Deployment To Afghanistan

I hope this email finds all of you happy and healthy, enjoying the start of fall.  I am writing to let you all know that I will be deploying to Afghanistan at the end of October with the First Medical Battalion from Camp Pendleton, CA.  In my role as a critical care nurse, I will be working on a forward operating base as part of a Forward Resuscitative Surgical team.   Along with a trauma surgeon, anesthesiologist, several corpsman and Marines, I will be helping to provide stabilizing treatment to wounded Americans and coalition forces and members of the Afghan National Army before they are transferred to the large hospitals and eventually medically evacuated.  I also hope to have the chance to provide enroute care, transporting patients from the forward operating bases to the large Role III hospital at Camp Bastion. 

I will be finishing up my training with the Marines in the coming week and then will pack my sea bags and depart for Afghanistan just before Halloween.  I will be over there for about 7 months, returning in May of next year.  While I'm gone, I will hopefully have access to my personal email address and facebook account.  

 

I will also be able to receive mail, letters, care packages, etc.  It takes about 10 days for mail to reach the forward bases in Afghanistan and packages mailed in those USPS flat rate boxes tend to be delivered fastest.  

LT Albero

 

My Niece, who was a straight "A" Student all throughout High School and College, chose to serve our country after college. Her Parents, both United States Coast Guard Academy Graduates, (Class of 1980) and her Uncle, (ME) couldn't be more proud.

SBYNews At 6 General Election Interviews

Sby News Interview Addie Eckardt from Jack Powell on Vimeo.

Don't Miss Our 6 PM Candidate Interview With Addie Echardt

Folks, this is not only the best interview I've ever done, it may just be one of the best candidate interviews you will ever see. Be here at 6 PM for an outstanding interview with an outstanding Lady.

Mayor To Announce Fire Chief And Information Technology Director For City

Mayor James Ireton, Jr., today, will announce the selection of a new Fire Department Chief and a new Information Technology Director for the City of Salisbury.

Please join us at Fire Station 16 on Cypress Street for a press conference, today, Tuesday, October 12th, at 3:00 p.m.

Mayor Ireton will be available after the press conference for questions regarding crime and the public input meeting taking place tonight at Station 16 on his proposed Safe Streets Neighborhood Legislative package.

"I am excited that these new leaders will continue to help move Salisbury forward.  The exhaustive process that our human resources department, as well as City Administrator Pick and Assistant City Administrator Chambers undertook, was comprehensive and thorough.  I am proud of the professionalism and experience that our new directors bring to us, and I know that they will help me, and our employees, continue our march forward to a more safe, secure city," said Mayor Ireton

Mayor To Announce New Fire Chief Today

The Mayor will hold a Press Conference today to announce his choice for the new Fire Chief in Salisbury. We'll report it just as soon as it's announced.

Terror Threat To Restaurants As Al Qaeda Calls For Attacks in D.C.

The terror group tied to the Ft. Hood killings and the Christmas Day undies airbomber urge wannabe American jihadis to open fire on crowded restaurants in the nation's capital to massacre U.S. government workers.

The advice appears in "Inspire," the latest issue of a slick propaganda publication by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Osama Bin Laden's franchise in Yemen.

"A random hit at a crowded restaurant in Washington, D.C., at lunch hour might end up knocking out a few government employees," Yahya Ibrahim writes in the 74-page jihadi how-to magazine.

"Targeting such employees is paramount and the location would also give the operation additional media attention," Ibrahim added.

Other trash talk came from "Samir Khan," an American who came to AQAP from North Carolina, who produces the publication and wrote that he is "proud to be a traitor in America's eyes."

"This guy is bad news, and given the fact that he helps publish AQAP trash, he certainly spreads a lot of it around, too," said a senior U.S. official.

According to a copy of the magazine obtained by the SITE intelligence group, AQAP also urged those bent on murdering for Islam to use everything from pickup trucks to improvised pressure-cooker bombs to kill.
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Salisbury Police Department Press Releases

On October 9, 2010 at approximately 8:06 pm, Officers of the Salisbury Police received a call to respond to the Giant Food Store on North Salisbury Boulevard for the report of a shoplifter. Upon arrival the officers met with store management who advised that store employees had observed the below listed suspect take alcoholic beverages into the ladies restroom where it was found that she consumed them. The suspect then attempted to leave the store with an additional alcoholic beverage without making payment.

