good morning. time for the republicans to get out of the away and let us build a better world for future generations.

Frank Rich: "As the election campaign quickens, genuine nightmares may well usurp the last gasps of Rovian fear-based politics. It's hard to ignore the tragic reality that American troops are caught in the cross-fire of a sectarian bloodbath escalating daily, that botched American policy has strengthened Iran and Hezbollah and undermined Israel, and that our Department of Homeland Security is as ill-equipped now to prevent explosives (liquid or otherwise) in cargo as it was on 9/11."

Good Morning, Friends and Democrats!

:)

ISRAEL CONTINUES TO VIOLATE CEASEFIRE IN LEBANON

U.N.: Israeli raid violates cease-fire--
Israel says mission into Lebanon aimed at halting arms transfer

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is "deeply concerned" about Israel's commando raid Saturday in eastern Lebanon, which he said violated the cease-fire resolution concerning Israel and Hezbollah, his spokesman said in a written statement.

The statement also cited the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon as saying there have "also been several air violations by Israeli military aircraft."

Annan's comments affirmed those by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who earlier had condemned the Israeli operation as a violation of the U.N.-brokered cease-fire.

A Hezbollah member of the Lebanese Parliament, Hassan Hobballa, called the raid "proof that the Israeli enemy is still carrying on with its aggression ... and that it doesn't care about the resolutions taken by the U.N. Security Council."

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr has threatened to halt the deployment of army troops to the country's southern region unless the United Nations can ensure Israeli compliance with Resolution 1701, Murr's adviser told CNN.

The adviser said Hezbollah is complying with the agreement. Under the agreement, Israeli troops are to gradually cede control of southern Lebanon -- Hezbollah's former stronghold -- to the U.N. military contingent in Lebanon known as UNIFIL and then to Lebanese army troops.

Israel defended Saturday's operation, saying it was aimed at preventing the transfer of weapons from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah, an action barred by the resolution.

Israel won't accept "a cease-fire in which Hezbollah can use that cease-fire just as a timeout to regroup and rearm and prepare for the next round," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

"Israel would not have to do these sort of operations if the international forces and the Lebanese forces were following through on their commitment ... preventing these arms shipments for Hezbollah."

In Washington, a White House spokeswoman said the Bush administration took "note" of Israel's statement.

"We note that the prevention of the resupply of weapons to Hezbollah by Iran and Syria is a key provision of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701," said Jeannie Mamo. "And the incident underscores the importance of quickly deploying the enhanced UNIFIL."

'Exercise maximum restraint'

The cease-fire agreement was to bring an end to nearly five weeks of fighting that claimed the lives of more than 900 Lebanese and 159 Israelis. The conflict began on July 12 after Lebanese-based Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border raid.

Annan called on "all parties to respect strictly the arms embargo, exercise maximum restraint, avoid provocative actions and display responsibility in implementing resolution 1701," the statement by his spokesman said.

"All such violations of Security Council resolution 1701 endanger the fragile calm that was reached after much negotiation and undermine the authority of the Government of Lebanon," the statement added.

Annan spoke Saturday with both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanon's Siniora, the spokesman said. Annan instructed both governments to provide to the Security Council "daily reports of compliance," the statement said.

During his discussion with Olmert, Annan said he had received complaints about Israel Defense Forces activity in Lebanon, specifically the Bekaa Valley raid on Saturday, according to Israeli government officials.

The two also discussed progress in the formation of the agreed-upon international U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, Israeli government officials said.

Their discussion coincided with the arrival by boat of50 French troops at the southern Lebanese city of Naqoura, the first contingent of international reinforcements since the cease-fire went into effect Monday. (Watch the first U.N. troops trickle in to Lebanon -- 2:12)

Meanwhile, a U.N. delegation met with Siniora and other Lebanese officials, including Murr and parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, to discuss the means of implementing Security Council Resolution 1701.

One Israeli officer was killed and two were wounded Saturday in the Israeli raid in the Bekaa Valley, the Israel Defense Forces said.

After landing in Bouday, IDF forces clashed with Hezbollah forces, a Baalbeck Civil Defense official said.

The fighting ended with Israeli airstrikes in the area, about 15 miles from the Lebanese-Syrian border -- a long-time Hezbollah stronghold. One air raid targeted a bridge, the Lebanese army said in a statement.

There were no Lebanese army or Hezbollah casualties, a Baalbeck Civil Defense official said.

Find this article at:
Click Here

you want duck sauce with that?

By Emma Graham-Harrison

BEIJING (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will be seeking political support as well as energy deals when he visits China from Tuesday, but Beijing is keen to stick to business and avoid antagonizing Washington, analysts say.

The globe-trotting populist leader will spend nearly a week in China on his fourth visit there and hopes to secure investment in oil production and shipping -- exploiting the shared interests of the world's number two oil consumer and its number five exporter.

But their courtship has raised hackles in U.S. corridors of power, where some officials fear the emerging Asian heavyweight is trying to edge its way into Washington's sphere of influence in South America...

the chinese are coming the chinese are coming!</a.

It seems clear that Israel is determined to foment or manufacture continued provocations to reopen the war they were unable to conclude a week ago.

George W. Bush and Condi Lies-A-Lot are not willing to serve as an honest broker to keep the peace.

I don't like the appearance of antisemitism, but I am sick of the meaningless slaughter of innocent civilians, not to mention the loss of what remains of the Lebanese infrastructure.

I am writing the Israeli Embassy today.

good morning paul.

mr. bush's big adventure:

DEATHS SINCE MAR 2003
Iraqi civilians: 42,358
Iraqi security forces*: 5,182
US military: 2,596
UK military: 115
Other coalition military: 115
Journalists: 77
*Since June 2003
Sources: Iraq Body Count (baseline estimate of civilian deaths), Brookings Institution

death count

paul, not a happy middle east today. lots more carnage in iraq. i posted a piece from kos yesterday that i will repost here as it really captured some things i feel are important about who we are becoming as a nation:

A Sense of Urgency, Please
by georgia10
Sat Aug 19, 2006 at 01:55:58 PM PDT
It's difficult to appreciate the magnitude of self-censorship in the American media until you're exposed to how the foreign press reports on a given conflict. Watching the news here in Greece has helped to put things into perspective.

Here, and in nations across the globe, America's dirty little secret is exposed for the entire world to see. It's a difficult transition to make, the one from filtered news dolled up in blazing graphics and theme music to this unadulterated version of reality pouring into television sets around the globe. The anchor will usually preface the segment with a warning ("the images you are about see are disturbing, but we feel we have to show them to you"), and before your heart has a chance to tell your mind to look away, you're looking at Iraq. The camera pans the street. It's strewn with debris, not flowers. The blackened skeleton of some family car is in the foreground. There's a screaming woman on her knees, slapping her hands on the ground (the puddle of blood she's in, the reporter kindly reminds us, is that of her son). And suddenly, you feel that all-too familiar feeling as your eyes begin to sting and tear up for the death of a stranger.

Of course, it's not just the death of this particular Iraqi, this stranger that affects us so. It is the death of thousands who preceded him that weigh like a million anvils on our conscience, and it's the inevitable death of thousands more that make the shame rise so quickly to our cheeks when we're confronted with the consequences of our action (or inaction, as it may be).

Unlike the conflict that has dominated the news for the last month, the war in Iraq, as the President has promised, is a long war. As such, there are no urgent peace deals being brokered in the White House or Paris. There's no steady stream of reports from Baghdad with flashy news banners declaring this to be a "DEVELOPING STORY". No, for Iraq, the story has already developed. Iraq's story began in shock and awe and has ended in silent indifference. Flashier wars have taken center stage. Election season is upon us. And Iraq has receded into the shadows of our global consciousness, out of sight, out of mind.

More below...

go to kos for the rest.

msm kicks allen in the teeth.

who is the monkey now bozo?

Re: Posted by gregg on August 20, 2006 at 07:49 AM

GregG,

1) I read that piece when you posted it yesterday. I traced it back and read the original article. It is informative and revealing.

2) I posted in turn a list of links to the international news I personally peruse, which show the same perspective. Here in DC we have access to MHz Networks (http://www.mhznetworks.org/). They broadcast a number of international news programs from France, Germany, and the Middle East. Of course, we also get BBC. None of these media show the sanitized, pro-George W. Bush propaganda that we are forcefed by our MSM.

3) I strongly recommend if one doesn't have access to unbiased TV broadcasts, check out the Internet site to Link TV (http://linktv.org/). They are available anywhere, and they rebroadcast Mosaic (streaming world news from the Middle East).

4) It doesn't take much actual hard-core truth to dispell the cobwebs.

thing about this election cycle is that there are so many competitive races and most are ones involving incumbent republicans. this pretty much ensures a fun election night. we won't win them all but there should be enough red meat to satisfy most. just here in new york a number of republican congressdorks are sweating hard and if a couple fall....how sweet it will be.

thanks for that paul. i missed it yesterday.

remember bernie kerick? being a new yawker i can't get enough of his antics and my hope is that when that two faced vampire rudy guiliani gets ready to throw his cape in the republican presidential tomb bernie will be the albatros that sinks him quick.

two more bernie stories from the ny daily news:

a one a:

Bernie gets KO
from pricey job

Disgraced former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has apparently lost a big bucks job overseeing reforms to the police force in Guyana.
The Inter-American Development Bank said yesterday that part of a $20 million loan to Guyana can't be used to pay Kerik.

President Bush nominated Kerik for Homeland Security chief but he withdrew after admitting he hadn't paid taxes for his nanny-housekeeper, who may have been an illegal alien. In June he pled guilty to taking gifts from a company that was trying to do business with New York City.*

and a two a:

City vows to nix pix

Kerik photographer bud feels heat
for publishing book of Sept. 11 shots

BY MICHAEL SAUL
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

A former NYPD detective tapped to take Ground Zero photos by disgraced former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik won't make a dime peddling his pictures if the Bloomberg administration gets its way.
"Aftermath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop," the 200-page work set to hit bookstores at $44.95 next week, features the work of John Botte. Kerik gave the veteran crime-scene photographer "privileged access" to the rescue and recovery efforts immediately following 9/11, according to the book's jacket.

But city lawyers recently told the book's publisher, HarperCollins, it plans to sue to recover "all profits" from the book.

