Recycling at its coolest...

BIG thanks to my dad for passing this along - a hotel in Costa Rica has refurbished a Boeing 727 airframe and turned it into a hotel suite, of all things!

The fully outfitted, meticulously detailed, two bedroom, Boeing 727 fuselage suite. We have refurbished a vintage 1965 Boeing 727 airframe, which in its prior life shuttled globetrotters on South Africa Air and Avianca Airlines ( Colombia ).

Our phoenix is now ready for its future duty as the most exclusive hotel suite in Costa Rica.

Need a getaway place?

727 Home Entrance

We salvaged this airframe, piece by piece, from its San Jose airport resting place. We carefully transported the pieces on five, big-rig trucks to the jungles of Manuel Antonio where they have been resurrected into a unique jumbo hotel suite. Our classic airplane, nestled on the edge of the National Park in our Costa Verde II area, is perched on a 50-foot pedestal. At this height, you will enjoy scenic ocean and jungle views from the hard wood deck built atop the plane's former right wing.

The plane's interior is Costa Rican teak paneling from the cockpit to the tail. Furnishings are hand-carved, teak furniture from Java , Indonesia Our 727 home features two air conditioned bedrooms--one with two queen sized beds and the other with one queen sized bed, each with its own private bath-a flat screen TV, a kitchenette, dining area foyer; an ocean view terrace; a private entrance up a river rock, spiral staircase; and 360 degrees of surrounding gardens.


Enjoy an evening on the terrace while sipping a glass of wine and observing your tree top neighbors: sloths, toucans and monkeys................

Our refurbished Boeing 727 home is not the only such dwelling in the world: We were inspired by a Forbes Magazine article about a company offering hurricane-proof living via surplus Boeing 727 airframes! Of course, we were intrigued and found some new ways to introduce convenience and luxury to this very prosaic bit of aluminum scrap. We are sure you will agree with us!

TV Area


Kitchenette Dining Foyer


Master Bedroom


Master Bath


Second Bedroom


Wing Balcony


Ocean View From 727 Balcony


Amplified Balcony View

Rates:
From January 2, 2009 - April 30, 2009 $350.00 daily plus tax

From May 01, 2009 - Nov 17, 2009 $300.00 daily plus tax

Heckuva deal, I'd say...

An Editorial in Today's New York Times...

This hits EXACTLY what I've been saying...

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
By FRANK RICH
WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

And now, the backlash:

Because Shepard Smith of Fox News had the temerity to call it like he saw it, the Right is now calling for his head. The whole article can be found atMediaMatters.com.

On June 10, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting validated a recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report alerting law enforcement to an increased threat from "rightwing extremists," including "white supremacists." Smith said: "[T]his is a former military guy and he's gone extremist. They were warning us for a reason -- not about something political or social or anything else. ... It was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right." Smith also said that he's receiving "more and more frightening" emails from viewers since President Obama's election, including conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate. In response to Smith's remarks about the Holocaust museum shooting, several conservative media figures have attacked Smith or called for his firing from Fox News.

Sorry folks, but Jew-hating Holocaust deniers ARE extreme rightists. And DHS is correct. Anybody remember Timothy McVeigh? His ilk is on the rise again, and they're being egged on by the likes of Beck, Hannity, Coulter and Limbaugh - though, like all good neocons, they're accountability-averse. They'll continue to claim thay have no responsibility for this while simultaneously blaming the "liberal" media for the decline of American culture.
I wonder if they ever actually listen to what comes out of their mouths?

Whoa...

Even FOX news is starting to connect the dots:


Wouldn't have expected this from them.

Now, THIS is funny...

The opening bit from "Frasier" on 2/11/99 - 6 minutes of some of the best physical comedy you'll ever see. David Hyde-Pierce turns in a bravura performance:

Good Lord, they've gone utterly around the bend...

The right wing in this country has officially gone into "wackyland".

And that's a bad thing, as surprised as some of you may be to hear that from me. We NEED a viable opposition party in this country - one-party rule is a little too "politburo" for my liking. But the Republicans aren't it anymore - they have gone utterly, certifiably, NUTS.

As evidence, I cite as Exhibit A Rush Limbaugh's recent call to boycott GM until the government gets out of it. Brilliance! Let's hurt AMERICAN workers and send MORE money overseas because we don't like the President! let's put MORE people out of work and put our economy in even worse shape than it's already in! THAT will show Washigton who's boss! Let's destroy our national economy to prove we're right!

Rush, you're still on the drugs, aren't you?

As Exhibit B - M, I give you the recent article in Salon Titled "Crazy Right-Wing Myths About Obama", which sums these up better than I could - tells you what they are, and who's spreading them. WARNING - you may feel your own sanity slipping away as you read this...these are THAT nutso.

And finally, as Exhibit N, we're back to Rush, and his now-famous declaration "I hope he (Obama) fails". For heaven's sake, this is like being on an airliner and hoping your pilot fails because you don't like his views on universal health care!
Stone-cold fact, folks: Obama fails, we are ALL screwed.

And as to the right wing's newly-rediscovered fiscal responsiblity: where were these guys when Bush and the GOP Congress were taking surpluses and turning them to record deficits? Resoundingly silent, is where they were. The GOP drove this country into a ditch (AGAIN - just like in 1896, 1929, and 1991), and now they're gonna bitch about the cost of the tow truck!

Priceless...and certifiably insane.

The SOCIALISM, you say!

Many on the right are having a field day with the "Obama's a Socialist - America's becoming a Socialist nation!" theme of late. So let's look at it objectively:
Merriam-Webster defines "Socialism" as follows:

1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

OK, so it seems like, in Socialism, government owns and/or controls most businesses and functions thereof. Are we close to this situation?
NOTE: since the text in the image is unclear, I'll point out that the BLUE area is the percentage of American corporate and business assets currently NOT held by the US government; RED represents those that are so held.


Doesn't seem like it - not even close.
Does the right ever get tired of being proven wrong? Hasn't seemed to slow them down yet.