Thanks BIIII for the info on the anti-Michael Moore films. I'd be interested in seeing them, sounds like they borrow heavily from Moore's technique (an unintended tip of the cap?). I'd also be interested in the Edge's review of these films, espescially "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis". I hear that piece of fiction is about as believable as the Jessica Lynch story invented by the Pentagon and reported as fact by the evil liberal media. Remember that one? Let's hear the Edge's expert film critique.People like the Edge can't deal with reality when it isn't sanitized for consumtion by "news" organizations like Fox who present the war and it's ugly human toll as if it were a baseball boxscore. Michael Moore shows an alternate point of view and he's branded "David Duke of the Left". The Edge proves once again the Right's view that anyone speaking out against the Administration and its policies is UnPatriotic, UnAmerican and a kook.Oh. And let's not forget the war in Iraq was about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Heed the call of the Nazi-Stalinists-Green Party alliance Ralph Nader Calls Israel a "Puppeteer" 12:30 Jun 30, '04 / 11 Tammuz 5764(IsraelNN.com) On Tuesday, as broadcast on the American cable network C-Span, independent presidential candidate and environmental crusader Ralph Nader said the following: "What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine of foreign visitation from the head of the Israeli government. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with the puppets in Congress. And then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for the Washington puppet show to be replaced by the Washington peace show." He made the speech as part of a conference of the Council for the National Interest titled, "The Muslim Vote in Election 2004". In addition to Nader, speakers included Ambassador Edward Peck, former Iraq Chief of Mission and others.http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=64895

Paul Bremer left behind "grave security threats, a sputtering economy and an appointed government with little popular support," concludes the Washington Post's (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13216-2004Jun28?language=printer) front page assessment of Monday's transfer of power in Iraq. The New York Times begins its coverage ( http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/middleeast/29DIPL.html&OQ=hpQ3DQ26pagewantedQ3DprintQ26positionQ3D) with the statement that "Iraq was officially made sovereign Monday, but how sovereign is still in dispute." The Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/services/site/premium/access-registered.intercept)branded it "an inauguration on the run." Franklin leaves his diatribe in post #1023By contrast, the Boston Globe's Anne Barnard (http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/06/29/iraqis_gain_sovereignty?mode=PF) plays it straight, and gets to the inauguration speech of Prime Minister Allawi in paragraph three, a subject the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&destination=register&nextstep=gather&application=reg30-world&applicationURL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13049-2004Jun28.html) pushed into paragraph six and the New York Times relegated to paragraph 10. Thus the bigs work to minimize the accomplishment in Baghdad, and to begin gnawing away at the credibility of the new government in Iraq.Does American media want the interim government to succeed or to fail? Reporters and editors would clamor on and on about their interest only in the objective reporting of the events, but why does the Post, for example, find it necessary to refer to Allawi as "a prime minister who had been a CIA-supported opponent of Hussein," a description sure to mirror those used by extremist opponents of the transition to democracy.Every article and commentary on the new government will either add to its legitimacy or detract from it. It is impossible to conclude that the American press want a successful transition. Like so many Franklins & Michael Moores, they are in the business of delivering the worst possible assessments of all events, the better to usher in a new round of chaos and instability. The "uprising" in April and the urgent warnings relayed of a "Sunni-Shia" coalition to challenge the occupation was so much gas, and now that Sadr is marginalized, the U.N. on board, and Bremer gone, Blowback & the media chorus has to find a new song of despair to sing. Iraq isn't Vietnam, but much of the American press in Baghdad sure wishes it was.For a treatment of Monday's events equal to their importance, read Fouad Ajami's essay (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005282) from OpinionJournal.com. As for the future, Victor Davis Hanson has it right (http://www.victorhanson.com/Articles/Private%20Papers/High_Noon_on_June_30.html): "The key, of course, will be for the United States to stay engaged as it did in Korea and the Balkans -- and not flee as it did in Vietnam circa 1974-5." The November election will be a referendum on American resolve. Kerry represents the cut-and-run ethic his entire career has embodied. Bush means staying the course. An elite media that is nearly unanimous in its distaste for Bush will do whatever it can to erode American staying power the better to erode support for Bush. Perhaps after November's vote, the editorial rooms of America might find it possible to root for democracy and freedom in the middle east. Don't look for that here though.