"The city will not permit one of its employees to profit personally from the tragic events of Sept. 11," said Gerald Singleton, senior counsel in the affirmative litigation division of the city's Law Department.

"John Botte took all of the pictures in the book using privileged access he received in his capacity as a member of the NYPD, and while being paid by the city," Singleton said. "The pictures belong to the city."

Judith Regan, head of ReganBooks, the HarperCollins division in charge of the work, is Kerik's former mistress. Her organization also published Kerik's autobiography, "The Lost Son."

----bernie, rudy's gift to us that just keeps giving---

*dat would be a mob operated company...

Good Morning, gregg and John?

Unlike Israel, and the Bush Administration who gave Isreal permission to violate the ceasefire, something I posted about on the Blue Is Beautiful blog, should set off alarms for American citizens.

Meanwhile, the Lebanon Government works to hold the high ground:
"In an implicit warning to the militia, Elias Murr, Lebanon's defence minister, said on Sunday that anyone who violated a cease-fire deal by firing rockets into Israel from Lebanon would be arrested and tried by a military court.

"Any violation ... any rocket that would give Israel a justification [to hit Lebanon] will be treated harshly," Murr told a press conference.

"It will be considered as direct collaboration with the enemy," Murr said, adding that those responsible "will be tried and referred to a military tribunal".
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A57E29C6-0130-435D-BE11-1DD8EBC02825.htm

morning fos, isn't it me paul and roxie?

Good morning gregg

Do you believe democrats will awaken and take back their government and lead the nation forward in a positive direction?

I don't get it.Why is Israel still in Lebanon? Why are they still bombing after the so called cease fire? Why is the United States all up in it? Why did France only send 12 men on two little tiny rafts? Why are we NOT talking about Irans little "war games" excersize that's taking place right now? Why isn't the White House concerned about North Korea testing more rockets? Why are pretending that China is our friend? Why are we obsessing over harmless Mexican Immigrants while still allowing Du Bai to have control over our ports? Why are we even discussing violating Arab Americans rights by pushing for racist profiling when we know that all it takes is fake blue contacts, skin lightener and some peroxide and the United States will automatically deem you harmless and let you get on the plane with anything? Why , why? , why?

John Karr

Considering he has porn charges pending, I can not help but wonder if his confession in the killing of the Ramsey's daughter is an effort to present himself as mentally defective in order to beat the porn charges.

When asked questions, if you look at the interview, he pauses, thinks, his eyes go up and to the right before he answers questions.

Regardless of if he is guilty of murder, this is one twisted pretzel.

Lebanon prime minister condemns Israel

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Standing in the midst of the rubble of south Beirut, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora called the Israeli bombing campaign "a crime against humanity," and Lebanon's defense minister warned any group that breaks the Middle East cease-fire will be dealt with harshly.

What's really going on?

Do you believe democrats will awaken and take back their government and lead the nation forward in a positive direction?

I am going to jump in and correct this question...Democrats?? Do you mean democrats like Joe Lieberman, who now declare it is their right to form a new party called CT-LIE or do you mean the Progressive Democrats like Russ Feingold and John Edwards?

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority

Georgie Porgie and Iran's President are calling each other out for a gunfight at the Iran Corral. Iran is, and was a far greater threat to world peace than Iraq. President Bush can't talk with Iran because they support Hezbollah, and of course we do not talk with terrorists.

China can affect this nations economy over night. China has nuclear weapons. China supports Iran and Korea. None of this is important, because working with China helps increase profits for buisness. America is being sold-out.

PepperminLizzy

I do not consider Joe Lieberman to be a democrat. He cut and ran from the party, hired republican's in his campaign. He has used the Bush arrogant may-way-or-the-highway attitude ignore the voters who told him he was no longer welcome to represent them.

Democrats Change 2008 Primary Schedule...

Democrats agreed to shake up tradition Saturday by wedging Nevada between Iowa's leadoff caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in the 2008 presidential nominating calendar and adding South Carolina soon afterward.

The addition of Nevada's caucuses and the South Carolina primary to a presidential calendar long dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire is intended to give a greater voice to Hispanics and blacks — minorities critical to Democrats' success.

I'm flattered speechless.All these republican trolls who keep saying that the Democrats should ignore these very groups and the Democrats not only stood up to them,but they changed the whole schedule to show that they want theses groups to have a voice too.

Thank You, DNC. (tear)

I am impressed with John Edwards. I'd love to see him run in 2008 and see what happens.

Israel Committed to Block Arms and Kill Nasrallah

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 20, 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 19 — Despite a cease-fire agreement, Israel intends to do its best to keep Iran and Syria from rearming Hezbollah and to kill the militia’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, says a senior Israeli commander.

International commitments to exclude the Hezbollah militia from southern Lebanon and to disarm it already seem hollow, said the commander, who had a well-placed view of the war and its planning and has extensive experience in Lebanon.

The officer would only speak on the condition of anonymity in an interview on Friday. But, speaking one day before commandos carried out a raid that Israeli officials said was to disrupt arms shipments for Hezbollah from Syria and Iran, he was explicit that Israel would continue to seek out and block any such attempts. He also emphasized that, despite criticism from the Israeli public and even troops of the performance of the Army and government, he considered the threat and the fighting ability of Hezbollah to have been severely diminished.

Furthermore, he made it clear that Sheik Nasrallah remained a target as the leader of a group that Israel and the United States have labeled terrorist. “There’s only one solution for him,” he said. At another point, he said simply, “This man must die.”...

Everyone seems to be getting into the guerrilla warfare thing. Bin Lauden has won over just about everyone including the Israelis when it comes to terrorism as the warfare mode of choice.

Cheney and Rumsfeld are the only ones who seem to think you can win with extensive bombings and occupations. Can't wait to see what they think a conventional war with nuclear bombs will accomplish.

morning fos, isn't it me paul and roxie?

Posted by gregg on August 20, 2006 at 08:39 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

....and Pep too. LOL

You go SandyH!

The Bush Administration has put this nation at greater risk to terrorism.

roxie, i heard edwards on air america the other day and he was very inspirational and coherent. i have not been a big fan of his as i thought he was pretty lame in the 04 contest but maybe he is the guy to change the outlook and direction of the country.

I believe John Edwards brings thinking outside the box to the political process. I believe such discussion is good for the nation.

I do visit John Edward's One America website, but I am not currently supporting anyone who may seek the office of President. I am waiting to see what my actual choices may be.

A sign of the times?

Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed

Passengers refuse to allow holiday jet to take off until two Asian men are thrown off plane

By CHRISTOPHER LEAKE and ANDREW CHAPMAN 20th August 2006

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

# Flight 93 'was shot down' claims book
# Pakistanis find no evidence against ‘terror mastermind’

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.

The incident fuels the row over airport security following the arrest of more than 20 people allegedly planning the suicide-bombing of transatlantic jets from the UK to America. It comes amid growing demands for passenger-profiling and selective security checks.

It also raised fears that more travellers will take the law into their own hands - effectively conducting their own 'passenger profiles'...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/
news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=
1770

There appears to be a full scale revolt occurring with Blair's handling of the War on Terror. How will the American public handle Bush's incompetence?

Happy Slacker Sunday, everyone.

Action 81 Welcome New Neighbors
Take some time this Saturday to introduce yourself to any new neighbors you may have. Start a relationship that will eventually allow you to talk politics and work together in organizing your neighborhood.

I walked a parade for Zack Space in the neighborhood, introducing him & his candidacy to those along the route.

Action 80

Visit Your Local Bookstore
Catch up on your reading this Sunday by heading to your local bookstore's political section. There are hundreds of great books on everything from health care to national security that will help you become more informed.

What better way to spend today...shopping.

morning all.

Hartford Courant had an excellent Commentary this morning, "Lieberman Imitates Nader".

Goes into how Lieberman Railed against Nader in 2000 and how his candidacy ruined his and Gore's win, and now is doing the exact same thing.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-commentarymoffett0820.artaug20,0,4479722.story

Sorry I missed the Republican Blind troll last night. one look at her blog, shows how truly misguided she is. She sites failures of:If Bush invited instability, how do you explain the attacks on the Trade Center in '93? The Khobar Towers of '96? The bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya resulting in 224 deaths? The 2000 USS COLE bombing?

What part of the fact that Clinton never received a Report the month before these attacks, saying "Al Qaeda to attack world trade center, or USS cole," etc, and ignored them did she miss???

abc just reporting they are televising a show in 3 weeks, The Path to 9/11. Going to show How many warnings this administration received prior to the attacks. How every country was sending warnings, etc. A must see for every American.

Yet bush/Cheney sat back and let it all happen!
What a victory, those 3000 deaths were to them, as an excuse to go into Iraq!

Roxie,

I am not going to look that far forward to John Edwards running for President, because we have effing mess in Connecticut right now with Lieberman, that also is quite evident in DC. MyDD has a really good post up on why it is so important to change the Democrats on the Hill:

The Lieberman challenge (and the Wynn and Lawless challenges) are about changing the revenue model of bad actors within the party and on the left and making it unprofitable to push a right-wing agenda. It's fairly clear at this point that Democrats will not take back either House without a progressive message, so getting rid of these bad actors actually helps a Democratic takeover. But more to the point, if Democrats do takeover a House of Congress, it's not like the right-wing pressure is going away. It's not like it's going to be easy to pass bills, since ripping New Dems and Blue Dogs from the leadership and having them be essential GOP caucus members is quite possible given the setup I've described. There should be an incentive system to discourage that kind of behavior. In fact there must be such an incentive system, or a Democratic Congress will simply be more competent at driving this country off a cliff.

This election is not just about winning a Democratic majority in Congress, but also about changing the culture of DC, at least with respect to the Democrats and Lieberman CANNOT be one of them.

There appears to be a full scale revolt occurring with Blair's handling of the War on Terror. How will the American public handle Bush's incompetence?

Iran's President suggested Britons "evict Blair's government."

Bush is planting the seeds of terrorism, and adding fertilizer with his current war on terror. Congress has been weak, and given the President far more power than the founding fathers wished.

Just when will the Republicans "decide" that we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq? McCain says he thinks we are not there yet. How much longer can he hold on to this line of logic? He seems to be waiting till after the election, no?

