Posts Made By: Christine Canelos Welsh

That's neat, Michael! I enjoyed your other videos as well - 'specially the coasters!

Wow - those are awesome. Looks like you were there at the perfect time and with perfect weather!

Congrats, Deb - Nice to hear about a happy landing!

One of my favorite bugs. Nice shot!

My friend gave me some sunflower seeds she collected and they turned out great. Caught this one right as the fading sunset hit it...

Lee Spain said:

The political and business leaders of this country are lucky that they are allowed to continue to manage our nation. People are quite angry in this country and they should be. I think that anyone who is launching a 1 man revolution is crazy and i think that the right wing talkers only understand 1/2 the story. But, I don't think toning down rhetoric will work.

It would be a good start.

I see that Sarah Palin has taken down the pictures of Gabrielle Gifford and others which were overlaid with cross-hairs. It would be even better if she apologized, but given that one of her favorite slogans is "don't retreat, reload", I doubt if we'll ever hear one.

It may be just rhetoric to some, but unfortunately it sets the tone for the whole nation. It needs to stop.

Lee Spain said:

Our politicians and business leaders should be working their butts off to help put the country back on track.

Yes they should. They could start by setting a new tone - a respectful one, one not based on the scare tactics and propaganda that feeds the paranoia which seems to be growing daily in this country.

Regards,
ccw

Well, I've now had time to read all the posts here.

A person I trusted told me that if you clicked on the cross-hairs on the SarahPac website, you were linked to the person being targeted. When I went to the website to check, it was gone so now I have no way of knowing personally if this was true. First and foremost - if I perpetuated a false rumor, then I do apologize.

However, I stand by my statements that inflammatory rhetoric, hers included, is distasteful and even harmful. If you wouldn't tolerate it from Bill Ayers, then you shouldn't tolerate it from Sarah Palin either. There's no difference in my opinion.

Has this sort of thing been going on for a long time? Certainly it has, but today the internet has given it lightning speed and an audience unprecedented in size compared to the days when you had to pay for a newspaper to read it, if a newspaper would even publish half of it.

Whether they literally incite violence or not, a prominent figure should be above telling their followers things like "so and so hates America" or "so and so wants to destroy the middle class" and so forth. It's one thing when you read it from commonplace cranks in the blogosphere, but among the leaders in our nation, there should be no place for it. It engenders the mindset that people should fight back by any means they think is necessary and people seem to be losing their grip more all the time. Witness counter-protestors getting beat up at rallies, people holding up signs saying "by ballot or bullet", witness the rocks thrown in office windows and death threats against judges for how they ruled and against members of congress for how they voted on certain issues.

Whether the shooter was a liberal or a libertarian or anything in between does not matter. Six people are dead because an unhinged individual had an apparent grudge against the government among other things. Whether these shootings or any other violence in particular are a direct result of incendiary language in the political realm is debatable, but it is a debate we should have. However, now we have even the most thoughtful of commentators on either side of the aisle on this subject being accused by of trying to politicize the shootings.

It's gone beyond the shouting - far beyond, and it's time for people to take a stand against it. Even John Boehner seems to think so, along with many others on the conservative side. Hopefully the common ground we all need in our government will become more of a reality.

Peace, folks.

Recently I saw a "Show me the birth certificate" bumper sticker. It was on a foreign car. Anyone else find that as amusing as I did?

Russ Carroll said:

http://gallery.me.com/russ92069#100169

This was my favorite class assignment from an After Effects class I took. We had to make a movie trailer from scratch.

Good job! That's always been one of my favorite movies and your video made me want to see it again! :-]]

Awesome - one of my favorite critters.

I was once in the right place at the right time to see thousands of these moving through a meadow. The air was full of them - it was incredible.

Great shot - I love how it's looking right at the camera.