I know you Moore defenders demand examples of Moore's deceptions. Easiest part of the Michael Moore paranoid fantasy to explode: That President Bush arranged for the bin Laden family to flee the U.S. after 9/11. (See that story from The Hill posted below) Richard Clarke --hero to Moore's movie in other parts-- let the bin Ladens go. It never got to Bush. Moore didn't have time to put that in the movie. Oh. And let's not forget the war in Afghanistan was about an oil pipeline.

BTW "Edge", thanks for the link to the Hitches piece. Needs and deserves to be read and discussed, in conjunction with a good watching of Fahrenheit 9-11, and a strong dose of Gore Vidal.

"edge": if you wrote that, thanks for putting down your own thoughts, even though my guess is that i disagree with them.what exactly did you find deceptive about Farhenheit?And no, you are wrong. Someone who likes the movie is not a "fool," just someone with whom you disagree with.And Hitchens' credibility leaves something to be desired. Does he remember to mention that he was a cheerleader for that miserably dumb experiment called the war in Iraq? Did I say "experiment"? Oops. scratch that, I mean "quagmire."In case anyone missed it, the US civilian overseers snuck out of Iraq yesterday leaving US enlisted men sitting ducks for the rage of the Arab world. No other way to describe it: snuck out. Time to bring the boys home, now that the civilians have recognized in deed if not in word their awful awful mistake.

Conservative film critic Michael Medved advised that one could not possibly grasp how lousy a film is Fahrenheit 9/11 unless one had seen it. So I went yesterday, and Michael was right. The movie gives propagandists a bad name. At least it could have been well-made anti-American tripe. Instead it is a crudely made and insufferably dull march through the fever swamps of the unhinged left. It is pulling in big bucks, which is a testament to the disposable income of the swamp residents, but put me down as one in favor of even broader distribution and bigger box offices for the picture. It is an anchor around John Kerry's neck as ordinary Americans not filled with self-loathing will despise Moore for his transparent lies and not trust a political party that does not reject them. I am more certain than I was last week that attending the premier and the standing ovation that followed it was a mistake for Tom Daschle. The folks in South Dakota should hear repeatedly of Daschle's sympathy for Moore's project and point-of-view. The John Kerry-Michael Moore Democrats do in fact represent a low point for that party, and unless and until the Kerrys and Daschles denounce the fraud for what he is, they are stuck with him Some on the left are proclaiming Moore to be their Limbaugh. He's not. Moore is the Democrats' David Duke, but they are putting their arm around him.I will not reprise the now well-known deceptions abundant in the movie. The best romp through that territory is an article by Christopher Hitchens'( http://politics.slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ ). But I will note the one undeniable benefit of the movie's success. It provides a handy reference to the intelligence of the person who sees it. If you encounter anyone speaking in tones even remotely approaching respect for the movie, you have proof positive that the speaker is a fool, not to be trusted on any point, for he or she has given testimony as to their ignorance of basic facts and of an inability to detect even elephant-sized inconsistencies in argument and story line. Michael Moore is the latest in a long line of entrepreneurs who have proven P.T. Barnum to have been on the money when it came to the number of suckers abroad in our land. Sure he's a Jabba-sized oaf, but give him his due. He knew how to play the left's paranoia like a fiddle, and he did.

To "one of your heroes," yes, i did find the article on Richard Clarke taking responsibility for letting all the SAudi royals and Bin Ladens out right after 9/11 helpful, up to a point. Clarke taking responsibility pinpoints an official but still does not answer the "why?" question. And sorry i hadn't responded. I did earlier in a message that got eaten by my computer just as i was posting it. oh well. does not excuse my lack of response.Those others who continue to put garbage - lots of it, like "you missed your calling" below - as well as reprints on our site - please do go away and go cut and paste somewhere else.Or else I invite you to critique our lyrics. If you can find a factual error - or at least a provocative other way of looking at an issue - then we will put it up. At least that way, you'll actually have to use your brain in a constructive rather than pointless way. Try it, you'll like it.

