MessageHumm.. he’ll spend tax payers money to visit the vets, but not his own?

“The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign,” senior adviser Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

Here is the full article:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/07/25/no_troop_visits_for_obama_in_g.html
No Troop Visits for Obama in Germany
By Dan Balz
BERLIN–Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama scrubbed a planned visit to see wounded American servicemen and women in Germany after Pentagon objections that the stop at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center could be seen as a political event, according to Obama’s campaign.

Although the Illinois senator visited troops in Afghanistan and Iraq on the first part of his overseas trip, those stops were part of an official Congressional delegation, and therefore deemed apolitical. The European tour, which included a speech in Berlin last night before an enthusiastic crowd of 200,000, is funded by the campaign and as such is not official government business.

“Senator Obama had hoped to and had every intention of visiting our troops to express his appreciation and gratitude for their service to our country,” retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration, an Obama adviser, said in a statement.

“We learned from the Pentagon [Wednesday] night that the visit would be viewed instead as a campaign event. Senator Obama did not want to have a trip to see our wounded warriors percieved as a campaign event…and decided instead not to go.”

When Obama arrived in Germany yesterday, a printed schedule said he would fly to the military hospital today. Asked at the time about the schedule, an Obama adviser said it was incorrect, that the stop had been considered but ultimately rejected.

“The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign,” senior adviser Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

The campaign of Obama’s GOP rival, Sen. John S. McCain, was quick to criticize the decision. “Barack Obama is wrong,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said. “It is never ‘inappropriate’ to visit our men and women in the military.”

As a result of the schedule change, Obama remained in Berlin Friday morning before leaving for a brief stop in Paris and a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He is expected to hold a news conference with the French leader before flying to London to end the day.

Imagine if you can a ideology that hates American’s and their way of life.  Imagine that same ideology slowly grouping together over a couple of decades getting stronger and stronger until they are a united front.  They then train and recruit others with the same beliefs, or instill their beliefs on them through force.  They then send spies into our country to find our weaknesses.  They use any all ‘inner fighting’ amongst Americans against us in order to bring down the moral of the population as well as the military.

What group do you think I am talking about?  I am talking about Communism.  However, it could also be Nazism or maybe even the early days of the Ku Klux Klan.  It could also be the Islamic Extremist.

There was one city with a wall down the middle that proved to be the crack which eventually brought down the dam.  Americans united together to the betterment of the common good.  Not just for American’s but people being oppressed by communism all over the world.

Imagine the 34 years it took to unite Germany.  There were food rations, gas rations, families separated and a nation destroyed.  While West Germany prospered, East Germany became a weary place to live.  Much like North and South Korea today.  However, Americans of a different generation held firm remaining united through our beliefs and values of freedom.

What if Iraq is our generations Berlin?  We may not have personally started this fight, but can’t we hold firm and do what is needed for a few years?  Our parents generation gave 34 years to the cause, and here many of us are now, as spoiled brats complaining that it is taking to long to rebuild Iraq.  Grow up kids, this isn’t the play ground.

A friend forwarded me a link to http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=179009

It was a good read, not something I would have normally read.  But it does bring up two points I think are key to where we are today.

He said: “At the time the invasion was launched, polls showed over 70% of Americans in support of the President’s war (or in a state of terror about terror, should we not stop Saddam Hussein from nuking us).” Americans today have no real understanding of what they were thinking, nor did Congress (or the UN) when they voted for the use of force.  Looking back after Hitler, much of the world asked the US “Why did you wait so long to do something?”  Here we acted sooner (and before a second wave of attacks on US soil).  And now people do not understand the realities of Nation Building.  Look what happened when we pulled out of Mogadishu (It looks like someone now has to go back as the war has spread over much of Africa).  Building a nation takes years, decades, heck, even centuries (when did slavery end and blacks before true Americans?  For that matter women in this country?).  So it isn’t a situation where we can put a deadline.  The job will be done when the job will be done.  If we leave now, or God forbid, set a deadline.  The ‘bad guys’ (any ONE ethnic group in control of Iraq would be the bad guys) will just wait us out.  The day after the last US troops leave, the country will be taken control of with much deadlier force than we have used.  Think of Vietnam with the last Huey leaving the ground….  We (soldiers, myself included, though not in this fight) were asked to come, by the UN with congresses approval.  Let them finish their job.  Does a good parent give in and not punish your child because of the puppy dog eyes?  No, it is hard to do the job, but it is a job a good parent knows must be done.

He also stated that “Many fewer young people, I suspect, have any remnant of that deep faith that our political system could be responsive to them or that anything they could do might change it. When they look to Washington, what they see is fraud, dysfunction, conspiracy, cronyism, cabal, influence-peddling, corruption, fear — in short, a system, a world, beyond response, possibly beyond repair, and utterly alien to their lives. In such a situation, despair or apathy tends to replace anger and hope. “  I agree with this 100%, however, it isn’t just one party or the other.  It is all of them.  There is too much tit for tat going on in DC these days and all Americans are crying out.  How is Gonzales replacing a few lawyers different than when Clinton did it?  Did the Clinton not award contract to Halliburton? Look at what NAFTA has done to jobs in the US.  These days you have to have the pork… Too much of DC just wants to see their name in lights.  They want the credit, they want to be the hero, no matter the cost and regardless of the political party.  They want to be the one who saved jobs, balance the budget or kept more kids in school.
 

