the all-purpose Sarah Palin thread

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I think there probably is a fair balance, it may be right for some countries, don't know about the U.S.. I would say that Zimbabwe right now is the best country to look at in terms of what not to do.



1). Its not so much about the producers themselves but the societies they're fueling, particularly where you have dictatorships (ie. Chavez, Putin and Medvedev questionably) or countries that have terrorist training and schools of radical Islam that have exponentiated with the new money. A lot of these same countries do something much different, they don't have fee-market oil prospectors and refiners, their oil companies are socialized.

2). We would still be selling, this is correct. On the other hand we would at least balance the offset a bit more, keep a bit more of our own money (sell some, buy some). I think we're in agreement that U.S. resources aren't as immense, we have plenty of shale oil and that is a technology which is still a work in progress. All the same though, its about freedom of choice to an extent, while its a commodity I can't imagine that we'd be forced to sell everything we've got.



That is a good question, though I don't think its one that either side of the isle is really addressing effectively.



This is something that I think may have back-peddled on "well she meant to say that the teacher should just have freedom to bring it up, not necessarily teach it". She might not be Biden yet but I am seeing where there have been a lot of things in her past that she left herself open for.



That's telling. I think your very well articulating the differences between pro-life and pro-choice on this as well; pro-life would argue that from a zygote its substantively the same thing; like arguing that an under-ripened banana isn't the same thing as a full grown banana.



I didn't mean easy on the personal level. Politically speaking (politically correct) its much easier to approve a procedure than tell people how to live.



Or they're really that serious about the matter of life - all factors included.



That does make an inherent argument that people are good or bad based on the genes they receive from their parents. I'll admit that early childhood influences can developmentally gnarl people up, including alcoholic parents, physical abuse, molestation, but I can't say I've ever seen research to suggest that you are your parents in that sense.



On your last point , it has to be hell - not something I'd argue in the least. With the programs you mentioned them wanting to cut, do you know what their reasoning is?




What issues are you thinking of?



I don't think it made them weaker, I'm just saying that even they didn't offer it as a marriage option to the best of my knowledge.



I don't think it would cause shifts in sexual identity as much as it would change people's concepts of marriage and in end result the family unit. The idea tends to be that straights would be even more likely to treat marriage certification like overinflated fiat.



No one really knows I guess, its never been done to this extent. Personally I know progress and change will happen, I wouldn't stand in the way of it. At this point if anything I think a lot of this should be tried - if it works great, if not its either more likely to be done right the next time or more likely not to be repeated.



That I can't go with, he still denies the surge to this day.



http://www.heritage.org/research/Homela ... bg2085.cfm

You may not like the source but it gives specifics, names, things you could check up on.



Don't know what to tell you on that one, aside from the fact that its practically a dead horse that we've all had the chance to kick to our hearts content and then some ad nauseum. The reasons for going in were apparent ties between Al Qaeda and Hussein, intelligence agencies all over Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa agreeing that he had WMD's, his shooting at planes over the parallels, his awards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, the yellow cake controversy. If we're safer now its partly that he wasn't able to bribe the U.N. (Oil-For-Food vouchers) into letting him off the hook and going back to what he wanted to do which was make nukes.

You can debate whether that was good enough reason, as compared to Iran, as compared to North Korea. On the other side of things though as we're there we do have to finish the job appropriately.



I'd have to guess your joking with the first bit. Our big concern of course, by the time a major city blows it pretty much ushers in an economic era like we've never seen. Unlike Japan as well we have a situation where most of the populace lived largely westernized lives, are largely pro-west, and are held hostage by their leadership (and yes - thank you Jimmy Carter :eww: ). If Israel does strike it will be as surgical as possible, though yes, the administration is playing the collateral damage game as despots do best - underneath its citizens for the sake of great photos for Reuters. I would like to think the Iranian people can oust him, with our help even, before he awakens the 12th Imam from the well to hasten the apocalypse - that's one thing we quite thankfully don't hear out of our own leadership on any side.

[/quote]

He took a hell of a media hammering, though I still really wonder to this day - as much as many in congress were out for his blood, if they had enough on him why they wouldn't have taken it.

