.

Here are some important, must read excerpts taken from this article:

In a material sense, Britain today has much less of a “gun culture” than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge’s even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called “Saturday Night Specials”. Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter’s journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Irishman to carry a loaded revolver in the streets was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, KB 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by our Bill of Rights.

In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime. Such deterrent potential was indeed acknowledged in part in Britain’s first Firearms Act, which was introduced as an emergency measure in response to fears of a Bolshevik upheaval in 1920. Home Office guidance on the implementation of the Act recognised “good reason for having a revolver if a person lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars is essential”. The Home Office issued more restrictive guidance in 1937, but it was only in 1946 that the new Labour Home Secretary announced that self-defence would no longer generally be accepted as a good reason for acquiring a pistol (and as late as 1951 this reason was still being proffered in three-quarters of all applications for pistol licences, and upheld in the courts). Between 1946 and 1951, we might note, armed robbery, the most significant index of serious armed crime, averaged under two dozen incidents a year in London; today, that number is exceeded every week.

Restrictive “gun control” in Britain is a recent experiment, in which the progressive “toughening” of the regulation of legal gun ownership has been followed by an increasingly dramatic rise in violent armed crime. Eighty-four years after the legal availability of pistols was restricted to Firearm Certificate holders, and seven years after their private possession was generally prohibited, they still figure in 58 per cent of armed crimes. Home Office evidence to the Dunblane Inquiry prior to the handgun ban indicated that there was an annual average of just two incidents in which licensed pistols appeared in crime.

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the “murder capitals” of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since 1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace, but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction of “right-to-carry” permits for concealed firearms.

In a nationwide survey of the impact of the legislation, John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago found that by 1992, right-to-carry states had already seen an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes.

Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice observes that “firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993″, and it has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached, the bureau states, “the lowest level ever recorded”.

Now, how can you argue with these facts?

Senate Republicans are putting social security as their top legislative goal for 2005.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said at a news conference that S.1, the designation of the first Senate bill to be introduced in the new session, “has been reserved for what is probably the most important domestic legislation we will address in this Congress, and that is modernizing and strengthening the Social Security program.”

The bill, which the president has yet to send to Congress, is expected to include provisions for individuals to divert part of their payroll taxes that now go to Social Security into personal investment accounts.

Democrats said they would look at what Republicans have to offer but disputed the need for urgency to change a system that will be financially solvent for decades to come.

“This is no crisis, so why should we be lurching forward?” asked Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Amen to this bill. Sign me up ASAP. I am happy to hear that this issue is being addressed in full force for 2005. I still don’t understand how democrats think that social security is not in a crisis. I am absolutely positive that democrats wants social security to stay the way it is because they want to keep their hands in our pockets. Privatizing social security would cut their funds and keep their hands out of taxpayers’ pockets.

If you want to see some crazy, weird creatures from the abyss, check it out.

The beauty of sight…

The sun sets in Tuplamu beach in Takuapa, about 130 km north of the tsunami-hit Thai resort island of Phuket, January 22, 2005. REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

The Center for Immigration Studies shows the high cost of cheap labor. Based on Census Bureau data, their studies showed that illegal households created a net fiscal deficit at federal level of more than $10 billion in 2002. Here are the findings of their study:

• Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household.
• Among the largest costs are Medicaid ($2.5 billion); treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion); and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion).
• With nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services.
• On average, the costs that illegal households impose on federal coffers are less than half that of other households, but their tax payments are only one-fourth that of other households.
• Many of the costs associated with illegals are due to their American-born children, who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth. Thus, greater efforts at barring illegals from federal programs will not reduce costs because their citizen children can continue to access them.
• If illegal aliens were given amnesty and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual net fiscal deficit would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for a total net cost of $29 billion.
• Costs increase dramatically because unskilled immigrants with legal status — what most illegal aliens would become — can access government programs, but still tend to make very modest tax payments.
• Although legalization would increase average tax payments by 77 percent, average costs would rise by 118 percent.
• The fact that legal immigrants with few years of schooling are a large fiscal drain does not mean that legal immigrants overall are a net drain — many legal immigrants are highly skilled.
• The vast majority of illegals hold jobs. Thus the fiscal deficit they create for the federal government is not the result of an unwillingness to work.
• The results of this study are consistent with a 1997 study by the National Research Council, which also found that immigrants’ education level is a key determinant of their fiscal impact.