Deleted by topic administrator 07-29-2006 06:00 AM

A confused, round the bend lunatic....GORE TEXTJUNE 24, 2004 When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear. It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he - the president - label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty - even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal. What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together. What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power - even without a declaration of war by the Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current President's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief. I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point? Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history - a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent - that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war. Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."In more recent decades, the emergence of new weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarily increase the war powers of the President at the expense of Congress do not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president - when added to his other powers - carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our constitution, and in the process, threatening our liberty.They were greatly influenced - far more than we can imagine - by a careful reading of the history and human dramas surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic. They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined his military commander role with his chief executive role, the Senate - and with it the Republic - withered away. And then for all intents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for seventeen centuries, until its rebirth in our land.Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander-in-chief role and his head of government role to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America. In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case in the 1950's, the single most important Supreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, "The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new Executive in their image...and if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian." I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked on September 11th, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. But just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country that, according to the best evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bi-partisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us. As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm. A little over a year ago, when we launched the war against this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al Qaeda, and not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda of any kind. And, of course, over the course of this past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, the President and the Vice President are arguing with this commission, and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right, and that there actually was a working co-operation between Iraq and al Qaeda. The problem for the President is that he doesn't have any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite of that, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like to pause for a moment to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. And I think it's particularly important because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government. To begin with, our founders wouldn't be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it's so important particularly for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda isn't true. Among these Americans who still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the President's decision to invade Iraq. But among those who accept the commission's detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly. And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the President took us to war when he didn't have to. Almost nine hundred of our soldiers have been killed, and almost five thousand have been wounded. Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there's a meaningful connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they'll not only lose support for the controversial decision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they've picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick. But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the President's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to this editorial from the Financial Times: "There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny - however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense."Of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with the promised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92% of Iraqis, while only 2% see them as liberators. But right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie -- visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resorted to statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70% of the American people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The myth that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together was no accident - the President and Vice President deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe's top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al Qaeda claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "an exaggeration."And at least some honest voices within the President's own party admitted as such. Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, "Saddam is not in league with al Qaeda...I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda." But those voices did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the President and Vice President used carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed al Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, the President told the country "You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam" and that the "true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government." By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network."But after the invasion, no ties were found. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al Qaeda monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al Qaeda. By August, three former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al Qaeda claim was "tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies." And earlier this year, Knight-Ridder newspapers reported "Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence" of a connection.So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead of the candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence. Vice President Cheney insisted even this week that "there clearly was a relationship" and that there is "overwhelming evidence." Even more shocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: "Was Iraq involved with al-Qaeda in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." He then claimed that he "probably" had more information than the commission, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults. The President was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." He provided no evidence.Friends of the administration tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an Al Qaeda meeting. But within hours, the commissions files yielded definitive evidence that it was another man with a similar name - ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument. They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government. That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad decisions also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage. To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with Al Qaeda. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission "finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie" - a clear statement of the obvious - and said there is no "fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said." He tried to deny that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression of linkage between Al Qaeda and Iraq.Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire." Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking government officials "the toughest of the tough questions." Rather went so far as to compare Administration efforts to intimidate the press to "necklacing" in apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as "an obscene comparison." "The fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Rather explained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush Administration. Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the Administration's policy "makes it complicated and more difficult" to fight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a certain extent my station, was intimidated by the Administration." The Administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the President's consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President...you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation. Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report "without fear or favor" our democracy will disappear. Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again. We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions. We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war. But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President's policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse - and even torture and murder - by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." At least we don't have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant and overbroad." But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo - that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information - most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush, meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the bush administration to ignore the United nations, do serious damage to our most alliances in the world, violate international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fools gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress, courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation.If the congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process. Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles, "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them...to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men." The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal... If the president, for example approves something, approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president's decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law."Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as President before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis. The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings. In some ways, our current President is actually claiming significantly more extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting the see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who picked the staff lawyers at Justice