Warner wants to give our troops a "new mission." That sounds pretty ominous?

Just wanted to point out a guest blog at Howard-Empowered People that you might be interested in...

Friday night Hubby and I and Son*in*Burlington went to see the film Who Killed the Electric Car? and heard a panel (which included Scudder) speak to the issue.

Did you know that after developing electric cars and testing them on the roads in California and Arizona to rave reviews from those who drove them (all were leased, none were allowed to be sold), all the vehicles were taken back and (sitting down?) crushed, despite protests.

Why? It's a combination of the usual culprits:
Big Business ~ (in this case Auto Industry, deeply connected to Big Oil)
Energy Commission ~ whose chair had already agreed to be part of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell project
Consumers ~ who believed the propaganda that electric cars are unreliable and impractical

Click here for more

News: "Bush Administration hires Baghdad as Iran spokes Person. We now go to Iraq and Baghdad Bob"

Baghdad Bob, live on camera: "Iraq is not in a civil - wait, we need to get out of the line of fire - As I was saying, there is no civil war here in Iraq. I am sorry, we are having to be careful not to be in the cross-fire, but this simply thugs and trouble-makers, not civil war."

Posted by PamB on August 20, 2006 at 09:15 AM

Pam, that might be a good point for Lamont to emphasis. Lieberman urged Gore to bow out gracefully, that it would be destructive to the country to now concede. Is Lieberman's continued insistance that his career is more important than the issues facing average citizens hurting the people of Connecticut?

and Lieberman from CT-LIE is going to be on Face the Nation this morning.

This has been a great "political weekend" for us.

Friday night was our Dems executive board Bahama Mama fundraiser. We were excited to have Connie Shultz, wife of Sherrod Brown, attend our event. She is a wonderful speaker. She took the time to speak to everyone there.

Yesterday, We attended the grand opening of our county Dems HQ. Frances Strickland was our guest. She talked about herself, her husband, Ted, who is the democratic candidate for Governor, and even entertained us with a "bio song" (click on her name) she wrote and performs while on her good will tour.

We ended the evening by entrying and walking a parade for Zack Space. Good time had by all!

Time to enjoy the rest of the weekend. Off to the bookstore!

Enjoy the day, everyone.

Posted by PamB on August 20, 2006 at 09:19 AM

About time. Someone in the MSM is actually going to question if somebody in the White House should be charged with criminal negligence on 9/11.

It appears that the folks over at Disney Land have finally had enough of the Bush/Cheney "Mickey Mouse" war on terror. They've bungled things so badly, they must be projecting that it will cut into profits big time in the future. People can't afford to drive to the amusement parks or fly there without being harrassed by Homeland Security.

So much for the corporate love affair with these incompetents and their Long War.

Good morning good dems,

Have started a Sunday insert at bluenc.com "Tour NC With Me". Today's tour is of Seagrove, the Pottery capital of NC (some claim the world). Please read my article, follow the links and find out what the towns of NC are like. The first link is to a page where all 100 potters are listed. If you click on anyone of them, it will show you a picture of a sample of their pottery, give their address, contact info and hours.

There is a lot more to pottery in that region, come over and read all about it!

oops, there is a lot more than pottery in that region....

I know that FOS is all excited about the DNC shaking up the nominating calendar, by vaulting Nevada and South Carolina into the first wave of 2008 presidential contests along with Iowa and New Hampshire.

The move intends to add racial and geographic diversity to the early voting which is a great thing, although New Hampshire is not too happy about it. I have to wonder why New Hampshire is upset, does it not like racial and geographic diversity? Why NH even threatened to leap over the states to keep its pre-eminent role.

And their motto is "Live Free or Die" -- **scratching my head**

While the calendar is not final, I am just wondering wtf is the DNC doing about the Lieberman?

And their motto is "Live Free or Die" -- **scratching my head**

{{LizzyBeth}}}

How would you like to be a jail mate in New Hampshire, having to create these License plates?

:)

I am just wondering wtf is the DNC doing about the Lieberman?
Posted by PeppermintLizzy on August 20, 2006 at 09:54 AM

oh, and I think it is up to Harry Reid , and the DSCC to come out and take Lieberman's seniority and seats away from him, NOW ! He gave up the Democratic party, he should not be given privileges of the Democratic Party. It is not up to the DNC to do that.

And A-hole McCain sitting on TV this morning, LYING that there is no Civil war in Iraq! How these guys continue to back up and defend this administration is mind boggling!

The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082006Z.shtml

It is not up to the DNC to do that.

True Pam, but I am just wondering, since we were always told that the DNC does not get involved in primaries, just where are the threads about Ned Lamont, since he is the Democratic Winner of the Connecticut Primary.

Posted by PeppermintLizzy on August 20, 2006 at 09:54 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whew! It's really busy here this morning at work.

Okay,So Pep.I know what you mean about Lieberman.He is no longer a Democrat and I think more Democratic Leaders should publically denounce his staying in the race and urge him to drop out on national television.Also,I feel that any Democrat in Congress who openly campaigns in Connecticut on his behalf,should automatically forfeit any funds from the DCCC,DLC, DNC, or any other D Commitee.

Loserman alert! He's on Face the Nation.

...................................................................................

............The History of Terrorism in the Middle East..........
......................The Israeli/Palestine Problem..................

....................................................................................

The Beginnings:

Any discussion of the history of terrorism in the Middle East must start with why the Middle East was such a fertile breeding ground for terrorism in the first place. Terrorism doesn't exist in a vacuum, a series of events must occur for terrorism to raise its ugly head.

WARNING: Economic Downturn Threatens Dems '06 Victory
by bonddad
Sun Aug 20, 2006 at 05:30:44 AM PDT

The polls are in our favor: they all say the electorate is sick of war, the country's general direction and Republicans in general. The Lamont campaign scared the GOP establishment to death because it demonstrated an anti-incumbent mood. However, assuming everything goes well and the Democrats win a majority in the House and Senate, it will be a short-lived victory. Within 6 months of attaining majority status, the Democrats will have an economy in shambles thanks to 6 years of Republican mismanagement.
****

bonddad is probably right. When the severe recession occurs, we want Democrats to pick up the pieces and work on reversing the damage from the false Bush economy. Reversing the tax cuts for the wealthy is the first step. Eliminating subsidies to oil and gas companies is another step. We are going need some "demand side" economic thinking from Democrats to create a real economy that is based on producing products not just moving money around.

morning all,

from msn in case you didn't see their poll:

Do you agree with President Bush that Hezbollah was defeated in the monthlong Mideast war? * 95669 responses
Yes, Hezbollah was beaten
24%
No, Hezbollah was neither victorious nor defeated
51%
No, Hezbollah won a major victory over Israel
24%

those who believe the moron = 24%

I won't argue with you Pam over that pompous ASS called McCain, why he just said: “I do not have confidence in Rumsfeld.”

That is rich...so just what have the bloggers, the progressives and people who don't live under the fundie rocks of the pugs been saying for 3 years now?

(my head itches)

Posted by PeppermintLizzy on August 20, 2006 at 10:17 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I agree with you.Hey,if the DNC can impose penalites on the candidates who violate the new Schedule, then,ummm....yeah.They can stick their nose in the Lamont/Judas Race.Hell,the Republicans and Fox News is all up in it and I don't see anyone crying fowl on that shet.LOL

And the first thing Joltin' Joe does after his loss is duck his head, bull his neck and clean house.

He fires part of his campaign staff and asks for the rest to resign before the dust has a chance to settle.

Then he says, "I do not blame my staff for my loss on Tuesday. I bear that responsibility." Of course, he fired them anyway.

This to me is just an underlining of something I have known about politicians for many decades. As much as they pretend to know the pulse of the working man, the inner thoughts of the underclass (anyone who is not a politician), they have no idea what is in the minds of the rest of us people out here in the world.

Hey Joe, to normal, moral men and women who work for a living it is not OK to fire someone just because you feel like it. I personally would have accepted this massacre better if he had said, "I think these idiots cost me a primary election, now I have to run as an independent or I'm out of a job, so I fired their butts."

But that's not what he said. He said he doesn't blame them, which just shows us he is either a liar or a cold-hearted jerk.
****

This is not hard to understand. The Loserman is staffing up with Republicans!

Morning Dems

Just a friendly warning:

America is under attack by none other than the notorious. . .

. . .OSAMA bin BUSH- The Monstrous Morph

Tell Everyone!

Blog On to Victory in November

Within 6 months of attaining majority status, the Democrats will have an economy in shambles thanks to 6 years of Republican mismanagement.

Hi rj,

It will be up to the Democrats to keep this issue and every other issue FRAMED correctly out in the public eye. They will have to almost daily, be out there talking about what has happened and what they are trying to do.

It all was a mess when Clinton went in, too, but people trusted him as they watched him turn it around.

Frank Rich takes on Loserman:

The administration's constant refrain that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terror is not only false but has now also backfired politically: only 9 percent in the CBS poll felt that our involvement in Iraq was helping decrease terrorism. As its fifth anniversary arrives, 9/11 itself has been dwarfed by the mayhem in Iraq, where more civilians are now killed per month than died in the attack on America. The box-office returns of "World Trade Center" are a cultural sign of just how much America has moved on. For all the debate about whether it was "too soon" for such a Hollywood movie, it did better in the Northeast, where such concerns were most prevalent, than in the rest of the country, where, like "United 93," it may have arrived too late. Despite wild acclaim from conservatives and an accompanying e-mail campaign, "World Trade Center" couldn't outdraw "Step Up," a teen romance starring a former Abercrombie & Fitch model and playing on 500 fewer screens.

Mr. Lamont's victory in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary has been as overhyped as Mr. Stone's movie. As a bellwether of national politics, one August primary in one very blue state is nearly meaningless. Mr. Lieberman's star began to wane in Connecticut well before Iraq became a defining issue. His approval rating at home, as measured by the Quinnipiac poll, had fallen from 80 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in July 2003, and that was before his kamikaze presidential bid turned "Joementum" into a national joke.