When people talk like this they act like its somehow new. We've had 42 presidents now and they've all been protestant or evangelical of some type? The only way competant adults still cling to those sorts of beliefs is that they'll have them reconciled with reality - they may still have a very intense spirituality, they may talk that sort of Pentecostal rhetoric, but you sure as hell wouldn't see them talking that from the presidents office or the vp's for that matter and its given that impinging on people's free will in terms of religion is very much morally and ethically wrong (unless they're attacking liberties of others).

[/quote]When people talk like this they act like its somehow new. We've had 42 presidents now and they've all been protestant or evangelical of some type? The only way competant adults still cling to those sorts of beliefs is that they'll have them reconciled with reality - they may still have a very intense spirituality, they may talk that sort of Pentecostal rhetoric, but you sure as hell wouldn't see them talking that from the presidents office or the vp's for that matter and its given that impinging on people's free will in terms of religion is very much morally and ethically wrong (unless they're attacking liberties of others).[/quote]

ACtually we've had 43 presidents and only one of them have been Catholic, John F. Kennedy. (The rest have been Protestant, but it would be stretching it to say evangelical, for this movement is one of the most radical and not popular outside of tent revivals until the last few decades.) It was a big deal back tin he early 60's that JFK overcame people's predjudice against voting for a Catholic. I guess voters thought the Pope would be running the US or something. Their fears were groundless of course, and JFK obviously one of the most popular presidents ever. While it is true that it is easiest to judge others because of their religious beliefs, Palin's church has been associated with the more radical edge of the Third Wave, which I guess are associated with the pentecostals. The Third Wave believe in the power of prayer to bring about disasters, and their entire belief system revolves around ultimately bringing to pass the "end of days" scenario in which they believe they will be at the head of a new world order, new apostles answerable only to God (Third Wave leaders call themselves apostles even now). They pray not to end suffering or to ask favors, but to bring about the END, and it is that fanatical belief that is so scary. To read about them and their belief system is even scarier as they seem like a group with a very cult-like ideology and rigidity. This association for the #2 position in the US is for me, too far a stretch, although I believe in freedom of religion. I would never tell anyone what to believe or that they must follow such and such a doctrine, but the Third Wave believes that they can tell people what to follow, and also that if people don't follow them, that they will be destroyed. All pretty scary stuff.

Sarah Palin annoys me.

Actually in retrospect 42 presidents, 43 presidencies (though yes I'll admit, I just slipped - wasn't thinking of it that way myself).



If the later is true, ie. be it that she is into this stuff - that means we have a VP on one side and presidential candidate on the other with sketchy religious credentials. With a democratic house and senate though, she couldn't do much even if it were true; but having both democratic president and democratic legislature really worries me a lot more regardless, particularly with the other stuff that's been mentioned and which I reiterated in a new thread - ie. Ayers, Alinsky, ACORN, all that combining with Reverend Wright who was his mentor and pastor for 20 years; Obama himself may not be as radical as the people who he's surrounded by but he has to remember that people like those mentioned as well as Mayor Daley are the people who got him elected even to the senate let alone presidency, he'd be nothing without them and when they say jump he'll have to say "How high?".

With all of that said though, with regard to Palin's religious beliefs, I'd like to see what both sides have to say on this.

This may be a misunderstanding of what I was advocating. I would't favor giving more money back to someone than they had paid in taxes, but rather raising the amount below which a person isn't required to pay taxes (IIrc $3K right now? Same as it's been for decades?) Basically, if you're living at or below the poverty level, I don't think that you should be paying income taxes. You need your money to eat, pay the rent, put shoes on your kids' feet, etc.



agreed. I'm not a fan of PETA, et. all, either.



Just out of curiosity, I've heard that Louisiana has attracted some business, but I wonder if you have any data on the poverty levels and/or employment levels pre- and post- tax-structure change?




Don't know how many of those there are to compare (messy unstable democracies), maybe if your speaking of satellite states of the old U.S.S.R. but they don't have the economic pull on the overall system.[/quote}

examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guate ... '%C3%A9tat
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00372.html
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mi ... index.html
http://www.africawithin.com/lumumba/who ... umumba.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/amer ... .chile.ap/

It is entirely possible for the majority of a population to support socialist or even communist leaders; it is entirely possible for the majority of a population to support anti-American leaders; it is entirely possible for the majority of a population to support terrorist leaders. In any of those circumstances, a pro-business, pro-American dictator may seem favorable from an American point of view.