And don't forget these additional propaganda films about Michael Moore-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just as his "Fahrenheit 9/11" opens nationwide, several filmmakers are readying documentaries aimed at debunking Michael Moore, and a new film festival is being planned that will feature such works as well as other movies well to the right of Moore's films.Scheduled Sept. 9-11 in Dallas, the American Film Renaissance, as the festival will be known, has just been announced by co-founder Jim Hubbard, who said it is bankrolled primarily by some "big-time conservative donors."Hubbard currently is negotiating to show two films critical of Moore. The first is "Michael Moore Hates America," made by newcomer Michael Wilson and funded partially by Brian Cartmell, who made a small fortune when he sold his Internet domain registration company, eNic, to Verisign. The feature film, made for $200,000 and featuring appearances from Penn Jillette and John Stossel, among others, is looking for a theatrical and DVD distribution deal. The second is the bigger-budget effort "Michael & Me" that was made by talk-radio star and soon-to-be TV host Larry Elder. The 90-minute documentary takes on Moore's 2002 anti-gun documentary, "Bowling for Columbine," Elder said."My film is a defense of those who own guns and of the Second Amendment," said Elder, whose "The Larry Elder Show" from Warner Bros. Prods. starts Sept. 13 on CBS affiliates in most major markets.Elder said that he borrows liberally from Moore, including a "Bowling"-like animated segment that has Elder interviewing an obviously tense Moore. "He's sweating and sweating to the point he's reed thin, then he pulls out a gun and shoots me."Moore didn't agree to an interview for either Elder's movie or Wilson's. "I did ambush him at a book signing in Santa Monica, and that's in the film," Elder said. "I asked him how many times Americans used guns for defensive purposes. He had nothing. No blooming clue."For Moore's part, he said he's familiar with the title "Michael Moore Hates America" but doubts the movie even exists, beyond the trailer that can be seen on the Internet."You're being duped by the kooky right," he said. "I've been waiting to see this movie. It sounds like great science fiction."Moore said he hadn't heard of Elder's film "Michael & Me."As for the festival, Hubbard said that about 10 films are confirmed, and he'll cap it at about two dozen. Film reviewer Michael Medved is a confirmed guest as is Lionel Chetwynd, whose Showtime movie "DC 9/11," starring Timothy Bottoms as President Bush, will be shown."I'm itching to show that anywhere I can," Chetwynd said. "Like with all cable films, you want to keep it out there as long as you can to get it in front of as wide an audience as possible."Hubbard and wife, Ellen, both attorneys, co-founded the festival in the spirit of competition. Boycott efforts, like the one from the group MoveAmericaForward.org that is asking exhibitors not to show Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," "are for the weak," Hubbard said."We want everyone to see Michael Moore's film," he said. "We also want everyone to see 'Michael Moore Hates America.' Conservatives complain about institutional bias in Hollywood. They need to stop whining and get out there and produce.""Documentaries," added filmmaker Wilson, "are not 'Lions of the Serengeti' anymore. In this politically charged climate, they're skewed to an agenda, be it Michael Moore's or mine."Not all films screened at the American Film Renaissance will invoke Moore. Patrick Wright's documentary, "Is It True What They Say About Ann?" focuses on Ann Coulter, the Fox News pundit. It was recently screened at the Maryland Film Festival.And the war on terror also is expected to be a dominant theme at the American Film Renaissance."Liberal Hollywood has basically ignored the subject," filmmaker Jason Apuzzo said. His entry to the festival is "Terminal Island" and stars his wife, Govindini Murty, with a cameo from Irvin Kershner, director of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Never Say Never Again." Kershner, who Apuzzo is careful to note that he doesn't share the same politics as Apuzzo and Murty, nevertheless mentored the couple in the making of their film."Conservative messages don't have a chance in contemporary Hollywood," Apuzzo said. "But there's another side in Hollywood. We are small in numbers but passionate.""Terminal Island" is a black-and-white feature film about a woman being stalked by a Muslim terrorist who is himself being stalked by a bounty hunter."When you shop a script like this around," said Murty, "studio execs say, 'Is this about Muslim terrorists? We don't want to touch it.' "So why have a couple of lawyers from Texas created a film festival? "I've always been interested in the cultural and political messages in film," Jim Hubbard said. "To be frank, whenever there is such a message, it's liberal. For 40 years the left has had a near monopoly, and we're going to counter that."

Dear franklin,In response to your post, Re-Re-Re-Posted:Re-Posted:Does this help you franklin?Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.” Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened. Clarke’s claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim s as material witnesses to the attacks.http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx

Make sure to go see Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", now out in theatres nationwide. Let us know what you think of the film. I am hoping to have a friend, who recorded sound on the film, join the forum and take some questions.Here's some review quotes from that liberal media bastion FOX News: "As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice."also:"But, really, in the end, not seeing "F9/11" would be like allowing your First Amendment rights to be abrogated, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat."and finally:"More than even "The Passion of the Christ," "F9/11" is going to be a "see it for yourself" movie when it hits theaters on June 25. It simply cannot be missed, and I predict it will be a huge moneymaker.And that's where Disney's Michael Eisner comes in. Not releasing this film will turn out to be the curse of his career."full story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122680,00.html

Knowing a bit about J.S. Mill, I doubt that the quote attributed to him is either genuine or in context. "Not You": put up or shut up: get the citation.Orwell must be rolling in his grave having his words used by a supporter of the current misAdministration, masters of Orwellian double-speak and lies.And for "Get a Clue Bob": clearly you've never worked a minimum wage job and had to rely on it, or else YOU would have a clue. Not only clueless words, but mean-spirited as well. Whatever happened to "Compassionate Conservatism"? Oh wait, that's right, Bush is a "uniter not a divider." Just an amazing string of lies that the minority of the popular vote supported (the majority of the popular vote, you may recall, went to Gore).

