Memorial Day – from these honored dead
- That we may be free.
Archive for May, 2010
May 31, 2010
What was Memorial Day originally called
- What’s the Answer?
Mrs. Figgins Trivia Question:
Question:
What was Memorial Day originally called?
A: Remembrance Day
B: Poppy day
C: Decoration Day
D: Memorial Day
Answer:
Memorial Day is celebrated in the U.S on the final Monday in the month of May. It used to be called Decoration Day. It is a day to remember those who died while serving in the military.
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Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
- What’s the Answer?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio at it again!
- Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Dear Mrs. Figgins:
I thought your readers might enjoy reading this. Please pass this on.
“You all remember Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona , who painted the jail cells pink and made the inmates wear pink prison garb. Well………. SHERIFF JOE IS AT IT AGAIN!
Oh, there’s MUCH more to know about Sheriff Joe!
Maricopa County was spending approx. $18 million dollars a year on stray animals, like cats and dogs.. Sheriff Joe offered to take the department over, and the County Supervisors said okay.
The animal shelters are now all staffed and operated by prisoners. They feed and care for the strays. Every animal in his care is taken out and walked twice daily. He now has prisoners who are experts in animal nutrition and behavior. They give great classes for anyone who’d like to adopt an animal. He has literally taken stray dogs off the street, given them to the care of prisoners, and had them place in dog shows.
The best part? His budget for the entire department is now under $3 million. Teresa and I adopted a Weimaraner from a Maricopa County shelter two years ago. He was neutered, and current on all shots, in great health, and even had a microchip inserted the day we got him. Cost us $78.
The prisoners get the benefit of about $0.28 an hour for working, but most would work for free, just to be out of their cells for the day. Most of his budget is for utilities, building maintenance, etc. He pays the prisoners out of the fees collected for adopted animals.
I have long wondered when the rest of the country would take a look at the way he runs the jail system, and copy some of his ideas. He has a huge farm, donated to the county years ago, where inmates can work, and they grow most of their own fresh vegetables and food, doing all the work and harvesting by hand.
He has a pretty good sized hog farm, which provides meat, and fertilizer. It fertilizes the Christmas tree nursery, where prisoners work, and you can buy a living Christmas tree for $6 – $8 for the Holidays, and plant it later. We have six trees in our yard from the Prison.
Yup, he was reelected last year with 83% of the vote.
Now he’s in trouble with the ACLU again. He painted all his buses and vehicles with a mural that has a special hotline phone number painted on it, where you can call and report suspected illegal aliens. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wasn’t doing enough in his eyes, so he had 40 deputies trained specifically for enforcing immigration laws, started up his hotline, and bought 4 new buses just for hauling folks back to the border. He’s kind of a ‘Git-R Dun’ kind of Sheriff.
TO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO
HE IS THE MARICOPA, ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF
AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER
THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:
Sheriff Joe Arpaio (In Arizona ) who created the ‘ Tent City Jail’:
He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them.
He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights, cut off all but ‘G’ movies.
He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects.
Then He Started Chain Gangs For Women So He Wouldn’t Get Sued For Discrimination.
He took away cable TV Until he found out there was A Federal Court Order that Required Cable TV For Jails So He Hooked Up The Cable TV Again . Only Let In The Disney Channel and The Weather Channel.
When asked why the weather channel, He Replied, So They Will Know How Hot It’s Gonna Be While They Are Working ON My Chain Gangs.
He Cut Off Coffee Since It Has Zero Nutritional Value.
When the inmates complained, he told them, ‘This Isn’t The Ritz/Carlton…… If You Don’t Like It, Don’t Come Back.’
More On The Arizona Sheriff:
With Temperatures Being Even Hotter Than Usual In Phoenix (116 Degrees Just Set A New Record), the Associated Press Reports:
About 2,000 Inmates Living In A Barbed-Wire-Surrounded Tent Encampment At The Maricopa County Jail Have Been Given Permission To Strip Down To Their Government-Issued Pink Boxer Shorts.
On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 Degrees Inside The Week Before.
Many Were Also Swathed In Wet, Pink Towels As Sweat Collected On Their Chests And Dripped Down To Their PINK SOCKS.
‘It Feels Like We Are In A Furnace,’ Said James Zanzot, An Inmate Who Has Lived In The TENTS for 1 year. ‘It’s Inhumane.’
Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic.. He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates: ‘It’s 120 Degrees In Iraq And Our Soldiers Are Living In Tents Too, And They Have To Wear Full Battle Gear,
But They Didn’t Commit Any Crimes, So Shut Your Mouths!’
Way To Go, Sheriff!
Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for their crimes – not live in luxury until it’s time for their parole, only to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on taxpayers money and enjoy things taxpayers can’t afford to have for themselves.”
Jerry, Arizona
Dear Jerry:
Thank You for sharing this article on Sheriff Arpaio.
He is a great American. May GOD keep him safe.
Mrs. Figgins
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
May 30, 2010
Baby brings changes
- Changes
- Changes
Dear Mrs. Figgins:
My wife and I are very happy parents of 18 month old beautiful little boy.
I feel things different. We love one to the other but life has been changed much by this 30 lb energy bundle.
I don’t complaining and I put one feet in front of the other.
Ralph, Munich
Dear Ralph:
When you have a baby emotional fireworks happen. Then the dust settles and everything is different from what it was before. Yes Ralph, different.
Along the way, with GOD’S help, our commitment to our spouse and good parenting, we realize how blessed we truly are.
Mrs. Figgins
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
May 29, 2010
“Oklahoma is OK
An update from Oklahoma :
Guess what………. Oklahoma did it anyway..
Oklahoma recently passed a law in the state to incarcerate all illegal immigrants, and ship them back to where they came from unless they want to get a green card and become an American citizen. They all scattered. HB 1804. Hope we didn’t send any of them to your state This was against the advice of the Federal Government, and the ACLU, they said it would be a mistake.
Guess what…….. Oklahoma did it anyway.
Just this month, the state has voted and passed a law that ALL driver’s license exams will be printed in English, and only English, and no other language. They have been called racist for doing this, but the fact is that ALL of the road signs are in English only. If you want to drive in Oklahoma , you must read and write English. Really simple.
Guess what….who cares… Oklahoma is doing it anyway.
Oklahoma – their way!
- OKLAHOMA
Dear Mrs. Figgins:
If you can please give Oklahoma a shout-out.
“Oklahoma is OK
Three cheers for a state that has the good sense to do what all of us just talk about. Good for them. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Oregon, Washington or California to follow suit. It is time for the rest of the states to take care of their citizens and quit worrying about who they may or may not offend in the process. Based on which states that are stepping up, it appears that those redneck jokes may just be on the rest of us!
OKLAHOMA MAY JUST BE THE PLACE TO LIVE!
An update from Oklahoma :
Oklahoma law passed, 37 to 9, had a few liberals in the mix, an amendment to place the Ten Commandments on the front entrance to the state capitol. The feds in D.C., along with the ACLU, said it would be a mistake. Hey this is a conservative state, based on Christian values…! HB 1330
Guess what………. Oklahoma did it anyway..
Oklahoma recently passed a law in the state to incarcerate all illegal immigrants, and ship them back to where they came from unless they want to get a green card and become an American citizen. They all scattered. HB 1804. Hope we didn’t send any of them to your state This was against the advice of the Federal Government, and the ACLU, they said it would be a mistake.
Guess what………. Oklahoma did it anyway.
Recently we passed a law to include DNA samples from any and all illegals to the Oklahoma database, for criminal investigative purposes. Pelosi said it was unconstitutional. SB 1102
Guess what…….. Oklahoma did it anyway.
Several weeks ago, we passed a law, declaring Oklahoma as a Sovereign state, not under the Federal Government directives. Joining Texas,
Montana and Utah as the only states to do so. More states are likely to follow: Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolina’s, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Florida. Save your confederate money, it appears the South is about to rise up once again. HJR 1003
The federal Government has made bold steps to take away our guns. Oklahoma, a week ago, passed a law confirming people in this state have the right to bear arms and transport them in their vehicles. I’m sure that was a set back for the criminals (and Obamaites). Liberals didn’t like it — But ……..
Guess what………… Oklahoma did it anyway.
Just this month, the state has voted and passed a law that ALL driver’s license exams will be printed in English, and only English, and no other language. They have been called racist for doing this, but the fact is that ALL of the road signs are in English only. If you want to drive in Oklahoma , you must read and write English. Really simple.