And yet it seems that even CEOs who take relatively successful companies and run them to ruin are paid off with huge bonuses. Why not just fire them? At the very least.



If you find out more, let me know. I haven't heard that name yet.



Oh, I'm certain that that's the case. In fact, I would be surprised if there aren't single individuals responsible for thousands of individually chargable incidents of fraud - something as simple as adjusting the diagnosis from 'diabettes unspecified' to 'diabettes uncontrolled' can affect the amount of money medicare pays a hospital on a given admission, and a single biller or coder may review hundreds of admissions a year even in a tiny hospital like mine. If a hospital coder is inclined to fudge things in the hospital's favor, they can do a lot of damage from medicare's POV. On the other hand, I'm also certain that the total incidents of fraud are a tiny percentage of the number of claims submitted (sort of like tax fraud: little fudges may be common, but serious tax evasion (outside of loopholes, that is) is relatively rare in terms of a percentage of individuals filing taxes in any given year). It's not the coder that gets penalized for incidents like this: It's the hospital, and the hospital can be driven into the ground if it gets caught. Even non-billing clinical staff like myself are *heavily* educated by the hospital in order to avoid even accidental fraud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zimbabwe
Not the best explanatory entry, but I don't see any mention of tariffs - price controls and nationalization (the latter in the form of seizing property from white owners and giving it to blacks, and both of which I do understand are not a good idea), yes, but tariffs? Sounds like they were cooperating with the IMF until relatively recently.



That's a good point. I wouldn't mind Saudi Arabia returning to being an exporter of sand (facetious).



http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/06/ ... index.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/06/ ... index.html

It's not that we'd be 'forced' to sell to certain people; it's that the market is international. The oil we drill here in the U.S. is going to the highest bidder, regardless of where they come from. As far as 'balance,' have you looked at the numbers? Even at the most wildly optimistic projections, American wells aren't going to produce enough to change the import ratio significantly.



Genes do mean a lot, though. Look at the personality of a golden retriever vs. that of a Jack Russell terrier - there are individual differences, but the shared genes within a breed show a lot of heritibility in personality traits. From what I can tell, it seems to be ~50/50 as far as the power nature and nurture have over one's personality. Even beyond that, though, a woman should not be forced to carry to term a fetus that mingles her DNA with that of a rapist. It means that she is being forced to produce, with her own body, a permanent link to him - a permanent, intrinsic bond with him, embodied in the fetus. Even if the child that would result does not necessarily grow up to be a rapist itself, its genes are a continuation of a forced relationship.



As far as I can tell, it's simply wanting to save money, and not thinking that those programs are important. But, heavens, forcing rape victims to shell out more than $1K for a rape kit?! That's pretty damn extreme, in my view. Do victims of home robbery have to pay for a CSI team to take fingerprints?



Mmmm. Campaign finance reform. Antipathy towards extreme fundamentalists getting mixed up with the republican party. Immigration reform (actually more recent, and possibly the only time in the last 8 years when I've somewhat agreed with the current admin.). In general, it seems like he swung hard to the right when he decided that he was going to run for president.



How so?



Depending on what you think the surge was for, Obama is correct. The stated objective of the surge was to give the Iraqi politicians space in which to pass some desperately needed legislation, and from what I've heard they're still years behind where they should be. Even on the subject of the markedly decreased violence, it's debatable how much was due to the surge and how much was due to the 'anbar awakening' and to the simple fact that much of the ethnic cleansing that much of the violence was comprised of has been completed.

I'll get back to you on the rest of your post soon.