To You and your ilk:"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)"… there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States..." George Orwell (1903-1950)<---- This "partially" sums your side up ---->

Let's just end poverty NOW, shall we, Walt? Let's set that minimum wage at $27.55 per hour with time-and-a-half for any overtime. To assure an affluent and stress-free lifestyle for America's hardworking poor, let's limit the work week to four 8-hour days, with any additional time to be overtime. Of, course, we need free medical and free life insurance for the poorpeople. Free internet connections, and free dishwashers, too. Three week paid vacations plus all national holidays to be paid also. Family Time, too. Black Mold insurance is an absolute must! Send the bills to George Soros, that rich turd!

All Blowback fans in Florida:Floridians For All needs your help in getting a minimum wage amendment on the 2004 ballot.From the site:"If the federal minimum wage had been increased to keep up with rising prices over the last 25 years, it would now bring in $15,431 per-year—not the $10,712 it currently does if one works 40 hours per week for $5.15 per hour. As the cost of living keeps going up, the over 300,000 minimum wage workers in Florida, are forced to stretch their dollars even further since Congress hasn't done anything in 6 years. Floridians can do something about raising wages for working families now, by supporting a minimum wage increase. Floridians for All is proposing a minimum wage of $6.15 per hour with indexing to inflation. That means not only a big raise for minimum wage workers, almost 20%, but also that as the cost of living keeps going up, so will the minimum wage. In order to get this question on the ballot in 2004, we need your help."Vote Walt!

R.I.P. Johnny RamoneGo now brother and join your mates Joey & Dee Dee at the big gig in the sky