ARRESTED: Kirstin Gertrud Williston, 46 years of age
Salisbury, Maryland
CHARGES: Theft (under $ 100)
DISPOSITION: Released to Central Booking
CC # 2010000040310


On October 11, 2010 at approximately 8:34 pm, Officers of the Salisbury Police were on routine patrol in the area of Second Street and W. Main Street and observed the below listed suspect acting suspiciously on the street corner. When the suspect observed the officers, he attempted to discard a small item. The officers retrieved the item which was found to be a quantity of suspected "crack"/cocaine. The suspect was arrested without incident.

ARRESTED: Juvenile, 16 years of age
Salisbury, Maryland
CHARGES: Possession of cocaine
Possession of cds/paraphernalia
DISPOSITION: Released to Central Booking
CC # 201000040597

On October 11, 2010 at approximately 9:28 pm, Officers of the Salisbury Police received a call to respond to an apartment building on Winterbourne Lane for the report of subjects shooting bb guns at victims. Upon arrival the officers met with three (3) victims who advised the officers that while walking through the apartment complex, the below listed suspects hid behind another building then fired at them with bb rifles. The victims knew the suspects by name and identified the suspects for the officers
.
ARRESTED #1: Ernesto Luis Colon, 18 years of age
Salisbury, Maryland
ARRESTED #2: Juvenile, 16 years of age
Salisbury, Maryland
CHARGES (Both): Second degree assault (3 counts)
Reckless endangerment (3 counts)
DISPOSITION: Suspect # 1 released to Central Booking
Suspect # 2 released to guardian
CC # 201000040601

Pani Pizza #1 In MD For NY Style Pizza

I have taken it upon myself to rank Pani Pizza the #1 New York Style Pizza in Maryland. Without a question, their pizza is an authentic thin, (yet crunchy) crust pizza with the flavors of back home pizza. No one I have ever visited in Maryland have come even close to the way its supposed to be done.

If you haven't been in to try them out, they're in the same shopping center as Old Navy, across Rt. 13 from Sam's Club. Stop in today for lunch or dinner and give them a try. You will NOT be disappointed in anything you order.



THE BIG 'IF': Historic Tax Hike Rests On Congress' Shoulders

If Congress allows Bush-era tax cuts to expire, New Year's Day will usher in the nation's biggest tax increase since the end of World War II, tax watchdog says, and that may be only the beginning.

GO HERE to read more.

Turk Admits Flotilla Activists Started Clashes

The Israel Defense Forces did not open fire on activists aboard a Hamas-supporting flotilla until the soldiers' lives were endangered by those on the now infamous ship, admitted a Turkish journalist who was on the flotilla.

Some participants in the Turkish flotilla, named the Mavi Marmara, had claimed in news media interviews Israeli troops indiscriminately opened fire upon boarding the ship from a helicopter. Nine activists were killed in the clashes that ensued.

The ship, purchased by the Hamas-linked Turkish charity IHH, was attempting to break Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The Jewish state maintains the blockade to ensure against Hamas arming itself at sea. The terrorist group had been caught several times attempting to smuggle weapons, including rockets and advanced missiles, into Gaza by sea.

"I saw with my own eyes that when the soldiers came on helicopters and started landing on the ship, they did not fire," stated Turkish journalist Sefik Dinc.

"It wasn't until the soldiers were met with resistance and realized that some of their friends' lives were in danger that they began using live ammunition," he said.

Consistent with video footage and testimonies of Israeli soldiers who had boarded the ship, Dinc recalled flotilla activists using iron bars against the IDF troops.

WND previously reported that prior to its violent confrontation with Israeli commandos, the commander of the flotilla announced participants were planning to use "resistance" and declared the ship's activists wanted to die as "martyrs" more than they wanted to reach the Gaza Strip, according to Hamas television.
Here is more

Have American Jews Lost Faith In Obama?

Senior members of the US Jewish community have spoken up against Obama's foreign policy regarding Israel, and it what is considered a rarity, have said that should he continue on his current path, they will stop their contributions to the Democratic Party.

Since taking office, it seems as if Obama has lost ground across every sector in the United States, but throughout, he has always enjoyed wide-scale support from US Jews.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the Huffington Post that although the US president enjoyed a 78% support rate among American Jews at the time of his election, he has now lost about a third.