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1) SECURITY WATCH:

- DNS Security Basics
Your DNS is a sweet spot for hackers who want to compromise your network; learn to protect it.

By Joern Wettern

While it may seem that computer names and their corresponding IP addresses wouldn’t be of much value to hackers, attacking a DNS server can be a hacker’s first step toward compromising an entire network. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the standard for resolving computer names on the Internet to IP addresses. It has also become the primary method for name resolution in corporate networks.

That can be a potentially dangerous combination. All too often network administrators neglect DNS security. Here are some DNS security basics you should put into effect:

SPLIT PERSONALITY
When Microsoft adopted DNS as the primary name resolution method for Windows — instead of using the older WINS — it was an important step toward making networks work together well and making them easier to use. However, by using the same name resolution method for corporate networks that the Internet uses, internal and external name resolutions are often combined.

Internet users find your company’s Web site by going to www.companyname.com. Your internal computers also have a DNS name that would be something like computer.yourcompany.com, or another DNS name that’s in the same or at least a similar zone. This can result in internal computer names and addresses being accessible on the DNS server that resolves names from the Internet. Good security practices dictate that you separate internal and external name resolution. This is known as a split DNS design.

A network penetration test I did a couple of years ago offers a good illustration of how dangerous it can be to not maintain a split DNS.  My task was to find ways an intruder could break into a small corporate network. All the information I had to start out with was the company’s domain name.

My first step was to find an externally accessible DNS server for this company and get all records for the DNS zone using a zone transfer. To my surprise, the zone data included the names and IP addresses of all their internal computers — even domain controllers, application servers and client computers.

More: http://redmondmag.com/columns/article.asp?editorialsid=1655

Joern Wettern, Ph.D., MCSE, MCT, Security+, is the owner of Wettern Network Solutions, a consulting and training firm. He has written books and developed training courses on a number of networking and security topics. In addition to helping companies implement network security solutions, he regularly teaches seminars and speaks at conferences worldwide. jwettern@redmondmag.com

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FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE
1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
4. Gun control is not about guns; it’s about control.
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
7. “Free” men do not ask permission to bear arms.
8. If you don’t know your rights you don’t have any.
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
10. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights reserved.
11. What part of “shall not be infringed” do you not understand?
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others.
13. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
14. Guns only have two enemies: rust and politicians.
15. Know guns, know peace, know safety. No guns, no peace, no safety.
16. You don’t shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
17. 911 - Government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
19. Criminals love gun control — it makes their jobs safer.
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
23. Enforce the “gun control laws” we ALREADY have, don’t make more.
24. When you remove the people’s right to bear arms, you create slaves.
25. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
26. “A government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

IF YOU AGREE: PLEASE PASS THIS ‘REFRESHER’ ON TO 10 FREE CITIZENS

If you have a few minutes, check out my crazy brother in law’s blog.

http://totels.com/insideout/2007/03/news-sucks.html

Message

One of my best friends, Chris, went with a mission to deliver text books to schools in Guatemala.  He took a lot of great pictures and strung it all together in a video.  It is about 10 minutes, but is well worth it.

Next time you think you have it bad because you have to wait 2 days for your netflix to come.. think how lucky you are to have everything that gets the netflix to you…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D4vF24_eFBUI
Chris also wrote and preformed the background music.  The the time to appreciate the things you have.

An excellent read from SecurityWatch@newsletters.101com.com.

A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE BOTNET PHENOMENON

Members of the John Hopkins University Computer Science Department have
conducted an excellent study analyzing bots and botnets (download the
PDF here: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/%7Eterzis/imc114f-aburajab.pdf ). It’s
an extremely comprehensive study of botnets over a three-month period
from early 2006. They constructed a sophisticated environment within
which they were able to become infected, determine what the infected
code does, monitor the actions of the code as well as the Command
and Control (C&C) channel used by the bot-master, and, finally,
detail the actual tasks performed by the bot-infected systems.

Without getting into human motivations, this study is extremely
informative to anyone attempting to prevent or detect bot activity.
It shows the difficulty in monitoring, detecting the sources and
identifying the bot-masters.

It also provides some insight into the size and scope of botnets,
indicating they are likely smaller than many of the media claims have
been. They provide and understanding of why that is, namely, the fact
that IRC servers have functional limitations on the number of
computers they can simultaneously control. They explain their
observations of how a few bot-masters attempt to overcome
that limitation.

It’s well worth a read. Hopefully this study will lead to more
research in this area. This study, coupled with the BT announcement
mentioned above, may well show signs that we may be making progress
against the bot-herders.

Not sure how true this is….

                                            If this doesn’t open your eyes… nothing will! From the L.A. Times