How America can win the intelligence warDeparted US Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet tried to ascertain whether available intelligence justified a war, I observed last week. The late president Ronald Reagan's CIA chief, Bill Casey, knew that if you want intelligence, first you start a war.If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. Reagan's people had the courage to ask the right question to begin with, namely whether the Soviet system could keep pace with America's drive for strategic superiority. The diplomatic and academic establishment asked the wrong question, that is, how detente might be perpetuated with a seemingly eternal Russian empire. Was communism merely a somewhat obstreperous partner, or an enemy to be defeated?Every US intelligence assessment of Soviet military strength and morale available in 1981 was dead wrong. Washington learned better by putting Moscow under stress. How adaptable was Russian weapons technology? Start a high-tech arms race with the Strategic Defense Initiative and find out. How good were Russian avionics? Help the Israeli air force engage Syria's MiGs in the Bekaa Valley in 1982, and the destruction with impunity of Russian-built fighters and surface-to-air missile sites would provide a data point. How solid was Russian fighting morale? Instigate irregular warfare against the Russian army in Afghanistan and learn.The United States lacks the aptitude and inclination to penetrate the mind of adversary cultures (Why America is losing the intelligence war, November 11, 2003). In the so-called war on terror, it lacks the floating population of irredentist emigres who provided a window into Russian-occupied Eastern Europe back during the Cold War. But the best sort of intelligence stems not from scholarship but from decisiveness of command and clarity of mission. "War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one," observes Sir John Keegan in Intelligence and War, published last year. President George W Bush might do well to read it carefully before choosing the next CIA director.It was not the intellectuals but the bullyboys of the Reagan administration who shook loose the relevant intelligence. In 1981 the CIA enjoyed a surfeit of Russian speakers, in contrast to today's paucity of Arabic translators. But William Casey routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies PhDs, reaching out instead to irregulars who could give him the insights he required.Intelligence in warfare presents a different sort of intellectual challenge than academics are trained to address. President Reagan, no intellectual in the conventional sense, nonetheless formed a clear assessment of what the enemy was, what it wanted, and how it might be defeated. Without the courage to define and then engage the enemy, intelligence services will wander randomly in the dark.If in 1981 the enemy was the "evil empire" of Soviet communism, who is the enemy of the West today? A number of Washington's critics, for example Dr Daniel Pipes, observe that it is senseless to speak of a "war on terrorism", for terrorism is a tactic, a mere method to achieve a strategic goal. But what is the goal and who wishes to achieve it? Without defining the enemy, how can one define the mission?Pipes and others propose instead to declare war upon "radical Islam", a formulation that leads to just as much confusion. No one, least of all the vast majority of the world's Muslims, can say with any clarity what distinguishes radical Islam from "moderate Islam".Western polemicists felt at home on the moral high ground against communism, along with president Reagan. But they are tongue-tied before radical Islam, fearing to offend a religion with more than a billion adherents. Inadvertently they give credibility to the radicals. It is difficult to assess what proportion of today's Muslims are "radicals", because neither the world's Muslims nor the West has a clear definition of what is radical and what is not. Vitriolic sermonizing is so commonplace under the eyes of "moderate" regimes, for example Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, that the label of "radical Islam" has worn thin.In reality, the West sooner or later will have to draw a bright line between "radicals" and "moderates". Under the circumstances there can be nothing in between. Islam's encounter with the West leaves room for nothing but radical jihadists on the one hand, or radical reformers. Islam is expansionist by construction and political by its original design. It is a fact of history that jihad, by which I mean specifically the propagation of the faith by violence, is a mainstream tradition. Even communal prayer in Islam has at its center the alignment of the individual believer to jihad (Does Islam have a prayer?, May 18).Identifying the enemy in 1981 was far easier than in 2004, and President Bush deserves a modicum of sympathy in the inevitable comparison to Ronald Reagan. By 1981 no communists still lived within the confines of the Soviet Empire, only careerists. The emperor had no clothes, such that when Reagan spoke of an evil empire and a warped idea destined for the ash can of history, the truth of his remarks resonated among the Soviet elite. By contrast the Islamic world is full of Muslims. It was much easier for Russians to separate national aspirations and Marxism than it is for Arabs to separate ethnic loyalty and Islam. That is less so for South Asians.The problem actually is quite simple. To advocate jihad today is the hallmark of the radical Islamist, and it is there that the West must draw a line in the sand. But to repudiate jihad in turn implies radical revision of the religion's mainstream, and that is the hallmark of the radical reformer.Like other religions, Islam has reached a point in world history - or rather world history has caught up with Islam - such that it must undergo a fundamental change. By way of comparison, the Catholic Church accepts separation of church and state as well as religious tolerance, but it did so only after the likes of Count Camillo Benso Cavour in Italy stripped the papacy of temporal rule over anything but the square mile of the Vatican City.Western leaders must not attack Islam; to take sides against any religion runs counter to the traditions of religious tolerance upon which the United States was founded. But they must denounce the use of force to propagate religion, and make it clear that they will match force with force. The enemy is not "terrorism", but any form of violence, including conventional warfare, in the service of religious expansionism.What does that mean in practice? First of all it changes the subject and shifts the battleground. The issue is not whether Middle Eastern governments will adopt democratic reforms - that is not within the power of the West to dictate - but whether Muslims will employ violence in the service of territorial irredentism in the Kashmir or Palestine. There simply is no more room for the jihadist dogma that Muslims may not abandon a square meter of the Dar al-Islam. Violence to reclaim lost territory is a characteristic of radical Islam and the hallmark of an enemy of the West. The first step should be to remove Yasser Arafat to exile in some inaccessible locale.Further steps should be action - not protests - to protect Nigerians, Indonesians, or Sudanese against violent attempts to further the Islamic cause. Black Sudanese are the victims of genocide encouraged by the radical Islamic regime in Khartoum. Washington should send them not only food, but also weapons and Special Forces advisers. Stern warnings, backed if necessary by a reduction in foreign aid, should be delivered to US clients in the Middle East that jihadist rhetoric on the part of government newspapers and government-sponsored clerics simply will not be tolerated.Enemy is radical IslamIn short, the West must give the Islamic world a clear choice as to who is with it, and who is against it - words that President Bush has used but with muddled meaning. That would change the character of the intelligence war utterly. It may be harder to define who is friend and foe today than it was in 1981, but by the same token, it will be far easier to tell friend from foe once the West carves its criteria in stone.The bane of US intelligence in the Middle East from Somalia to Iraq has been its inability to know whom it can trust. Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan, although sometimes attended by paternity suits. The unseemly public exchange of charges between the CIA and the Pentagon over Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is the most flagrant example. The CIA has placed stories in the press claming that Chalabi is an Iranian provocateur, heatedly denied by Chalabi's friends in the Pentagon civilian establishment. This removes all doubt that America's intelligence effort is an orphan. The only question is, whose?It would be convenient if US universities trained prospective spies in Middle Eastern and South Asian language skills and culture. But the United States can obtain all the spies it wants with all required skills: it simply has to persuade Muslims to join its cause. Once the US determined to win the Cold War, enough Russians and Eastern Europeans switched sides to give the US the winning hand. Existential despair is the result of the West's tragic encounter with the Islamic world, but it can cut two ways; it has produced suicide bombers, but it also can produce radical reformers who repudiate their own culture in favor of the West.If Washington were to make repudiation of jihad a condition for friendship with the United States, the demand would have unpredictable and destabilizing consequences for the Islamic world. Just as the race of Sovietologists viewed Reagan's determination to destabilize the Soviet Empire with horror, the whole profession of Mideast studies would rear up in horror against such a stance. But wars are won by ignoring the fat and complacent commanders of garrison troops, and forcing the burden of uncertainty on to the other side (Ronald Reagan's creative destruction, June 8). Decisive intelligence stems from destabilization of the opposing side, through defections and similar events.Bush might as well shut down the CIA and re-create something like the wartime Office of Strategic Services, for which Casey parachuted agents into occupied Europe. Most of the CIA amounts to a make-work project for second-rate academics, drawn from an academic environment generally hostile to US strategic interests. Even if US universities still produced strategic thinkers rather than multicultural mush-heads, and even if the CIA could recruit them, little would change. In spite of the academics, Bill Casey won his intelligence war because the US convinced enough players on the other side that it would win. To win to its side the best men and women of the Islamic world, the United States must make clear what it wants from them.

