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Martin Luther King Jr.:
'Life's Most Persistent And Urgent Question Is: What Are You Doing For Others?'
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Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?" On Monday, in his honor, we're asked to lift our sights beyond our immediate circle of family and friends, and help contribute to something larger than our own lives.
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Huffington Post Impact has put together a comprehensive list of links to donate and get involved in relief efforts for victims of Tuesday's devastating earthquake. You can also go to The Goods: Help Send Relief To Haiti, an online store by Causecast and HuffPost Impact, where you can purchase products for organizations that will be directly used on the ground in
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The U.S. State Department Operations Center has set up the following number for Americans seeking information about family members in
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The Golden Rule Applies
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Disaster is a way of life on the planet Earth. Always has been and seems like it always will be. Natural forces give us hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods and when we add in the human-based incidents, there seems to always be a need for people helping people. What happened in
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If you want to help the best source I’ve found for links to donate is at cnn.com and it is all about honest, fair organizations. Please check it out and do what you can.
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Cliff – The XCon
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Important Credit Security Bulletin From Cliff:
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I received this serious email and wanted to share it with you.
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There is a credit card scam so please do not give anyone the three digit code on the back of your credit cards.
Snopes.Com says this is true. To verify see this site: http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/creditcard.asp
This one is pretty slick since they provide YOU with all the information, except the one piece they want.
Note, the callers do not ask for your card number; they already have it... This information is worth reading. By understanding how the VISA & Master Card Telephone Credit Card Scam works, you'll be better prepared to protect yourself.
One of our employees was called on Wednesday from 'VISA', and I was called on Thursday from 'Master Card'.. The scam works like this: Caller: 'This is (name), and I'm calling from the Security and Fraud Department at VISA. My Badge number is 12460. Your card has been flagged for an unusual purchase pattern, and I'm calling to verify. This would be on your VISA card which was issued by (name of bank). Did you purchase an Anti-Telemarketing Device for $497.99 from a Marketing company based in ?'
When you say 'No', the caller continues with, 'Then we will be issuing a credit to your account. This is a company we have been watching and the charges range from $297 to $497, just under the $500 purchase pattern that flags most cards. Before your next statement, the credit will be sent to (gives you your address), is that correct?'
You say 'yes'. The caller continues - 'I will be starting a Fraud investigation. If you have any questions, you should call the 1- 800 number listed on the back of your card (1-800 -VISA) and ask for Security.'
You will need to refer to this Control Number. The caller then gives you a 6 digit number. 'Do you need me to read it again?'
Here's the IMPORTANT part on how the scam works: The caller then says, 'I need to verify you are in possession of your card'. He'll ask you to 'turn your card over and look for some numbers'. There are 7 numbers; the first 4 are part of your card number, the next 3 are the security Numbers that verify you are the possessor of the card. These are the numbers you sometimes use to make Internet purchases to prove you have the card. The caller will ask you to read the 3 numbers to him. After you tell the caller the 3 numbers, he'll say, 'That is correct, I just needed to verify that the card has not been lost or stolen, and that you still have your card. Do you have any other questions?' After you say No, the caller then thanks you and states, 'Don't hesitate to call back if you do, and hangs up.
You actually say very little, and they never ask for or tell you the Card number.. But after we were called on Wednesday, we called back within 20 minutes to ask a question.. Are we glad we did! The REAL VISA Security Department told us it was a scam and in the last 15 minutes a new purchase of $497.99 was charged to our card.
Long story - short - we made a real fraud report and closed the VISA account. VISA is reissuing us a new number. What the scammers want is the 3 -digit PIN number on the back of the card. Don't give it to them. Instead, tell them you'll call VISA or Master card directly for verification of their conversation. The real VISA told us that they will never ask for anything on the card as they already know the information since they issued the card! If you give the scammers your 3 Digit PIN Number, you think you're receiving a credit. However, by the time you get your statement you'll see charges for purchases you didn't make, and by then it's almost too late and/or more difficult to actually file a fraud report.
What makes this more remarkable is that on Thursday, I got a call from a 'Jason Richardson of Master Card' with a word-for-word repeat of the VISA scam. This time I didn't let him finish. I hung up! We filed a police report, as instructed by VISA. The police said they are taking several of these reports daily! They also urged us to tell everybody we know that this scam is happening.
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Don’t Get Scammed! Guard your numbers! Snopes.com is a trusted source of truth.
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Cliff – The XCon
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January 17: 7 Best Moments from Sunday Talk
by The Daily Beast Video
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Bush and Clinton make their case for
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Mitch McConnell:
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Mitch McConnell is a man of the people, and according to him, the people have spoken. Or screamed. On Fox News Sunday, McConnell calls the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown in Massachussetts a “referendum” on Obama’s health-care bill, which, he says, the people clearly do not want.
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Read & Watch more Daily Beast – CLICK HERE!