The hyperbole that has greeted the Lamont victory in some quarters is far more revealing than the victory itself. In 2006, the tired Rove strategy of equating any Democratic politician's opposition to the Iraq war with cut-and-run defeatism in the war on terror looks desperate. The Republicans are protesting too much, methinks. A former Greenwich selectman like Mr. Lamont isn't easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden. What Republicans really see in Mr. Lieberman's loss is not a defeat in the war on terror but the specter of their own defeat. Mr. Lamont is but a passing embodiment of a fixed truth: most Americans think the war in Iraq was a mistake and want some plan for a measured withdrawal. That truth would prevail even had Mr. Lamont lost.

\http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/19/211722/998

Fucking beautiful...Lieberman is saying that he allowed "his opponent" to distort his position on Iraq.

You know, I am getting really sick of this republican style of degrading people. His opponent beat him and is the WINNER.

NED LAMONT WAS SUCCESSFUL and CHOSEN BY THE PEOPLE.

Game over Lieberman, you are the loser.

.Lieberman is saying that he allowed "his opponent" to distort his position on Iraq.
****

If so, Joementum is worthless as a leader. But, we all knew that! Loserman should bow out gracefully.

"Lieberman is saying that he allowed "his opponent" to distort his position on Iraq."

peppermintl,

that's typical rove spin. it's give everyone a mirror and ask them to look into it and see the opposite = "mirror approach." ol' joe distorted the situation in iraq to the nation. the voters in CT were not fooled. ol' joe was the fool.

ol' joe dismounted the donkey for the elephant. not if, but when he leaps off the elephant it's more than a trunk length to the ground.

This is not hard to understand. The Loserman is staffing up with Republicans!

Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 10:29 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Of course.Lieberman took his loss out on his Democratic Staff.He totally used them.Here they were yelling and screaming for him on election day,almost getting into fights with the Lamont Supporters for his sake and physically threatening Lamont all for him and they were faithful till the end and what did Judas Lieberman do in return? He showed them his azz.That is vile, devious, visious....that was totally republican.

Work across party lines...Sorry Joe, you are not a part of my party.

This is too ugly to watch, rjsnj...Joe is lying through his teeth just like the republican. He has NO respect for the people.

by PeppermintLizzy on August 20, 2006 at 10:17 AM

true, Liz, but we also are not seeing any for other races. As important as the CT election is to me, I know that Casey's race against Santorrum for instance is very very important, as well as many others across the country. Those being staged in Red States are critical. So it doesn't bother me that the DNC is not hyping just Lamont.

have to run out for a while. bbl

It all was a mess when Clinton went in, too, but people trusted him as they watched him turn it around.
****

Hi Pam,

It's a shame that Clinton did that but he seems to be back tracking now. You need to get Barbara Boxer to go on record as well supporting Lamont. It never made any sense to me that she supported Loserman.

I think if you keep after it Loserman will lose almost all Dems and will be seen by the voters as the Republican candidate (after all that is what he has become).

LMAO -- HOW rich. McCain calls for new leadership in DOD and Lieberman parrots him.

LMAO -- HOW rich. McCain calls for new leadership in DOD and Lieberman parrots him.
****

Loserman is a Pug now!

Spike Lee coming up on This Week.

Chris Matthews said it perfectly when he showed Judas's Campaign Ad on HardBall.

"That's Joe Lieberman pretending to run for the senate. He already lost."

Perfect assesment!

Dumbya said:

The United States is engaged in a war against .... the urr ... ummm ... extremist folks. Oh really! Does that include the Bushitas? They are pretty extreme to me. This jerk doesn't have a clue and neither does the Bush kisser Rethuglican Joe Loserman.

Oh goodness, I had no idea that George Felix Allen was in this movie. Singing for "southern rights" eh???

http://s9.photobucket.com/albums/a81/kos102/2006/01%20August/Videos/?action=view¤t=G-G.flv

Beautiful! Go Jim webb!

Spike Lee coming up on This Week.

Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 10:51 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Blah. Please don't tell me he's running for something.We just got rid of one embarrasment (Cynthia Mc Krazy)we don't need another one right now. I'd rather he stick to his little Black Stereotype Movies that make things worse for us than better, than to see him try to run for office and embarrass us all nation wide.

I haven't logged on in a while and wanted to see what you all thought of the decision to push NH, (My home state for full disclosure's sake) back and further punish those that want to elicit our votes....

Mexico News addition: Court to Investigate Election Officials; Corruption Arrests
by el cid
Sun Aug 20, 2006 at 06:59:06 AM PDT

Ouroboros and I must have been working nearly simultaneously. Please check out the articles below, but for comments etc. please re-direct to today's Mexico News Roundup 8/20/06. - The corruption scandal switches sides today, with the vote-buying related arrests of liberal PRD party members in the southern (bordering Guatemala) state of Chiapas, centered around the governor's race.
- Also making big political news today, the Electoral Court (TEPJF) accepted a citizens' petition asking the Court to review the performance of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in the July 2nd elections.
Excerpts below the fold.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/20/9596/23476

Have the Rethuglicans been running the elections in Mexico as well? They need a complete recount and maybe a new election.

Blah. Please don't tell me he's running for something.
****

Nope! He's releasing a documentary on Katrina. It will on HBO Monday and Tuesday night. heck, socmeone needs to talk about how the Rethuglicans abandoned the people of the 9th ward. It might as well be Spike Lee. It should be our Congress but we all know the Thugs don't care.

Bush Administration Agrees to Provide Iran with Nuclear Weapons
http://blue-is-beautiful.blogspot.com/2006/08/another-roxieamerica-political-cartoon.html
RoxieAmerica is soooooooooo bad!

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 20, 2006 at 11:00 AM

FOS,

What are you talking about??? READ THIS!

These media talking heads make me sick. One of them just said that "terrorism" will be the top issue again in 2006. Don't these lazy idiots even read the polls before making these statements? Terrorism is not even close to being the top issue right now according to several polls.

What this Republican Bull line about "we should not convert the constitution into a suicide pack"? What in blue blazes does that mean? The only suicide pack is to give these thugs unlimited power.

Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 11:06 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No of course.It's great.I just hope he helps and not hurts.I remember his little movies growing up and and having seven sisters with a variety of skintones, that School Daze crap he put out caused a major war in our family and created a lot of problems that some are still effected by now that we are grown.I dont care much for Spike Lee.Perhalps, he can redeem himself with this movie but he better watch how he portrays Black people.

What is this garbage about being "armed with tools"? Each and every violation of our civil liberties is being framed as "needing necessary tools". At what point is it just plain wrong? Or do the Thugs think that anything goes?

We need to attack each and every mantra. The Thugs have not demonstrated any need for these draconian measures. Why are the Thugs so opposed to oversight by the courts and Congress?

We need to attack each and every mantra.

We need an attack Lieberman Thread. Period. Can we Sock it to Him!!

I just hope he helps and not hurts.
****

Me too! We need to get some attention focused on re-building New Orleans once again. It's a disgrace that the ReThugs have basically done nothing for one year.

civil war

n.

1. A war between factions or regions of the same country.

2. A state of hostility or conflict between elements within an organization: “The broadcaster is in the midst of a civil war that has brought it to the brink of a complete management overhaul” (Bill Powell).

3. Civil War The war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. Also called War Between the States.

4. Civil War The war in England between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists from 1642 to 1648.

"Our goal is to get the work done quickly," the president said.

He promised to spend federal money wisely and accountably. And he vowed to address the poverty exposed by the government's inadequate Katrina response "with bold action."

A year after the storm, the federal government has proven slow and unreliable in keeping the president's promises.

I don't think I could have said it any clearer than in this comment by purvis ames at Think Progress:
Hezbollah is handing out twelve thousand dollars apiece to the people who lost their homes in Lebanon. Maybe the idiot Boy Emperor should take a cue from the “terrorists” but he probably thinks that helping out the people of New Orleans is equivalent to supporting al Qaeda. What kind of filth is running this country?

****

yes indeed!

What's with Lieberman? He told Schieffer this morning that he's still trying to steer the Democratic party in the right direction. He said WE need to reach across the aisle in a bi-partisan effort. But he's running as an Independent.

You left us Joe. Your opinion holds no weight with the party anymore. Snap out of it.

We need an attack Lieberman Thread. Period. Can we Sock it to Him!!
****

Now you're talking! We need to after this turkey Loserman. He is now a Republican.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said that Iraq is in a “very defined civil war” and that the Middle East is “the most unstable we’ve seen since 1948.” He also reiterated that the United States needs to begin withdrawing troops within the next six months because staying the course just continues to “kill Americans and put Americans in the middle of a civil war that we have less and less control and influence over every day.”

Think Progress has the video.

Hey Chuck, now just what have the bloggers and progressives saying for the last two years???

I had forgotten why I hadn't logged in for a while. If your new, your ignored.

Good luck. Our world depends on us examining ourselves, not just the Repugs.

Chuck wakes up, wipes the sleep from his eyes, and says, Oh my stars, the American people have been trying to tell us something.

Keith1 - who is being ignored?

looking around...

What's with Lieberman? He told Schieffer this morning that he's still trying to steer the Democratic party in the right direction. He said WE need to reach across the aisle in a bi-partisan effort. But he's running as an Independent.

Well,he's being honest about that one.He's trying to steer us in the "right" direction.LOL

The "farright" direction.

ALERT...ALERT...ALERT....ALERT.....ALERT....!

I haven't logged on in a while and wanted to see what you all thought of the decision to push NH, (My home state for full disclosure's sake) back and further punish those that want to elicit our votes....

Posted by Keith1 on August 20, 2006 at 11:02 AM

Somebody answer him before he get's his feelings all hurt-n-shet.

;p

What's with Lieberman? He told Schieffer this morning that he's still trying to steer the Democratic party in the right direction. He said WE need to reach across the aisle in a bi-partisan effort. But he's running as an Independent.
Poor Joe, he doesn't get it. The Democrat party does not wish to move in the "right" direction! The "right" direction is the wrong direction.

What's with Lieberman? He told Schieffer this morning that he's still trying to steer the Democratic party in the right direction. He said WE need to reach across the aisle in a bi-partisan effort. But he's running as an Independent.
Poor Joe, he doesn't get it. The Democrat party does not wish to move in the "right" direction! The "right" direction is the wrong direction.

Keith1

Oh, It was a good decision. Thanks for being so cool about it too.You guys are awesome.

LOL!

(sacasm);p

The change of the primaries has nothing whatsoever to do with punnishing CT. It is an issue discussed long before the Lieberman incident.