I'm Not Surprised people hated Reagan so much:http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040609%2F1211355414.htm&sc=1110

Re-Re-Posted:Re-Posted:Does this help you franklin?Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.” Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened. Clarke’s claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim s as material witnesses to the attacks.http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx

Hey Not Surprised, just what did you expect the "rats" in the band to say? Maybe out of respect, since they (presumably) have nothing nice to say, they're saying nothing.BTW, how about this Reagan legacy:Guatemala: 200,000 deadEl Salvador: 75,000 deadNicaragua: 50,000 deadDoes Reagan deserve ALL the blame for those deaths? No more so than he deserves ALL the credit for the end of the Cold War or for anything else that happened on his watch.

Californians Pay Final Respects to Reagan 1 hour, 21 minutes ago Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo! By JEFF WILSON, Associated Press Writer SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - Nancy Reagan touched her cheek to the flag-covered casket, then made way for Americans by the thousands to pay respects Monday to Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) before a cross-country journey to a state funeral in Washington. AP Photo AP Photo Slideshow: Former President Ronald Reagan Dies at 93 Ronald Reagan's 1989 Farewell Address (AP Video) A steady, near-silent stream of people — some saluting, some praying — circled through the rotunda of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where the body of the nation's 40th president will lie in repose through Tuesday before traveling to Washington. After Friday's state funeral, the body will return to California for a hilltop burial service at sunset. A Marine Corps band played "Hail to the Chief" as eight armed forces members carried the casket into the presidential library, past a 10-foot-tall sculpture titled "After the Ride" depicting Reagan as a smiling cowboy with a Stetson in his hand. The journey began at a Santa Monica funeral home, where the mahogany casket was placed aboard a hearse for a 40-mile drive to the library in Simi Valley. Clusters of people watched from overpasses and roadsides as the motorcade headed north, then west on the Ronald Reagan Freeway, its path cleared by motorcycle officers. One banner hung along the route declared, "God bless you Ronald & Nancy." Another proclaimed, "God bless the Gipper." Flags at half-staff fluttered under an overcast sky as the casket was carried into the library rotunda before a brief family service. "As we were in procession, I couldn't help but think of the love and the outpouring that has begun in the nation for a great president, a great world leader and a faithful servant of almighty God," said the Rev. Michael Wenning, retired senior pastor at Bel Air Presbyterian Church, where Reagan had worshipped. When the service ended, Mrs. Reagan, dressed in a black suit and pearls, walked to the casket, placing her left cheek against the flag's field of stars. Her daughter, Patti Davis, hugged her tightly and other family members joined them, placing hands on the casket. Soon after the family departed, the first of many chartered buses arrived, bringing members of the public who had been waiting — in some cases for hours — for a chance to pay respects to Reagan, who died on Saturday after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer's disease (news - web sites). Between noon and 7:15 p.m., 12,100 people passed by the casket, said Melissa Giller, chief of staff for the library foundation. The library had prepared for 2,000 visitors an hour for 30 hours. Twenty-seven buses shuttled mourners about five miles from a college, which was shut down to provide parking. Among the early arrivals were Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites), like Reagan an actor-turned-governor, and California's first lady, Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan. Both crossed themselves. Mourners, including many children, stood quietly in line as they waited to enter the library, then moved rapidly past the casket flanked by an honor guard representing all branches of the military. Some people carried carnations or tiny U.S. flags; dress ranged from dark suits and ties to Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses. Mauchese Franklin, 31, from Laverne, said he had wanted to visit Reagan's library for years and was sad that his trip resulted from the former president's death. Standing with his 8-year-old son, Franklin recalled that as a boy he stayed up late to listen to election returns from Reagan's presidential campaign. "I couldn't wait to turn 18 to be able to vote," he said. "I can actually say he's the reason I am a registered Republican, even though everyone else in my family is a Democrat." Mrs. Reagan, accompanied by Patti and son Ron, had paused earlier on her way into the funeral home as she passed a display of impromptu remembrances. American flags, flowers and jars of jelly beans — Reagan's favorite treat — were left along with notes, stuffed animals and candles in the spontaneous shrine. Mrs. Reagan, 82, read some of the messages. "Thank you for changing the world," said one handwritten note. Roxanne Kubicek, 42, gave officers guarding the mortuary a card for Mrs. Reagan. "I just wished her lots and lots of love," she said. "I admired the beautiful love that they have. I told her that their love will last for all eternity." Peggy Sheffey, 85, said she drove to the funeral home from the nearby Mar Vista area to "just feel closer" to the man she had never seen in person. "He's a wonderful man," she said, choking back tears. "He was so real, absolutely real. Down to earth. He didn't just think of himself. He thought of everybody else." Besides Mrs. Reagan, Ron and Patti, others attending the service at the library included Reagan's son, Michael, and his family; Dennis Revell, husband of Reagan's late daughter Maureen; and Merv Griffin, the veteran entertainer and family friend. On Wednesday, the former president's body is to be flown to Washington, D.C. Following a ceremony Wednesday night in the Capitol Rotunda, the body will lie in state there. Friday will be a national day of mourning, with all federal offices and major financial markets closed. The state funeral will be held at Washington National Cathedral; President Bush (news - web sites) will deliver a eulogy and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev will be among the mourners. The body will then be returned to Reagan's library in Simi Valley for a private burial service Friday evening. Reagan will be buried in a crypt beneath a memorial site at the library some 45 miles north of Los Angeles. Praise for Reagan, and condolences to his family, streamed in from across the world. In a jarring contrast, a Cuban government radio station assailed Reagan's policies and said he "never should have been born." At the United Nations (news - web sites), Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) said Reagan "will be remembered for his leadership and resolve during a period of momentous change in world affairs, as well as for the warmth, grace and humor with which he conducted affairs of state."