By the way, Obama does not like any of this.
Guess what….who cares… Oklahoma is doing it anyway.
Some of the people I send this to won’t like it…
Well guess what Jimmy cracked corn and… (that’s right…)
Thanks for sharing this piece if possible, Mrs Figgins.
Jeffrey, Oklahoma City
Dear Jeffrey:
My pleasure!
Mrs. Figgins
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
Obama the detached
- In touch? Really???
- In touch? Really???
Dear Friends:
This is Barack Obama’s 3rd political disaster in his first 18 months in office, all shaped by his “political judgment and instincts”. And so opines Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.
-
Ms Noonan believes that the the inventory of presidential gaffes may be fatal:
The unnecessary war over his healthcare proposal and its cost;
The day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration;
The the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity;
Will Mr. Obama survive this? Will the country?
Below is Ms Noonan’s full article.
Mrs. Figgins
Wall Street Journal By Peggy Noonan 29 May 2010-05-28
He Was Supposed to Be Competent
The spill is a disaster for the president and his political philosophy.
I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.
There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.
The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.
President Obama promised on Thursday to hold BP accountable in the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill and said his administration would do everything necessary to protect and restore the coast.
The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.
And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.
In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—”catastrophe,” etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won’t see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been, “I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful soundbite.” But his strategic problem was that he’d already lost the battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow, the damage will already have been done.
The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or trust it.
I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”
This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.
Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.
How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls?
What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama’s standing with Democrats. They don’t love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president’s Gulf critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations.
The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of “the indispensable nation” be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.
Mr. Obama himself, when running for president, made much of Bush administration distraction and detachment during Katrina. Now the Republican Party will, understandably, go to town on Mr. Obama’s having gone before this week only once to the gulf, and the fund-raiser in San Francisco that seemed to take precedence, and the EPA chief who decided to cancel a New York fund-raiser only after the press reported that she planned to attend.
But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
In your heart you know he’s right!
- What’s the Answer?
- What’s the Answer?
Mrs. Figgins Trivia Question!
Question:
Who ran for President with the campaign slogan “In your heart you know he’s right”?
A: Jimmy Carter
B: Richard Nixon
C: Franklin D. Roosevelt
D: Barry Goldwater
Answer:
In the 1964 Presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater used the slogan “In your heart you know he’s right”.
Goldwater had taken a lot of heat from his opponent and the media who labeled him an extremist.
This slogan was intended to convince voters that the “extremist” label was unwarranted and that his views were not that different from their own. It was, apparently, unsuccessful as Goldwater carried only 38.5 percent of the vote, losing to Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide.
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
May 28, 2010
BP & OBAMA – The Connection
Questions?
Questions?
Dear Mrs. Figgins:
We know you give opinion on politics and our question is this.
Why do you think it’s taking so long for President Obama to get a handle on the oil spill?
Jeri, Birmingham
Dear Jeri:
BP lobbies “regularly” in Washington. In 2009 alone BP spent $16 million to influence legislation. In the first quarter of 2010 their lobbying efforts ranked second (behind Conoco Phillips) with a whopping $3.53 million.
In the 2008 election cycle Mr. Obama was the top recipient of BP related donations – but we certainly don’t hear about him being in the pocket of “big oil”.
The democrats are still talking about President Bush’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina. With the oil spill disaster, the response has been even slower. But to no one’s surprise Mr. Obama’s loyal media has been giving him pass after pass after pass.
Remember things can get very murky when a person is indebted. And this includes this President and all elected officials.
Mrs. Figgins
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
May 27, 2010
Parents & The Double Standard
- Worth The Wait
Dear Mrs. Figgins:
I have a twin sister and we’re graduating high school this year.
Our parents are against sex until marriage. We think it’s not honest because we know they had sex before they got married.
Why do parents expect something different from their kids?
Jenny & Lauren
Dear Jenny & Lauren:
Some people are OK with premarital sex – that is, until their own daughters are born.
I understand your question and even frustration with a double standard, but the important thing is that your parents are correct. They want to protect you and keep you from making choices that are potentially life altering.
Abstinence until marriage if the right choice.
Mrs. Figgins
www.askmrsfiggins.com
Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!
Marriage – the “formula”
- It’s the formula!