ACtually we've had 43 presidents and only one of them have been Catholic, John F. Kennedy. (The rest have been Protestant, but it would be stretching it to say evangelical, for this movement is one of the most radical and not popular outside of tent revivals until the last few decades.) It was a big deal back tin he early 60's that JFK overcame people's predjudice against voting for a Catholic. I guess voters thought the Pope would be running the US or something. Their fears were groundless of course, and JFK obviously one of the most popular presidents ever. [/quote]

Actually the religion of the Prsidents has been a lot more varied. As seen below

List of United States Presidential religious affiliations

In essence we have had a (In order of first the specified religion)

Episcopal Church-9 (including Washington, FDR, and Gerald Ford)
Unitarian-4 (including John Adam, Adams Jr., and Taft)
Deist-3 (including Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe)
Presbyterian-7 (including Jackson, Wilson, and Eisenhower)
Dutch Reformed-1, maybe 2? (including T. Roosevelt, maybe Van Buren
Deist or Atheist-1 (Lincoln's ideas on religion are unknown, but two of his close friends say he was either Deist or Atheist)
Independent Christian-3 (including Grant, Andrew Johnson and Hayes)
Disciples of Christ-2 (including James Garfield)
Methodist-2 (including McKinley and Shrub )
Baptist-4 (including Truman, Carter, and Clinton)
Congregationalist-1 (Coolidge)
Quaker-2 (including Hoover and Nixon)
Roman Catholic-1 (Kennedy )

Now I may have screwed up on a number or two but I am confident this is essentially right.

Edit: Eek..Double Post! Sorry!!

Last edited by Hurricane_Delta on 21 Sep 2008, 9:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

Anyone who would stand in the way of a thinking, feeling being's bodily integrity, especially in order to favor a non-thinking, non-feeling being's supposed "welfare," will never get my vote.

I see your concerns, and agree Wright is fairly 'bitter' to coin a phrase. He is old school though, a civil rights worker from a different generation, and I think he sees some threat to himself and his people that won't allow progress to occur between the races. I just wanted him to shut up, not because he was embarrassing to Obama, but just because I thought he was annoying.
I hope the world has moved beyond that old school racism where people are judged on their skin, but people judge how they judge. For me, I think this is a world where people are judged on their personality and thus the smash that Palin has made. She has an instinct for people and it shows. I'm not knocking a powerful female politician by any means and would never want my criticism of her to be regarded as misogynist. But she tends to be a follower of dogma even with such a powerful personality as hers is, and it is that dogma that really turns me off.
I've never had much appreciation for conservatives because I get a picture of intolerance and bigoted smugness (and a lot of wealthy people sweating out the financial chaos we have right now). Truth be told, that kind of thing is everywhere in the human race, but it seems most obvious with the conservatives. It seems reasonable to me that conservatives would question Wright and Ayers, but to me, speaking as a liberal even, Ayers seemed to be some old hippy that maybe people might want to be friends with, but not follow blindly. I think of anybody in Ayers' generation as old hippies, and I'm kinda sick of 'em. How many people today really remember "the Weather Underground"? (Actually, Italy's Red Brigade was much worse than the old W.U.) Sounds like a rock band really, but they were also the subject of a documentary a couple years ago. Is Obama counting on people not remembering them? I think he's someone with a lot of friends, but does he follow all of them, or any of them? I doubt it.
But I judge conservatives by their big-oil, big-corporate, big-money friends, so I can expect that any liberal like Obama would have his associates judged too. We do pick our friends. But I don't do what my friends say, though.
Palin's religious beliefs probably won't come out more than Bush's have. They're there, though, and that concerns me. As you said, because of congress, etc, she probably wouldn't be doing much, but the same is true if Obama was in office. There would be the same checks and balances on him and his liberalism! That's the beauty of our system.

Its funny you'd mention that aspect, I was listening to Gallagher who had on Boyce Watkins who's made a great deal of this race being purely race - that the U.S. is racist, that whites who immigrated here and who's ancestors never owned slaves were still racists because they still profited off the ripples of slavery. There was a caller from the newer generation who debated him and had spoken with Mike Gallagher earlier and he said pretty much exactly what you said about Wright, that a lot of these guys - like Jackson and Sharpton, were from the first wave, were necessary and laid good groundwork, but unfortunately were not passing the torch or baton off to the next generation.

In the states though we are as well seeing a lot of change whether its political figures, orientation, the republican party even has a black republican caucus. I would really like to think that as time goes on though, we won't have race and gender being voting blocks for one particular party or another. Race and gender don't define personality, don't define needs, people are people. To that end though with the conservative movement, like I mentioned maybe earlier here if not in another thread - they're distancing themselves, their ideology, and they're emphasis away from bible-beating and it is logistic. I also think of it like this, we're in a two-party system. We need both to keep an eye on the other for corruption in the case that one party or another won't point out corruption from within. A third party, great dream but it couldn't be a pretty sight when an election could literally be decided by 36% if it was a dead heat and congress, especially if all three had different outlooks, would be looking like an engine someone decided to run without any motor oil.