Not even one word from you rats........

when he was a lousy b actor in hollywood, he was a jerk. when he was governor of california, he was a jerk. when he lied 150 times under oath, he was a jerk. when he sold missiles to iran and paid them to hold the hostages longer to make carter look bad, and who arranged for their immediate release moments after he took office, he was a jerk. when he welcomed the bornagain fuckheads into our government he was a jerk. when he got alzheimers and grew old and feeble he was a jerk, and now that he's dead, as dead as we are all gonna be someday, he is still a jerk.

RONALD REAGANDIES IN HIS CALIFORNIAHOME

Re-Re-Posted:Re-Posted:Does this help you franklin?Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.” Most of the 26 passengers aboard one flight, which departed from the United States on Sept. 20, 2001, were relatives of Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence officials blamed for the attacks almost immediately after they happened. Clarke’s claim of responsibility is likely to put an end to a brewing political controversy on Capitol Hill over who approved the controversial flights of members of the Saudi elite at a time when the administration was preparing to detain dozens of Muslim-Americans and people with Muslim s as material witnesses to the attacks.http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx

dear friends,once again, i ask that you not re-post articles, as mr. flies has done below. try to summarize the article in your own words and do provide a link to the actual article.a point the Anne Coulter artile that Mr. Flies has posted is that it's the media's fault, both in Vietnam and now in Iraq. Well, i suppose if the media can be faulted for telling the truth, for exposing the truth, and we find that bad, then i'm not sure what we're supposed to base anything on.should the media hide the truth? and so then, we would support something based on lies (by the way, title of the recent BLOWBACK record which everyone should immediately stop whatever they are doing and get). I for one reject that.the public needs to kow the truth because then they can make informed choices. to paraphrase an obnoxious Clinton campaign slogan: "it's democracy, stupid."and yes, the truth can hurt, but if we avoid the truth, the damage will be ten times worse. North Korea might be a good example of where that all can lead to. And surely, we can all agree that we don't want that!