Keith1,

Sorry, I was not ignoring you and it really is not the policy here that we ignore people. Just sometimes, and I will speak for myself, get caught up with following some links here and it takes time to find my way back.

Aug. 20, 2006 -- - Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., blasted fellow a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, for continuing his bid in the Connecticut Senate race despite a narrow loss to newcomer Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary earlier this month.

"I'm concerned that [Lieberman] is making a Republican case," Kerry told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" in an exclusive appearance.

Kerry accused the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate of "adopting the rhetoric of Dick Cheney," on the issue of Iraq.

"Joe Lieberman is out of step with the people of Connecticut," Kerry added, insisting Lieberman's stance on Iraq, "shows you just why he got in trouble with the Democrats there."

Kerry called Lieberman's independent bid a "huge mistake" and applauded businessman-turned-politician Lamont as "courageous" for challenging Lieberman on the war.

Posted by Roxie on August 20, 2006 at 11:43 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I guess New Hamshire feels a litle bitter because the DNC wants to make Blacks and Latinos feel equal like we are supposed to be.I guess New Hamshire feels like all we are good for is our votes, money, volunteer work other "physical" labor.

ROFLMAO!

I keed I keed !

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post's Robin Wright, Middle East affairs expert , and George Will join George on 'This Week's' Roundtable.

Fareed Zakaria

bush, the neo-cons, and the republican sheep are being "GOATED" by Iran...

...just like Hezzbollah "GOATED" Israel.

George Will

Has been a reliable conservative voice for political commentary and he even thinks bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep are out of step with reality.

Robin Wright

bush, the neo-cons and the republicans are losing the political battle because every solution they have implemented is through the use of military force.

Reuel Gerecht

no comment.

Somebody answer him before he get's his feelings all hurt-n-shet.

;p

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 20, 2006 at 11:40 AM

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Just a few comments after I browsed this thread:
China is coming if they aren't already here. They start with agreements and then just as soon as you are weakened and they already think they own you anyway, they declare that you are a part of the Chinese Republic. Once they own the majority of our debt and make all of our goods, then the land is all that we have left to sell...that is if we haven't already leased it to the oil producing countries.
If you don't believe this, then take a look at how other countries were just taken over by China and the UN did absolutely nothing about it.
One is Tibet: http://www.tibet.com/Status/statuslaw.html
They will swallow Venezuela up very quickly.
On terrorism and Iraq, I think we should only quote educated sources when we talk about the causes of terrorism and the reasons for fighting in the middle east. I think Howard Dean is careful and correct in his approach of criticism of the Republican party. I think we go way to far when we blog about the USA causing violence in the middle east. They have been fighting since the beginning of history. We cannot blame their problems on any political party in the USA. We have managed to have a free society with many varying opinions, religions, and cultures without blowing each other up when we disagree, and we expect other civilized societies to create their own peaceful solutions, and if they don't, then Americans do not accept the blame. Violence only breeds violence, and it's a crime against all humanity, but the responsibility for the cause is the government that allows those that promote violence to grow within their society.
Regarding John Edwards as a policitical candidate for President, I think he was a little immature in some of his speeches when he tried to put forward liberal agendas. Simple-mindedness only works for extremists. It doesn't pull in the majority of people who consider both sides of every issue. For example, when debating Cheney, Edwards said that Cheney's daughter was "born that way" referring to her lesbianism. Edwards does not know this. No one does. Trying to seek agreement by stating an opinion as a fact just doesn't win anyone over period to your argument. Nor does it make good political policy. On illegal immigration, Edwards said that they were just "good people looking for work" much like his parents. Of course his parents aren't illegal immigrants nor are they Mexican, so the comparison is futile. Americans reject people who state falsehoods or simplifications as the reason for their agenda.
Anyone such as Edwards may have the very best motives at heart, but will lose the support of the American public, if not before the election, then afterwards as we can see what has happened to Bush in the polls. We need someone a lot smarter this time. It isn't about just getting a Democrat in office. It's about saving this great nation from the people who are selling us out. I think it's time for the Democrats to apologize for the "free trade" agreements. It isn't fair and it isn't right. It certainly isn't constitutional.

So what.

Bye.

...................................................................................

............The History of Terrorism in the Middle East..........
......................The Israeli/Palestine Problem..................

....................................................................................

ZIONISTS:

Beginning in the 1880's, Israeli Zionists, people who believed that it was their divine right to lands once held by King David and Solomon, began buying up land in Palestine. At the time there were 700,000 Palestinians living there. Much of the land bought up was rural and the Palestinian's farming that land were dispossesed of their land. This continued to be a problem well into the 20th century as more land was purchased and more Palestinians were becoming homeless.

BOILING OVER:

Violence began as the two sides couldn't or wouldn't find a common ground. In 1920, Palestinian's led by Haj Amn Al-Husseini, who would later become the Mufti of Jerusalem, attacked Jewish housing in Jerusalem. This violence continued in 1929 when Al-Husseini spread news that the Jews would carry out killings of Arabs, which led to the attack in Hebron resulting in the death of 67 Jews.

Simple-mindedness only works for extremists. It doesn't pull in the majority of people who consider both sides of every issue. For example, when debating Cheney, Edwards said that Cheney's daughter was "born that way" referring to her lesbianism. Edwards does not know this. No one does. Trying to seek agreement by stating an opinion as a fact just doesn't win anyone over period to your argument. Nor does it make good political policy.
She grew up with Cheney - that would be enough to turn me off to men! I'm sooooooooo bad!

It is impossible to know the cause of same-sex leanings given the current medical information. Some believe it is a "choice" while others believe they were "born that way." While it is politically negative to take any type of pro-homosexual stand, and stating someone is "born that way" is viewed as taking such a stand, it is also an opinion of the candidate, and gives insight into what type of policy the candidate may support.

Perhaps as Genome research continues the world may get insight into why someone is opposite-sex or same-sex orientated. I believe it is easy to accept simply explainations to complex issues, when the issue may be far more complex than we know given current available information.

Simplistic messages seem to state an agenda. It works well for those who agree, but turns off everyone else. It only speaks to their base.

Posted by Benji on August 20, 2006 at 12:01 PM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

...and it's unfortunate because Israel is laughing at us over here in America because we are letting them pretty much get away with murder.Why? We we're told in Sunday School that Israel get's what she wants and can do whatever she wants because those are Gods people and if we dare utter a word against them fire and brimstone shall consume us and all those that rise against her shall fall and if we bless her then we are blessed and if we curse her then we are cursed and that if .......................

So, yeah.Israel violates the UN agreements because she can and noone will do anything about it because they can't and they know this.

BTW. This is also the reason why the entire world hates America because we are so friggen stupid when it comes down to mixing our own interpretation of religious beliefs with how we govern our nation and deal with Foreign Policy.

Oh and before anyone calls me Anti-Semite,Let it be known that I practiacally love my Senator to death (Sen.Russ Feingold),I support Israels right to defend herself but not act like she's crazy and I'm a staunch supporter of the ADL as well as the Progressive Patriots Fund.So you know where to put your reBUTTall.;p

Thank You Very Much!

Any idea that Israel does not cause problems is based on myth. Quoting Ambassador James Akins, "Turning to the Golan Heights, Akins noted that the United Nations investigated about 1,000 incidents of border skirmishes. Only 10 of them were found to have been caused by the Syrians, another 20 were ambiguous, and all of the rest were found to have been caused by Israelis. Yet the majority of people still believe that the Syrians were firing upon innocent Israeli peasants from the Golan, thus justifying Israel’s invasion and continued occupation of that fertile and strategic land. In his diaries, Moshe Dayan confirmed the UN investigations and said that one of the worst mistakes of his life was to yield to the pressure of the settlers who lusted after the waters and the rich lands of the Golan Heights." http://www.alhewar.org/james_akins.htm http://blue-is-beautiful.blogspot.com/2006/08/unfair-and-unbalanced-american-middle.html

I'm still trying to find out when Congress passed a FORMAL Declaration of War to justify Bush's claims to being "at war" and him having all these powers because we are "at war". They passed a "resolution" to invade Iraq. But I haven't seen any proof that they passed a War Declaration.

In a way we are at war with war. Does that give us extraordinary powers to deal with it or with anything we feel we would like to deal with?

Also, the Democratic platform should include doing away with "incentives" to big corporations for setting up shop overseas. Who the blazes thought up this sick concept in the first place? Let's make it pricy for big corporations to do business overseas. Instead of giving them incentives, let's fine them.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS THE PARTY OF THE FUTURE.

And Dean Democrats need to exercise reason on all levels of the political debate.

Cheney referred to "Dean Democrats" in a speech used today on Meet The Press as a sound byte during the McCain interview.

I guess he must be talking about us.

I believe that more people are reading this blog than has in the past.

I also believe that those out their reading this blog are taking what is being said on this blog seriously (or they wouldn't be reading it).

Simplistic messages seem to state an agenda. It works well for those who agree, but turns off everyone else. It only speaks to their base.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 12:15 PM

Mom, John E is "doing the right thing" working tirelessly to help people get out of poverty. I don't think you become and be a top trial lawyer and not have the complexities of a situation in hand. John has what it takes.

I just wish the posters who sound like extremists and constantly promote their blogspot would stop.

Edwards/Feingold 2008

PERIOD!

The New York Times
August 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Five Years After 9/11, Fear Finally Strikes Out

By FRANK RICH

THE results are in for the White House’s latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans’ fearing fear itself is over.

In each poll released since the foiling of the trans-Atlantic terror plot ­ Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, Zogby, Pew ­ George W. Bush’s approval rating remains stuck in the 30’s, just as it has been with little letup in the year since Katrina stripped the last remaining fig leaf of credibility from his presidency. While the new Middle East promised by Condi Rice remains a delusion, the death rattle of the domestic political order we’ve lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans’ unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians’ and pundits’ hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

It’s not as if the White House didn’t pull out all the stops to milk the terror plot to further its politics of fear. One self-congratulatory presidential photo op was held at the National Counterterrorism Center, a dead ringer for the set in “24.” But Mr. Bush’s Jack Bauer is no more persuasive than his Tom Cruise of “Top Gun.” By crying wolf about terrorism way too often, usually when a distraction is needed from bad news in Iraq, he and his administration have long since become comedy fodder, and not just on “The Daily Show.” June’s scenario was particularly choice: as Baghdad imploded, Alberto Gonzales breathlessly unmasked a Miami terror cell plotting a “full ground war” and the destruction of the Sears Tower, even though the alleged cell had no concrete plans, no contacts with terrorist networks and no equipment, including boots.