According to the report, the Obama administration has annoyed Jewish leaders to the point where they are thinking of sitting out the 2010 election. Federal Election Commission records show contributions to Democratic candidates from the financial sector, where Jews hold important positions, are down 65% from two years ago.

"I started breaking with Obama ten months ago," Martin Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic, told the Huffington Post, "And I know that a lot of West Coast Jews are also having buyer's remorse."
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Healthcare Lobbyists Seek To Repair Relationship With Republicans

House Republicans say healthcare groups that backed the Democrats’ overhaul bill are trying to rekindle their hot-and-cold-relationship with the GOP.

The health industry’s effort to make nice with Republicans is both reflective of how Washington works and how much the political winds have shifted since Barack Obama’s inauguration early last year.

House Republicans felt shunned by their allies in the medical sector in 2009 as Democrats basked in their electoral victories that gave them control of Congress and the White House since 1994.

Nearly two years after Obama’s triumph and six months after the passage of health reform, the mood in the nation’s capital and beyond has changed dramatically.

"We had to find people to have meetings with us" in 2009, Ways and Means Committee Republican Kevin Brady (Texas) recently said with a smile. But that started to change soon after the health bill passed.

Whether Republicans are ready to forgive and forget if they take over the House is still an open question.

Some of the groups Republicans are meeting with, Brady acknowledged, endorsed the healthcare legislation, which barely passed Congress.

"They did [support the bill] and that's frustrating," Brady said, adding that the bottom line for Republicans is coming up with a better healthcare package than the bill that Obama signed into law.

Republicans say what’s grating isn’t just the fact that traditional allies backed Democrats, but that their support helped push the bill over the finish line.

Republican efforts to repeal health reform will undoubtedly cause awkward moments for trade groups that endorsed the law.

"Whether they support repeal or not," Barton warned, "that debate's coming."

Much of the renewed attention paid to Republican lawmakers has to do with "parochial" issues such as regulations on insurance companies.

“There is a legitimate question to be asked as to how well they’ll be received,” the Republican staffer said. “When you come to plead your case about an individual provision you didn’t like to Republicans, they’ll turn around and say: ‘But you’re the one who helped put it into law.’”
Here is more

Today's Survey Question

Are Speed Cameras Acceptable To You In School Zones?

Muslim Brotherhood 'Declares War' on U.S.

Five years before the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaida declared war on America, the West, Christians and Jews – and virtually no one noticed.

Now, a longtime observer of Islam is warning that a "war declaration" of potentially much greater significance has been made.

The Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi, who was elected only months ago, has "endorsed anti-American Jihad and pretty much every element in the al-Qaida ideology book," writes Barry Rubin, author and director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal.

The Brotherhood – the dominant Islamic organization in the West that has spawned most of the major Muslim terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, along with the biggest "mainstream" organizations – is giving the signal that it is "ready to move from the era of propaganda and base-building to one of revolutionary action," says Rubin.

In a sermon published Sept. 30 titled "How Islam Confronts the Oppression and Tyranny [against the Muslims]," Badi said waging jihad against both of these infidels, Israel and the U.S., is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded.

The remarks were delivered in a weekly sermon, published Sept. 30 on the Muslim Brotherhood's website and translated into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Governments trying to stop their people from fighting the United States, he said, "are disregarding Allah's commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah's word will reign supreme" over all non-Muslims.

Rubin concludes: "Let it be said that in September 2010, the Muslim Brotherhood, a group with 100 times more activists than al-Qaida, issued its declaration of war."

He calls the sermon "one of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don't fit their policies; and by experts, because they don't mesh with their preconceptions."
More here

U.S. Concerned About Attitude Of China’s Military

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met his Chinese counterpart in Vietnam on Monday for the first time since the two militaries suspended talks with each other earlier this year, calling for the two countries to prevent “mistrust, miscalculations and mistakes.”

His message seems directed mainly at officers like Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cao of the Chinese Navy.

Days before Mr. Gates arrived in Asia, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China’s first war games with the Australian Navy, exercises to which, he noted pointedly, the Americans were not invited.

Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until “the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.”

The Pentagon is worried that its increasingly tense relationship with the Chinese military owes itself in part to the rising leaders of Mr. Cao’s generation, who, much more than the country’s military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Older Chinese officers remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 set relations back, when American and Chinese forces made common cause against the Soviet Union. Younger officers have known only an anti-American ideology, which casts the United States as bent on thwarting China’s rise.