For the first part I agree - though I think judging on character is big, judging on how they judge is included. Sure, people don't have to be perfect but, if they're either making mistakes out corruption or just sheer intellectual laziness; that's bad. On the other hand I'd definitely like to see a female or black president, it just takes one as such who I think would be a good leader.





I see essentially good people on both sides of the equation, both trying to make the world a better place but there is a good deal of propaghanda from within both parties for their party members. I'm glad to at least live in a liberal area, in a swing state, with as many or more liberal friends IRL just because - I don't know if they make the same scarecrows out of liberals out in the heartland that many city liberals make of conservatives but, I'm glad if that's an influence out there that I haven't run into it because I think it would frankly disgust me just as much.



Depends, by statistics it looks like the senate and house have more seats for conservatives to lose than democrats. Either way a balance would not be struck in the senate, it would be widened notably if republicans lose the predictable amount and even if by some fluke they won all - it would still just be a narrower democrat majority. With McCain and Palin you'd have a republican executive branch and a liberal legislative, with Obama you'd have a liberal executive branch and a liberal legislature.

Ok, here it goes:

1)Richard Reid

Reid was a crazy dude who was apprehended by fellow passengers when they noticed him 'trying to light his shoe.' The Bush admin gets no credit for either recognizing him as a threat or capturing him, nor was he a threat inside the United States.

2)Jose Padilla
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos é_Padilla_(prisoner)
quote:
Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an "enemy combatant" after his arrest in 2002 on suspicion of plotting a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack. That charge was dropped and his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.
On January 3, 2006, he was transferred to a Miami, Florida, jail to face criminal conspiracy charges. On August 16, 2007, José Padilla was found guilty, by a federal jury, of charges against him that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was widely described in media as a suspect of planning to build and explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States, but he was not convicted on this charge

3)Lackawanna Six
Washington Post article on the Lackawanna Six

4)Iyman Faris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyman_Faris
quote:
On 22 June 2003, the United States Department of Justice revealed to Time that Faris had served as a double agent for the FBI for months. Faris was detained two weeks after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan on 1 March. While installed as a double agent for the US Government, Faris sent messages to his terrorist commanders by mobile phone and email from an FBI safe house in Virginia. A senior Bush administration official told Time, "He was sitting in the safe house making calls for us. It was a huge triumph."[2]

5)Virginia "Jihad" Network
Sounds like these were genuinely bad guys, although most seemed to be more interested in going to Afghanistan to fight American soldiers there (? one wonders how great their commitment to harming the U.S. was (or maybe just their intelligence), if they felt that it would benefit their 'cause' more to go to Afghanistan).

6)Dhiren Barot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhiren_Barot
Arrested in England, but definitely interested in attacking within the United States. Possibly guilty of delusions of grandeuer, but I'm glad he's in prison for a long, long time.

7)James Elshafay and Shahawar Matin Siraj, August 2004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahawar_Matin_Siraj
These guys clearly had a plan, but they had no explosives. They were arrested just before the repub. convention, but I haven't seen anything that suggests that they gave a damn about republicans vs. Americans in general. They are described, when they are described as anything other than 'violent young muslim men,' as 'witless, impressionable losers.'

*8)Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yassin_M._Aref
Aref appears to be guilty of knowing someone who was later bombed in Iraq, and also of briefly meeting someone who later founded a terrorist organization, and also of witnessing what he thought was a legitimate loan. He does not seem like a bad guy. Hossain appears to have thought that the loan had something to do with a musical group.

9)Umer Hayat and Hamid Hayat
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/28 ... m-wedick22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamid_and_Umer_Hayat
These guys seem to harbor the typical anti-semitic views of those raised in muslim countries, but I'm unconvinced that there was an al-quaida camp or a sleeper cell.

10)Levar Haley Washington, Gregory Vernon Patterson, Hammad Riaz Samana, and Kevin James
Possibly the real thing. Definitely guilty of trying to fund large actions, actually armed, actually plotting.