What makes the foiled London-Pakistan plot seem more of a serious threat ­ though not so serious it disrupted Tony Blair’s vacation ­ is that the British vouched for it, not Attorney General Gonzales and his Keystone Kops. This didn’t stop Michael Chertoff from grabbing credit in his promotional sprint through last Sunday’s talk shows. “It was as if we had an opportunity to stop 9/11 before it actually was carried out,” he said, insinuating himself into that royal we. But no matter how persistent his invocation of 9/11, our secretary of homeland security is too discredited to impress a public that has been plenty disillusioned since Karl Rove first exhibited the flag-draped remains of a World Trade Center victim in a 2004 campaign commercial. We look at Mr. Chertoff and still see the man who couldn’t figure out what was happening in New Orleans when the catastrophe was being broadcast in real time on television.

No matter what the threat at hand, he can’t get his story straight. When he said last weekend that the foiling of the London plot revealed a Qaeda in disarray because “it’s been five years since they’ve been capable of putting together something of this sort,” he didn’t seem to realize that he was flatly contradicting the Ashcroft-Gonzales claims for the gravity of all the Qaeda plots they’ve boasted of stopping in those five years. As recently as last October, Mr. Bush himself announced a list of 10 grisly foiled plots, including one he later described as a Qaeda plan “already set in motion” to fly a hijacked plane “into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

Dick Cheney’s credibility is also nil: he will always be the man who told us that Iraqis would greet our troops as liberators and that the insurgency was in its last throes in May 2005. His latest and predictable effort to exploit terrorism for election-year fear-mongering ­ arguing that Ned Lamont’s dissent on Iraq gave comfort to “Al Qaeda types” ­ has no traction because the public has long since untangled the administration’s bogus linkage between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. That’s why, of all the poll findings last week, the most revealing was one in the CBS survey: While the percentage of Americans who chose terrorism as our “most important problem” increased in the immediate aftermath of the London plot, terrorism still came in second, at only 17 percent, to Iraq, at 28 percent.

The administration’s constant refrain that Iraq is the “central front” in the war on terror is not only false but has now also backfired politically: only 9 percent in the CBS poll felt that our involvement in Iraq was helping decrease terrorism. As its fifth anniversary arrives, 9/11 itself has been dwarfed by the mayhem in Iraq, where more civilians are now killed per month than died in the attack on America. The box-office returns of “World Trade Center” are a cultural sign of just how much America has moved on. For all the debate about whether it was “too soon” for such a Hollywood movie, it did better in the Northeast, where such concerns were most prevalent, than in the rest of the country, where, like “United 93,” it may have arrived too late. Despite wild acclaim from conservatives and an accompanying e-mail campaign, “World Trade Center” couldn’t outdraw “Step Up,” a teen romance starring a former Abercrombie & Fitch model and playing on 500 fewer screens.

Mr. Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary has been as overhyped as Mr. Stone’s movie. As a bellwether of national politics, one August primary in one very blue state is nearly meaningless. Mr. Lieberman’s star began to wane in Connecticut well before Iraq became a defining issue. His approval rating at home, as measured by the Quinnipiac poll, had fallen from 80 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in July 2003, and that was before his kamikaze presidential bid turned “Joementum” into a national joke.

The hyperbole that has greeted the Lamont victory in some quarters is far more revealing than the victory itself. In 2006, the tired Rove strategy of equating any Democratic politician’s opposition to the Iraq war with cut-and-run defeatism in the war on terror looks desperate. The Republicans are protesting too much, methinks. A former Greenwich selectman like Mr. Lamont isn’t easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden. What Republicans really see in Mr. Lieberman’s loss is not a defeat in the war on terror but the specter of their own defeat. Mr. Lamont is but a passing embodiment of a fixed truth: most Americans think the war in Iraq was a mistake and want some plan for a measured withdrawal. That truth would prevail even had Mr. Lamont lost.

A similar panic can be found among the wave of pundits, some of them self-proclaimed liberals, who apoplectically fret that Mr. Lamont’s victory signals the hijacking of the Democratic Party by the far left (here represented by virulent bloggers) and a prospective replay of its electoral apocalypse of 1972. Whatever their political affiliation, almost all of these commentators suffer from the same syndrome: they supported the Iraq war and, with few exceptions (mainly at The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard), are now embarrassed that they did. Desperate to assert their moral superiority after misjudging a major issue of our time, they loftily declare that anyone who shares Mr. Lamont’s pronounced opposition to the Iraq war is not really serious about the war against the jihadists who attacked us on 9/11.

That’s just another version of the Cheney-Lieberman argument, and it’s hogwash. Most of the 60 percent of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq also want to win the war against Al Qaeda and its metastasizing allies: that’s one major reason they don’t want America bogged down in Iraq. Mr. Lamont’s public statements put him in that camp as well, which is why those smearing him resort to the cheap trick of citing his leftist great-uncle (the socialist Corliss Lamont) while failing to mention that his father was a Republican who served in the Nixon administration. (Mr. Lieberman, ever bipartisan, has accused Mr. Lamont of being both a closet Republican and a radical.)

These commentators are no more adept at reading the long-term implications of the Connecticut primary than they were at seeing through blatant White House propaganda about Saddam’s mushroom clouds. Their generalizations about the blogosphere are overheated; the shrillest left-wing voices on the Internet are no more representative of the whole than those of the far right. This country remains a country of the center, and opposition to the war in Iraq is now the center and (if you listen to Chuck Hagel and George Will, among other non-neoconservatives) even the center right.

As the election campaign quickens, genuine nightmares may well usurp the last gasps of Rovian fear-based politics. It’s hard to ignore the tragic reality that American troops are caught in the cross-fire of a sectarian bloodbath escalating daily, that botched American policy has strengthened Iran and Hezbollah and undermined Israel, and that our Department of Homeland Security is as ill-equipped now to prevent explosives (liquid or otherwise) in cargo as it was on 9/11. For those who’ve presided over this debacle and must face the voters in November, this is far scarier stuff than a foiled terrorist cell, nasty bloggers and Ned Lamont combined.

Very Interesting CNN Report with Lebanese Reporter and American Enterprise Institute Spokesperson

Wolfie is interviewing a Jewish blonde bombshell who works for American Enterprise Institute, along with a Lebanese reporter in Beirut. The blonde stated Hezbollah has committed crimes over the last 25 years and they must be prosecuted.

The Lebanese reporter said we can pursue the crimes of the past, but we must also deal with the facts on the ground today. We cannot demand only one side comply with the peace agreement; both sides are responsible.

I am a bit surprised to see a little more equitable reporting by CNN. Who thinks this could be a trend for the better?

the reason bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep are losing the war on terror...

...is simply because they have spent entirely too much time defending their reasons for going into Iraq.

if bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep don't outright admit they made a mistake they will continue to be weak on national security.

AND NO, IT'S NOT A TYPO!

YOUR EYES ARE NOT DECEIVING YOU!

I SAID,

BUSH, THE NEO-CONS AND THE REPUBLICAN SHEEP
ARE WEAK ON NATIONAL SECURITY!

John McLaughlin was a (very quiet) party to Wolfie's interviews ...

Of course McLaughlin is an old-time Republican.

I certainly have seen a big change on CNN since the days of the Presidential election when their hosts seemed to relish in the defeat of the Dems.
I wish we had some of their smirks and comments to replay on the internet. I think those that did harm to America included those who made Kerry and Dean to look bad. I hope they have many sleepless nights as they name the dead children who went to Bush's war.

I just wish the posters who sound like extremists and constantly promote their blogspot would stop.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 12:30 PM
Do I present as an extremist? It is always nice to know how others perceive us.

Roxie, who is "us"? Am I just an "other"?
This is why I rarely call any other poster out.

Posted by Roxie on August 20, 2006 at 12:21 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Roxie.Thanks for the link to your Blog.It's people like you and PeppermentLizzy who understand what the Liberal Blog Community is all about.It's important that we remain as informed about the issues of the day as much as we can because the more we know,the smarter we vote.That's just a basic Blog standard to provide information but I'm sure you already knew that.

;)

I find it interesting to see the Blonde spokesperson (Dannielle Pletka) pretending to be an American.

Roxie, who is "us"? Am I just an "other"?
This is why I rarely call any other poster out.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 12:43 PM
I do not understand the question. How other people perceive us when we blog is an important reflection because typing on a screen does not give the same feedback one would see from people's in person reactions. I certainly apologise because I did not mean to offend you or anyone in any way.

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 12:44 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Um,you do know that the majority of people who call Israel Home are not Israeli don't you? We have people there who moved to be in th "Bible Land".We have others who think that because their last name ends in berg,stein and berger, that are Jewish but there's not an ounce of Hebrew in their blood.It would be like me moving to England because my last name is Roberts, yet, I'm Black and Cherokee.(LOL) My last name does'nt make me British.My point is, there are Americans living in Israel who have become citizens and there are people who are not Semitic at all who are Israeli's.Real Jews sort of look like Russ Feingold.Nice skin color, prominent nose and the cute little ears.They don't usually look like "Tony Blair" if you know what I mean.LOL

SENATOR LAMONT HAS AN ATTACK DOG!

HOW IRONIC THAT WOLFIE CLOSED WITH AN INTERVIEW WITH THE JEWISH FOREIGN MINISTER, TZIPI LIVNI.

Why doesn't the democratic party start taking it to these bastards?

I am talking about all of those people who never served who are accusing me of being a traitor (Dick Cheney, Joe Liberman, Mike Pence, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh -- all of the NEOCONS)

First of all, what makes any of them experts on how to fight a war? Second, who the hell are they to say that I support Al Qaeda unless I support them---I ACTUALLY SPENT A YEAR FIGHTING AGAINST AL QAEDA!!!!!

Why aren't Democrats posting ads that have veterans speaking out against this smear? I would love to see an add with a Connecticut veteran asking why Joe Liberman is accusing him/her of treason.