As you might know, Arizona is fighting against illegal immigration cost. Here are some of the problems and costs they are facing.

Every day as many as 4,000 illegal immigrants cross the border into Arizona, and you pay for it in ways you might not even think.

At Senator Jon Kyle’s request, his organization calculated the cost to Arizona hospitals for treating illegal immigrants at 31 million dollars in just one year.

And Rivers said the expense could be much more.

She demands legal documentation, but she thinks many workers can easily get fake documents — just as they would do to apply for Welfare.

And according to the Center for Immigration Studies, Welfare payments, including food stamps to Illegal immigrants in Arizona cost us $4,698,000 in 2001.

There’s another expense you’ve probably never imagined.

Tucked behind a familiar stretch of I-10, and right across from one of Phoenix’s most popular resorts is an indigent burial ground.

Many of the grave sites are marked John Doe or Jane Doe.

They’re likely illegal immigrants who died shortly after coming to the United States.

In the last five years Maricopa County alone has buried 100 unidentified people at an estimated cost of more than $197,000. That’s enough to pay the five year salary for any one of the more than twenty Maricopa County jobs now open.

$31 million dollars in hospital cost in one year is VERY expensive. I am happy to see someone is trying to do something about this issue.

Three 11-year-old boys and one 10-year-old girl tried to hijack their school bus near Punxsutawney.

State police said the four hatched the plot yesterday. Just after 8 a.m. today, one of the boys pulled a knife from a book bag and held it near another student. He demanded driver Janet McQuown, 52, stop and get off the bus.

A police new release says she pulled over along Pine Tree Church Road in Oliver Township and “the knife was removed from the juvenile’s possession.” It doesn’t say how.

The bus, with the hijackers and about 40 other children, arrived safely at Mapleview Elementary, where the unnamed offenders were taken into custody.

Two were turned over to juvenile authorities and two went home with their parents.

The news release did not immediately say what the hijackers intended to do with the bus.

Wow, what are these kids coming to these days.

If someone tell you, “you don’t know Jack Shit,” tell them yes I do.

Here is a funny clip on President Bush’s second term. Enjoy!!!

It seems like the left are extremely furious because of President Bush’s second term.

The US Democrats vowed to fight “extreme” Republican policies as George W Bush saw in his second term as president with a lavish inauguration.

Despite their poor showing in last November’s elections, they said they would refuse to be sidelined.

They have demanded a full debate in Congress before approving Condoleezza Rice as the new secretary of state.

But some Democrats said they were heartened by the conciliatory tone of Mr Bush’s inaugural speech.

“Today… Republicans are hoping that we’ll fade into the background,” he wrote. “They’re hoping that for the next two years we’ll sit on the sidelines, and let them ram their agenda through.

“But we Democrats will never step aside. While Bush tries to build his legacy on a series of attacks against working families, the middle class and seniors, Democrats will be there to stand up.”

But correspondents say that resolve may be tested domestically in the coming days after the Democrats delayed the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state until next week.

They said they wanted more time so they could debate Iraq and other foreign policy issues.

What’s up with these democrats always picking on Condoleezza Rice? Well, I guess I can understand their frustration. If it was the other way around and the majority of the government was democrats and liberals, I’ll be pissed too. I can only image them applying their agenda: high taxes, abused social programs, affirmative action… Yuk!!! Well liberals, it looks like you are on the sidelines.