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Plan B: Democrats Consider
How To Pass Health Care If Coakley Loses
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A new way forward on health care is gaining some traction among Democrats, who are preparing for the possibility that Democrat Martha Coakley will lose her bid to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate, costing Democrats their 60th vote, which they'll need to overcome the filibuster.
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The House has been preparing to tweak the Senate bill with a package of amendments based on a deal reached last week with organized labor, send it back to the upper chamber for final passage, and claim victory. But Coakley could well lose her race, depriving Democrats of the 60th vote they'd need to overcome a filibuster, and that unthinkable possibility is forcing party leaders to consider a Plan B.
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Op-Ed Columnist
What Didn’t Happen
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy.
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I disagree. The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.
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About the stimulus: it has surely helped. Without it, unemployment would be much higher than it is. But the administration’s program clearly wasn’t big enough to produce job gains in 2009.
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Read more Krugman wisdom – CLICK HERE!
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Op-Ed Columnist
An Odd Couple Defends Couples That
Some (Oddly) Find Odd
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 16, 2010
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It has been quite a journey for Ted Olson. He’s gone from being the conservative lawyer who helped crown W. by winning the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, to being a lesbian.
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“Maureen,” he told me in his gravelly voice, “one of the biggest lesbian groups in this country told me I’m already an honorary lesbian.”
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Did it make you feel different, I wondered.
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“I still like women very much,” he wryly replied, as his biking pal, liberal adversary and now co-counsel David Boies laughed, snacking on a crust of sourdough bread in their temporary office on
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In 2000, Olson and Boies sparred with each other in
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Read more from Maureen – CLICK HERE!
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The 10 greatest Golden Globes moments
A lusterless show gets a goose from Mo'Nique, Jeff Bridges and the King of Bad Awards Speeches, James Cameron
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The Golden Globes is supposed to be the fun awards show, the Hollywood Foreign Press's loose, sexy and possibly drunk cousin to our stiff, self-congratulatory Oscars. The evening celebrates our twin obsessions of television and movies and does away with all those boring prizes for sound editing and whatnot. And this year, for the first time in 15 years, it even had a host, the wry Ricky Gervais.
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But as if to prove that anything NBC touches these days is sprinkled with FAIL dust, this year's show did not delight. An air of despair hung over the proceedings, as entertainers in designer clothes paused from time to time to evoke (in their solemn, frozen, Botox-faced way) the recent devastation in
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The atheist's dilemma
Reason and faith battle it out in the story of a celebrity philosopher and his tumultuous past
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Humanity is an ape with its head full of stars, and the precarious intersection it occupies between the corporeal and the transcendent is one of literature's great subjects. Sometimes, an author approaches this incongruity as a tragedy; even the most exalted among us are creatures of the flesh and doomed to die. But satire works, too, as Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," effervescently demonstrates.
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The novel's protagonist, Cass Seltzer, dubbed "the atheist with a soul" by the press, is a psychology professor at a small
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Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Tea Party Rip-Off Twitter
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By FRANK RICH
Published: January 16, 2010
Even given the low bar set by
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Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist at The Daily News in
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Get Rich Quick - Read more – CLICK HERE!
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Prop 8 – Day 5: The defense stalls and pleads fear factor
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Those were the words lesbian writer Helen Zia testified she heard when she and her spouse were handing out fliers opposing Proposition 8 in
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Zia was one of two on the witness stand Friday for plaintiff attorneys who are challenging Proposition 8 as a violation of the federal constitutional guarantees of equal protection. The other witness was
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CLICK HERE to read more on the trial.
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Proof Positive: Lots of Republicskum Women
Can Be Not Only Crazy But Pure Evil
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Coulter does her best to out-Limbaugh Rush
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Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to "burnish" his credentials with the black community.
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So she's making a conscious effort to out-controversy the controversial radio host, and on Fox News on Sunday, she didn't make much effort to keep that a secret.
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"Stop asking about Rush's statement. I made some controversial statements this week too," Coulter said on Geraldo at Large.
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Read more Lunacy – CLICK HERE!
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Karen Hughes: Bush rescued the economy
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George W. Bush rescued the economy from collapse, according to Karen Hughes. Bush's former campaign director attacked President Barack Obama on NBC Sunday, defending the record of her former boss on the economy.
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Speaking about Obama's successes, journalist Mark Halperin praised the current president's handling of the economy. "He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis, kept the world from going into depression," said Halperin.
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But Hughes quickly took objection to Halperin's assessment. "I have to disagree with you, Mark, about rescuing the economy," she said. "I think that happened before President Bush left office when they took the action that they did on TARP and the banks have now repaid much of that money but that's what stabilized the economy and prevented the collapse of the financial system."
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Read more from this Idiot blob – CLICK HERE!
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Puns For Educated Minds
1. The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall.. The police are looking into it.
11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'
13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'
15. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
16. The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
17. A backward poet writes inverse.
18. In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris , you'd be in
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