11)Michael C. Reynolds
In the first four google pages, I find one link associating this name with a terrorist plot:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/ ... -Sting.php
There is no wikipedia entry.

12)Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, Zand Wassim Mazloum
Google turns up less than two complete pages on this group, with links composed entirely of blogs, 'jihadwatch' sites, and laundry lists of 'successfully thwarted terrorist plots' like the one you linked to above. Even the Jihadwatch sites do not claim that this group was plotting to do anything within the United States.

13)Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Haris_Ahmed
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/04/20/bangla ... index.html
Ahmed is apparently guilty of videotaping buildings. Not something I had ever heard of as a crime. It's not clear how Sadequee is linked to him. Perhaps more will be revealed at the trial.

14)Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin, and Rotschild Augstine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seas_of_David
One acquittal and two mistrials.
Some talk, not a lot of action.

15)Assem Hammoud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_bombing_plot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assem_Hammoud
Arrested in Lebanon and accused of talking to others (not in person) about an unlikely-to-succeed plot to flood Manhattan.

16)Liquid Explosives Plot
Ah, yes, the reason that I can no longer take enough conditioner (in one bottle) on an airplane to last a week! Vile villains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_trans ... craft_plot
Six of them made 'martyr' videos. That's evidence enough of intent to blow themselves up, along with many other people.

17)Fort Dix Plot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Fort_Dix_attack_plot
Again, possibly the real thing. I don't honestly think that they would have been able to kill a great number of people (since they were going for an American military target, rather than a bunch of civilians in the mall), and I think that they would have quickly been killed themselves, but they would have caused genuine damage and it's good that they didn't get to murder anybody.

18)JFK Plot
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/0 ... t_pla.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... 69,00.html
quote:
'Jet fuel is flammable and can be made to explode, but it's difficult,' says Richard Kuprewicz, an independent energy consultant who has worked with pipeline operators for 33 years. Even if someone did manage to blow up a fuel tank, the resulting fire would not spread through the main pipeline, he says. 'Are they true terrorism targets that would shut down JFK for weeks or even days? No.'

...they had very little idea what they were actually doing. In the worst-case scenario, there might have been a fire — which would have been contained to an unpopulated area of the airport, since that's where the tanks and the pipeline are located.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/02/jfk.te ... index.html

19)Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
A real bad guy. Arrested in Pakistan, not the U.S.
Consolation prize for not getting Bin Laden.
There is suspicion that he had been in custody for some time, and that the announcement of his arrest was saved as a 'get out of trouble free' card for the Bush Admin.



So, ok. We do have a few legitimate plots that I didn't know about. However, it appears that local police forces (NYPD, LAPD) and overseas operations (Great Britain in specific) deserve more credit than the CIA or the FBI, which seem mainly to be involved in semi-entrapment schemes against young men full of big talk. It also appears that overseas targets were at least as likely as, if not more than, American targets to be discussed.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0209/p99s01-duts.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/10/iraq.intel/index.html


Never mind that weapons inspectors were in Iraq prior to the war, and Hussein had been cowed into cooperating with them... until they were recalled by Bush.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/12 ... memogate12
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/German_BND_ ... WMD_claims
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/11 ... na-niger11


He did shoot at some American patrol planes - until we bombed that capability out of him (before the war).


Disgusting, but hardly a reason to invade.


which was thoroughly discredited by Ambassador Wilson before the war, for which Wilson's wife, an active CIA agent, was outed by the administration in retaliation for Wilson's disagreement.



He was well in hand without invasion. He had figured out that Bush was serious, and was starting to cooperate. If Bush had stopped there, it would have been brilliant: rattle the saber hard enough to thoroughly convince him you mean business, without the actual losses to the United States (in terms of both soldiers and money) of an invasion. The fact that Bush invaded anyway is a statement either to Bush's stupidity, to his vengeful nature, or to his desire to invade Iraq for other reasons.



Technically, we don't have to. When you've bought a boat, and poured thousands of dollars into it to fix it up, and then you find out it will cost thousands more (that you don't have) to make it sea-worthy, the question isn't, 'can we abandon the work that we've already done?' it's, 'can we afford to lose any more, or should we cut our losses and get out of the boat business?'
It hurts American pride to get out without achieving our objectives, but the fact is that we (in the form of our government) screwed up right royally, and we frankly have to admit that.