“The biggest difference seems to get the least attention: With private accounts, money is invested in the economy, creating additional wealth, from which pensions can be paid. With Social Security, the money is spent as soon as it gets to Washington.” –Thomas Sowell

Star Parker introduces a statistical analysis on affirmative action by a law professor from UCLA by the name of Richard Sander. Please note that this law professor is a long-time liberal and advocate of race-conscious public policy.

This statistical analysis goes as follows:

The study, “A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” argues, using statistical analysis, that although total elimination of racial preferences would cause a 14 percent reduction in the number of blacks accepted to law school, there would be an 8 percent increase in the number of blacks actually becoming lawyers. The reason for this, according to the analysis in the 100-plus page study, is because of the improvement in grades, graduation rates, and rates in passing bar examinations that would result from color-blind admissions policies.

It would be good to see the validity of this statistical analysis. But I know there will be many pro-affirmative-action-bashing people out there off the top saying his data is wrong. I just hope his data have some truth to it, because I feel that it’s time for affirmative action to go.

Could terrorism be an excuse to ban guns? Well it seems like many political leaders are using terrorism as an excuse to ban guns.

Last year it was the semi-automatic assault-weapons ban before it expired. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) claimed the ban was “the most effective measures against terrorism that we have.” Of course, nothing happened when the law expired last year. There was nothing unique about the guns that are banned under the law. Though the phrase “assault weapon” conjures up images of the rapid-fire machine guns used by the military, in fact the weapons covered by the ban function the same as any semiautomatic hunting rifle; they fire the exact same bullets with the exact same rapidity and produce the exact same damage as hunting rifles.

Back in the mid-1980s it was the hysteria over “plastic guns” when the Austrian company Glock began exporting pistols to the United States. Labeled as “terrorist specials” by the press, fear spread that their plastic frame and grip would make them invisible to metal detectors. Glocks are now common and there are good reasons they are one of the favorite pistols of American police officers. The “plastic gun” ban did not ban anything since it is not possible to actually build a working plastic gun.

Now it is the 50-caliber rifles’ turn, especially with California outlawing the sale of these guns since the beginning of the year. For years gun-control groups have tried to ban 50-caliber rifles because of fears that criminals could use them. Such bans have not been passed these guns were simply not suited for crime. Fifty-caliber rifles are big, heavy guns, weighing at least 30 pounds and using a 29-inch barrel. They are also relatively expensive. Models that hold one bullet at a time run nearly $3,000. Semi-automatic versions cost around $7,000. Wealthy target shooters and big-game hunters, not criminals, purchase them. The bottom line is that only one person in the U.S. has been killed with such a gun, and even that one alleged case is debated.

Fighting terrorism is a noble cause, but the laws we pass must have some real link to solving the problem. Absent that, many will think that 60 Minutes and gun-control groups are simply using terrorism as an excuse to promote rules that he previously pushed. Making it difficult for law-abiding Americans to own guns should not be the only accomplishment of new laws.

I just wish some of these liberals sit and realize that banning guns is not a solution. It does not deter violence and will not stop terrorism. All these liberals are doing is preventing law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves. And I am very disappointed that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported the ban for the 50-caliber rifles. This ban is pointless.

Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice refuses to give a timetable on the US exit strategy from Iraq. She says that the exit strategy is directly proportional to Iraq’s ability to defend itself against terrorists after the election. Condoleezza also told the Senate that spreading democracy through the Middle East remains a top administration foreign-policy objective and that right now is a good moment of opportunity for Palestine following the death of Yasser Arafat.

This article also goes to show credit given to Condoleezza Rice.

Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., opened Tuesday’s hearing with warm words about Rice, who has served a mostly behind-the-scenes role at the White House for the past four years. He called her “highly qualified” for the post.

Biden also praised Rice, but noted that “relations with many of our oldest friends are quite frankly scraping the bottom right now.”

Rice has a sparkling resume full of firsts — including being the first woman to serve as White House national security adviser.