The famous French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) wrote in his book on the origins of government, The Social Contract (1762), that no laws are binding unless agreed upon by the people. The idea became one of the chief influences that brought about the French Revolution in 1789. During the revolution some small groups of radical factions supported rule by violence and terror.

"The word "terrorism" first became popular during the French Revolution, when the régime de la terreur was initially viewed as a positive political system that used fear to remind citizens of the necessity of virtue, " wrote Raymond Bonner in the New York Times. "The use of violence to "educate" people about ideological issues has continued, but it has taken on decidedly negative connotations - and has become predominantly, though not exclusively, a tactic deployed by those who do not have the powers of state at their disposal."

Modern terrorism
Rule by terror is as old as human history. War has never been humane. Terrorists also call their targets "terrorists." But what is a terrorist? What is the difference between a liberation army and a terrorist group? The aim of liberation armies is to claim or reclaim rule with the wider support of the people, to liberate people. (Many groups falsely claim to be liberation armies.) Those who use terror to rule or attempt to rule against the will of people are terrorists.

Modern terrorism sprang from the unstable political and social climate of the 1960s when colonialism finally collapsed. The event that is considered the beginning of modern terrorism was the hijacking of one of Israel's El Al passenger jets in Rome on 23 July 1968 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Almost instantly terrorist groups from around the world gained international attention.

In their early years terrorists robbed banks and kidnapped people for ransom to obtain funds. Although such methods are still used by terrorists in the Philippines, Columbia and elsewhere, modern terrorist groups are well-funded and well-organised across the world. They find harbour and support in countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan and Syria and often use forged or stolen passports to reach their target destinations. There is thought to be more than 500 terrorist networks operating around the world.

Notorious incidents

1972 - September, 5th: A Palestinian terrorist group called Black September murder 2 Israeli athletes and kidnap 9 others at the Munich Olympics. In the shootout with German police the 5 Arab terrorists are killed. The 9 hostages were killed when one of the terrorists threw a hand grenade into their helicopter. Black September emerged from the guerilla group al-Fatah, which was founded by Abu Jihad and Yasir Arafat in the 1959.

1974 - September, 8th: An explosion on Trans World Airlines Boeing 707 near Kefallinia, Greece caused the airplane to plunge into the Ionian Sea - 88 killed.

1977 - December, 4th: Terrorist shoot the pilots of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 737, the airliner crashes near Johor Baharu - 100 killed.

1983 - September, 23rd: A bomb exploded as the Gulf Air Boeing 737 prepares to land near Abu Dhabi - 111 killed.

1983 - October 25th: Lebanese suicide bomber attacks an American Marine barracks in Beirut - 216 US Marines and hundreds of civilians killed.

1987 - November, 29th: A bomb in the cargo bay of a Korean Air Boeing 707 exploded in mid-air - 115 killed.

1988 - December, 12th: Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland. Two terrorists, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were eventually handed over by Libya to Scottish authorities in 1994 but are appealing their case - 270 killed, including 189 Americans.

1989 - September, 19th: An Union de Transports Ariens DC-10 exploded over the Tenere Desert, Niger. Libyan and Syrian terrorists are implicated - 170 killed.

1993 - February, 26th: Muslim extremists detonate a 550 kilogram (1,200 pound) bomb in the parking basement of the World Trade Center, New York - 6 killed and thousands injured.

1998 - August, 7th: Bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania - 257 killed and some 5,000 wounded.

2001 - September, 11th: Muslim extremists on a suicide mission hijack four airliners; one airliner crashes, one is flown into the Pentagon and two are flown into the towers of the World Trade Center - more than 2,000 killed. The United States and her allies declare war on international terrorism.

from http://www.didyouknow.org/terrorism.htm

Sorry about the typos,I'm sure you got my point.Not every Israeli is Jewish.

good afternoon, y'all

FOS and Benji--when did you become bullies? I'm shocked at your meanness. Keith1 was being ignored, although it was probably not intentional.

Geez...he raises a good point. I asked yesterday but there was no discussion on the topic, Keith. Sometimes you might not find someone interested in the same issue, at the time. Check back later, and you might.

Lizzy, good post at the fountain. And my answer would be a resounding, "YES!"

FOS, I don't know what your beef with Spike Lee is. Maybe if you could eleaborate, I might. I've seen a few of his movies. I've known hundreds of African American/black people--and diverse doesn't begin to describe them. So, what is it that divided your family, if you don't mind my asking?

Remember, when bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep used to chant that same tired old cliche' that the Democrats are fiscally irresponsible.

Moderate Republicans will not deny that the deficit and the economy nothing more than the by-product of cutting taxes for the wealthy and spend, spend, spend, spend and spend some more. Fiscal responsiblity with this administration is a myth.

Now the bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep are repeating the same tired old cliche' that the Democrats are weak on national security.

THE DEMOCRATS MUST BE STRONG ON NATIONAL SECURITY.

THE DEMOCRATS MUST DEBATE THE ISSUE OF NATIONAL SECURITY EVERYTIME THEY GET THE CHANCE.

THE DEMOCRATS MUST BE EDUCATED ON ALL LEVELS OF NATIONAL SECURITY.

Saudi Arabia is the central front in the War On Terror.
Ohio is the central front in King George's War On Wages.

I also believe that those out their reading this blog are taking what is being said on this blog seriously (or they wouldn't be reading it).

Posted by Benji on August 20, 2006 at 12:24 PM

They might try to use what they find her to further their own agendy, like Amy P. Note the comments. Our friend Dorsano was busy last night.

Dems Spin Post Story

The Democratic Party selectively misreported on their official website an article in which the Washington Post reported Republicans Losing the 'Security Moms'. They posted some convenient excerpts from the article. This is how the DNC spun the story: (italics are from DNC)

(and Benji, this blog is not a major player in the blogosphere.)

Ranger,

This is how we do it. (You know that you get on my last nerve, but honestly you should consider running for office in your community.)

Here is a very good lengthy article:
Islam and the Theology of Power
shows the complexity of the situation. It basically says the demise of the classical tradition of the Muslim religion was brought about when Islamic civilizations lost their supremacy, and it is the follow-on muslim movements who have embraced terrorism as a way to regain their power.

Since the early 1980s, commentators have argued that Islam is suffering a crisis of identity, as the crumbling of Islamic civilization in the modern age has left Muslims with a profound sense of alienation and injury. Challenges confronting Muslim nations -- failures of development projects, entrenched authoritarian regimes and the inability to respond effectively to Israeli belligerence -- have induced deep-seated frustration and anger that, in turn, contributed to the rise of fundamentalist movements, or as most commentators have preferred to say, political Islam. But most commentators have been caught off guard by the ferocity of the acts of mass murder recently committed in New York and Washington. The basic cruelty and moral depravity of these attacks came as a shock not only to non-Muslims, but to Muslims as well.

The extreme political violence we call terrorism is not a simple aberration unrelated to the political dynamics of a society. Generally, terrorism is the quintessential crime of those who feel powerless seeking to undermine the perceived power of a targeted group. Like many crimes of power, terrorism is also a hate crime, for it relies on a polarized rhetoric of belligerence toward a particular group that is demonized to the point of being denied any moral worth. To recruit and communicate effectively, this rhetoric of belligerence needs to tap into and exploit an already radicalized discourse with the expectation of resonating with the social and political frustrations of a people. If acts of terrorism find little resonance within a society, such acts and their ideological defenders are marginalized. But if these acts do find a degree of resonance, terrorism becomes incrementally more acute and severe, and its ideological justifications become progressively more radical....

More here: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer221/221_abu_el_fadl.html

Edwards said that Cheney's daughter was "born that way" referring to her lesbianism. Edwards does not know this. No one does.

I am just curious Mom, but do you remember the day when YOU decided you would be hetrosexual?

Keith, I saw your question, but am thrilled that there will be some more States looking at the candidates before they are chosen, so did not wish to get into it with you. I have always wondered why New Hampshire and Iowa chose my candidates for me! Not exactly the 2 Prime Examples of all the other states in the nation.

Posted by fade2bluz on August 20, 2006 at 01:02 PM

Keith1, I apologize for my meanness

(although I was not intending to be mean, I just find the way FOS exresses herself amusing)

(no offense FOS)

However, you must admit there is a political debate going on here and you shouldn't take anything personal.

If you have something to say, you shouldn't think it isn't being read.

But if you want other bloggers to pay attention to what you are saying or asking, you have to be pro-active, persistent and you have to have a non-ego centric sense of humour.

And although everyone on this blog has been attacked for their views, you must admit that debate grudges don't last forever.

If you want to respond by calling me names, it's ok, I'm sure I will eventually get over it as long as there are no hard feelings.

Have a pleasant day.

p.s. i think the republicans are idiots.

Re: Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 20, 2006 at 12:54 PM

Freedom,

Um,you do know that the majority of people who call Israel Home are not Israeli don't you?

I understand. My feeling was that Pletka's position was so extreme that she is no longer an American. I know very well that my feeling is unreasonable, but then remember she works for the American Enterprise Institute, which group gave us all of the Neo Cons -- Paul Wolfowitz, etc.

This "national" identity has been a problem for quite a few famous people at AEI. Remember Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel?

There is no question that terrorism is a problem. "Security Moms" and the citizens as a whole understand that terrorism is a serious issue. The question before the American people is how to deal with the question of terrorism.

This is not always an easy issue. Take for example Hezbollah which Israel and the United States call a terrorist group, but Arab nations, the United Nations and much of Europe call them a resistance group.

How this nation deals with terrorism threats is most likely going to important in the 2008 election. The citizens will decide who in 2008 has the wisest plan to deal with these issues. Terrorism is linked to foreign policy, so perhaps experience in foreign policy may be a big issues in 2008. Time will tell.

I WONDER WHY THE DNC PROVIDED A LINK

DNC "spin"

Washington Post story

Good Afternoon, Friends & Democrats!

bbl . . .

Posted by fade2bluz on August 20, 2006 at 01:10 PM

I read that story (security mom's) on a conservative blog.

Dorsano knows what (conservative blog) I'm talking about.

p.s. i think the republicans are idiots.

Benji, I think you forgot an expletive in between are and idiots.

The Poetry Man has a great post up, if anyone is interested.