“All militaries need a straw man, a perceived enemy, for solidarity,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of China’s military and leadership at the National University of Singapore. “And as a young officer or soldier, you always take the strongest of straw men to maximize the effect. Chinese military men, from the soldiers and platoon captains all the way up to the army commanders, were always taught that America would be their enemy.” More here

Reid Aide’s 100% Stock Return Raises Eyebrows

Chris Miller, the top energy aide for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, doubled his $3,500 investment in stock of a renewable energy company in just two years. Skilled investing you might say. But there’s a catch, The Wall Street Journal reports. Reid helped pass a law that benefited the firm, Energy Conversion Devices Inc.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley defended Miller’s action at first. He said the aide played no role in creating tax incentives for renewable-energy firms and that the stock rose for other reasons.

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Obama, Democrats Declare War On U.S. Chamber

With massive midterm losses looming, President Barack Obama is blasting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for accepting foreign donations for its political advertising — a charge that myriad watchdogs and media outlets already have debunked as groundless.

The political battle the allegation has touched off appears to be escalating.

It began at a political rally in Maryland last week, when the president echoed a charge that first appeared in a left-wing blog that the Chamber of Commerce had used foreign contributions to help defray its $75 million campaign advertising budget.

Said Obama: "So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won't tell you where the money for their ads come from."

The Chamber immediately denied the report, explaining that its strict accounting procedures keep foreign and domestic contributions separate.
Denunciations that the allegations appear groundless have spanned the political spectrum.

The New York Times on Monday stated flatly in a news article: "The Democrats have offered no evidence that the Chamber is using foreign money to influence the elections."

On Sunday's "Face the Nation" program, White House senior adviser David Axelrod conceded that the administration has no facts to support its claim, while not backing off on the president's implication that the Chamber may have violated U.S. laws.

When ABC host Bob Schieffer asked whether he had any evidence to support the charge, Axelrod shot back: "Well, do you have any evidence it's not [true] Bob?"

Schieffer's replied by asking Axelrod: "Is that the best you can do?"

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Democrats Unleash IRS And Justice On Opponents Donors

If at first you don't succeed, get some friends in high places to shut your opponents up. That's the latest Washington power play, as Democrats and liberals attack the Chamber of Commerce and independent spending groups in an attempt to stop businesses from participating in politics.

Since the Supreme Court's January decision in Citizens United v. FEC, Democrats in Congress have been trying to pass legislation to repeal the First Amendment for business, though not for unions. Having failed on that score, they're now turning to legal and political threats. Funny how all of this outrage never surfaced when the likes of Peter Lewis of Progressive insurance and George Soros helped to make Democrats financially dominant in 2006 and 2008.

Chairman Max Baucus of the powerful Senate Finance Committee got the threats going last month when he asked Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman to investigate if certain tax exempt 501(c) groups had violated the law by engaging in too much political campaign activity. Lest there be any confusion about his targets, the Montana Democrat flagged articles focused on GOP-leaning groups, including Americans for Job Security and American Crossroads.

Mr. Baucus was seconded last week by the ostensibly nonpartisan campaign reform groups Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, which asked the IRS to investigate whether Crossroads is spending too much money on campaigns. Those two outfits swallowed their referee whistle in the last two campaign cycles, but they're all worked up now that Republicans might win more seats. Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) affiliate of American Crossroads supported by Karl Rove, is a target because it has spent millions already in this election cycle.

Here's more from the Wall Street Journal

Four Years Ago Today

Hey Barrie, Mike, Lynn, Shanie, how's it working for you now?

Powerhouse Nor'easter Coming To Mid-Atlantic, Northeast US

The stage is being readied for a disruptive nor'easter over the eastern U.S. late this week.

A storm is forecast to develop and strengthen rapidly affecting tens of millions of people in the Northeast Thursday into Friday night with wind and rain.

The heaviest rain appears to be aiming from the northern Delmarva Peninsula and eastern Pennsylvania to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Over a couple of inches of rain could fall in part of this region.

Right now, most places appear to be on track for 12 to 24 hours of heavy rainfall, which is probably "not" enough to have a flooding response from most rivers.

Rather than taking a traditional track northward along the Atlantic Seaboard, this storm will form over land first in the mid-Atlantic, then it will shift just off the south coast of New England in explosive fashion.

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