If Israel could pull out a surgical strike specifically on Iran's nuclear sites, with sufficient finesse that very few, or no, civilians were killed, I'd be all for it (especially if there was a little propaganda from our side explaining what had happened, since Ahmadinijad certainly wouldn't tell the truth), I'd be all for it.
On the other hand, we do hear apocalyptic speech from our own leaders, particularly Palin, who 'believes that Jesus will return within her own lifetime.'



You and me both - though I question whether they really wanted his blood, not whether they had the evidence to take it.

let me assure you that they do. I started college at Oregon State University in Corvallis, an ag town, and left after two years because of the far-right atmosphere of the town (I loved the school). During the time that I was there, posters for a visit by Anita Hill were defaced with racial and sexist slurs; a black student fumbling with his keys at the door to his door was urinated upon and spat upon, along with having racial slurs thrown at him, by two white students on a balcony above him (the two students were not suspended until the student body raised an outcry about it - they were drunk, which apparently is acceptable as a valid excuse for peeing on someone and calling him a 'n****r.') A stuffed body was hanged in effigy near the library.
Women were assumed to be in school in order to find a husband. The entire atmosphere was one of self-righteous conservatism that assumed that anyone who disagreed was a crazy 'big city liberal' communist satanist, and that no one reasonable and human would possibly be anything other than extremely conservative. I was accused of being a satanist when I made it clear that I disagreed with many of these things.

I transferred to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, to get away from that atmosphere; instead, I found its polar opposite - just as many conspiracy theories ('the U.S. government' rather than 'the U.N.' being the culprit), just as much credulous acceptance of anything that fit with people's worldviews, and just as much hatred of the other side.
*sigh*
I do fit in slightly better here, though, since compared to the United States average I'm rather liberal. No one's accused me of being a satanist, but they have accused me of 'supporting the war.'

Actually the religion of the Prsidents has been a lot more varied. As seen below

List of United States Presidential religious affiliations

In essence we have had a (In order of first the specified religion)

Episcopal Church-9 (including Washington, FDR, and Gerald Ford)
Unitarian-4 (including John Adam, Adams Jr., and Taft)
Deist-3 (including Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe)
Presbyterian-7 (including Jackson, Wilson, and Eisenhower)
Dutch Reformed-1, maybe 2? (including T. Roosevelt, maybe Van Buren
Deist or Atheist-1 (Lincoln's ideas on religion are unknown, but two of his close friends say he was either Deist or Atheist)
Independent Christian-3 (including Grant, Andrew Johnson and Hayes)
Disciples of Christ-2 (including James Garfield)
Methodist-2 (including McKinley and Shrub )
Baptist-4 (including Truman, Carter, and Clinton)
Congregationalist-1 (Coolidge)
Quaker-2 (including Hoover and Nixon)
Roman Catholic-1 (Kennedy )

Now I may have screwed up on a number or two but I am confident this is essentially right.[/quote]

Looking at the list, it's pretty apparent that, as I mentioned in my post, we have had only one Catholic president, who broke a lot of rules getting himself elected because people of Protestant faith, as enumerated in your list, did not at the time vote for Catholics. Protestant, that is, as again defined by the list above, and there are even more variations, but they are ALL basically Protestant faiths. In other words, they do not follow the teachings of the Pope or see the Pope as a churchleader. They all have differences between them, except for the fact they do not follow the Pope. You can even look it up in the dictionary. A Protestant is one who is "a Christian NOT of the Catholic or Eastern church." And I guarantee you America has never voted for a Greek (or Bulgarian or Russian) Orthodox president. (That is what is meant by Eastern church.)

So when I say they were all Protestant, I was correct, although I'm not tooting my own horn, it's just what the dominant faith was, or maybe still is. A baptist is a protestant, so is Methodist, so is a Lutheran, and a Presbyterian. They protested against the Roman Catholic church, led by a monk named Martin Luther in the 16th century, demanding an end to certain Catholic practices, and instead what they got was a brand new religion: Protestanism. Of course, this led to a lot of burnings and flaying of heretics, but eventually the Protestants got established and then expanded into many different branches, some of them on your list.