Fred from MCCS1997 has a reminder to exercise your vote on DCCC Candidates.

Benji. I'm just being silly today that's all.Dude wanted to be heard and I was just trying to "heppa-brudda-out" He He.Okay, I have to run off for a few.LOT's of Guest Checking Out today.

BBL

P.S. It's all good Paul.:)

One has to consider that western interpertations of the Middle East often contain a very different picture than those from the Middle East, much the way Native American history written by non-native Americans is different.

This does not mean to imply such sources of information are not good, and not well-meaning, but they sometimes lack perspective necessary to fully understand the issues.

PamB, I guess the day I decided I was definitely heterosexual was the day I sat beside a nice looking girl like myself on the bus, and after I told her I was going to visit my boyfriend in another county, she told me that she was attracted to me and wanted to have sex with me. If that wasn't bazaar enough, she tried to convince me with the line "if you haven't tried it, how do you know you wouldn't like it?"
I guess I should have asked her the day she decided she was a les, but by that point I really didn't care.
I think that's the way most people feel. They really don't care about other people's sexuality as long as they don't try to push it on someone else. Unfortunately, that's one of the points of the gay movement, to push it on others. The ones that I have known are just as bad as Jehovah Witnesses except they haven't come knocking on my door; they wait for you to sit next to them or talk to them.

THE NEXT STEP

Doing something over and over again expecting different results is................?

Bush's plan to fight terrorism?

Paul,

Frank's piece is rich! (ew, sorry) and I loved it. Thanks for all your posts, which are very informative.

Pam,

I don't know enough about the situation to think it's not a good thing to add a southern and western state...and think that New Hampshire residents are just used to their "favored" status and don't want to let go.

It seems like this will be a more representative cross-section of the country.

Saudi Arabia is the central front in the War On Terror.
Virginia is the central front in the War On Hate.

Roxie:

I, too, believe that foriegn policy (past and present) is responsible for heightened or lowered terror strikes against the U.S.

The problem is, our foriegn policy is linked to so many other variables: politics and the country's energy needs are just a couple of them.

What we need to do is change the way we interact with the rest of the world.

We have unfortunately in the past committed our own variations of 'terror' upon the populations of the world.

And, along with the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of modern warfare, the art of warfare has been 'dehumanized'.

Today, via technology, a general can sit sipping a Mai Tai on a beach in Florida while he directs bombs to be dropped on a population half a world away at 30,000 feet.

He doesn't have to look at the horror in the eyes of his victims as they lie dying.

Suicide bombers, I believe, are the result of frustration with this type of warfare thrust upon them as technologically inferior populations by the more developed countries of the industrialized world.

They don't have our technology, so (in desperation), this is how they reply.

We call it 'terror'.

However, I can't think of anything more 'terrorizing' than the thought of a cruise missile gone off course barreling up your ally in the dead of night.

And, this has happened in the past...and all because our technology is not 'perfect'.

The Bible says: "You reap what you sow";...if you sow the whirlwind, you will reap the whirlwind".

We also have a tendancy of making former operatives our enemy...such as Ho Chi Minh, and there have been many others in Central America and across the Middle East and East Asia since his time.

Unfortunately, many of the foreign policy debaucles are murky because the CIA has been/is involved at ground level. Step on a snake and see if it'll try to come back and bite you sooner or later.

My personal opinion is that the best way to fight terror is to focus on what's been wrong with our foreign policy. Correct that and you will see a lessening of terror activities against the United States in the future.

TLP

If acts of terrorism find little resonance within a society, such acts and their ideological defenders are marginalized. But if these acts do find a degree of resonance, terrorism becomes incrementally more acute and severe, and its ideological justifications become progressively more radical....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Posted by MominTN at August 20, 2006 01:15 PM

It's not the islamic acts of terrorism that are fueling Hezbollah recruitment and sympathizing in the Muslim world.

It's the double standard perspective that the west uses in developing their policies that relate directly to Arab nations, especially with Arab nations relationship or lack thereof with Israel.

bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep continue this by advocating military force.

military force will always be perceived by the recepients as a violent act equal to any act of terrorism unless military force is not pre-emptive and has been established as clearly a last resort due to an absolute exhaustion of diplomatic attempts to resolve the crisis.

bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep only exercise unilateral decision making and continue to dismiss diplomacy as a mandatory course of action.

there is a growing number of moderate republicans who are open enough to accept this reality. (i.e. Chuck Hagel)

bush, the neo-cons and the republican sheep are weak on national security

Posted by theLonelyProfessor on August 20, 2006 at 02:06 PM

couldn't have said it better myself.

Crazy Joe Lieberman: THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE

One last thing,

the only thing bush, the neo-cons, and the republicans have left is

the myth that
The Democratic Party is weak on National Security.

That is a myth.

The Democratic Party is strong on National Security.

Excellent Post LonelyProfessor - dinner discussion with you would clearly be a most interesting exchange.

i am reading at kos that today on the morning shows kerry spanked loserman hard and hagel made it clear that iraq is in a state of civil war.

Already posted the link gregg.

12:56 pm

McCain wants a DRAFT!

thanks pee-wee, seems like it was a good day for the reality based community.

A draft... that brings back some memories.

This is a very good site!
Why Islam today shuts down freedom of religion
http://answering-islam.org/Authors/Arlandson/apostasy.htm
Muslim leaders need to be encouraged to denounce the murder of those who are unbelievers.

This is the country we fought and died to free.

Afghanistan - Wednesday March 22, 2006
MORE CHRISTIANS ARRESTED IN WAKE OF ‘APOSTASY’
Two other converts from Islam in custody; another hospitalized after beating.
March 22 (Compass) – An avalanche of media coverage of an Afghan man facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity has apparently sparked the arrest and deepening harassment of other Afghan Christians in the ultra-conservative Muslim country.

Authorities arrested Abdul Rahman, 41, last month for apostasy, a capital offense under strict Islamic laws still in place in Afghanistan, which four years ago was wrested from the Taliban regime’s hard-line Islamist control.

During the past few days, Compass has confirmed the arrest of two other Afghan Christians elsewhere in the country. Because of the sensitive situation, local sources requested that the location of the jailed converts be withheld.

This past weekend, one young Afghan convert to Christianity was beaten severely outside his home by a group of six men, who finally knocked him unconscious with a hard blow to his temple. He woke up in the hospital two hours later but was discharged before morning.

“Our brother remains steadfast, despite the ostracism and beatings,” one of his friends said.

Several other Afghan Christians have been subjected to police raids on their homes and places of work in the past month, as well as to telephone threats.

First Known Apostasy Case

Rahman was put on trial in Kabul last week for the “crime” of converting from Islam to Christianity and faces the death penalty for refusing to return to the Muslim faith.

But news of his case did not break until March 16, when Ariana TV announced it. According to the TV newscaster, Rahman was asked in court, “Do you confess that you have apostacized from Islam?” The defendant answered, “No, I am not an apostate. I believe in God.”

He was then questioned, “Do you believe in the Quran?” Rahman responded, “I believe in the New Testament, and I love Jesus Christ.”

Although Islamist militants have captured and murdered at least five Afghan Christians in the past two years for abandoning Islam, Rahman’s case is the local judiciary’s first known prosecution case for apostasy in recent decades.

During Rahman’s initial hearing before the head judge of Kabul’s Primary Court, he testified that he had become a Christian 16 years ago, while working with a Christian relief organization in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border.

But after his conversion, Rahman’s wife divorced him, so their two infant daughters were taken back to Afghanistan, where they have been raised by their paternal grandparents.

Soon afterwards Rahman left Pakistan, and over the next few years he managed to enter several European countries. Although he attempted to apply for asylum, he was never able to obtain legal immigration status. After nine years, many of them in European detention centers because he had no valid papers, he was finally deported back to Afghanistan in 2002.

Back in Kabul, Rahman eventually contacted his family. In recent months, he tried repeatedly to regain custody of his daughters, now 13 and 14 years of age.

“The father finally went to the police in order to stop Abdul from contacting him, by telling them that Abdul converted to Christianity,” a Kabul source said. He was promptly taken into custody, interrogated and sent to jail to await trial.

Although Rahman is allowed to have a defense lawyer, he has declined, insisting he can defend himself. But according to Christian sources in Kabul, the convert suffers from recurring mental instability, which could alter the Islamic court’s handling of his case.

Rahman is reportedly incarcerated with 50 other prisoners in a cell designed for 15 in Kabul’s Central Prison, where members of the press have been denied access to him. Since he is estranged from his family, and prisoners are traditionally dependent upon food rations supplied by their families, it is unclear whether he is being fed regularly.

Labeled a ‘Cancer’

If Rahman is found guilty of apostasy and given the death penalty, as demanded by prosecutor Abdul Wasi, Afghan law permits him two final appeals – first to the provincial court, and then the Supreme Court.

Calling Rahman a “traitor to Islam,” Wasi told the court he was “like a cancer inside Afghanistan.”

Wasi told the Associated Press (AP) that when he offered to drop all the charges against Rahman if he returned to Islam, the defendant refused. “He said he was a Christian and would always remain one,” Wasi said.

“We are Muslims, and becoming a Christian is against our laws,” the prosecutor concluded. “He must get the death penalty.”

Rahman is being tried by Judge Ansarullah Mawlavizada, who has said he would issue a verdict on the case within two months.

“We are not against any particular religion in the world,” the judge told the AP on March 19. “But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. It is an attack on Islam.”

On March 20, however, Judge Mawlavizada told the British Broadcasting Corporation that Rahman’s mental state would be considered first, “before he was dealt with under sharia [Islamic] law.”

President Hamid Karzai’s office has said the president will not intervene in the case. But today a religious adviser to Karzai announced that Rahman would be given psychological tests.

“Doctors must examine him,” Moayuddin Baluch told the AP. “If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped.”

Although the Afghan government is clearly anxious to resolve Rahman’s case in order to satisfy international criticisms, the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has reportedly called for Rahman to be punished, insisting that he had “clearly violated Islamic law.”

Rahman’s plight dramatizes the judicial paradox within Afghanistan’s new constitution, ratified in January 2004. Although it guarantees freedom of religion to non-Muslims, it also prohibits laws that are “contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

At the same time, the constitution obliges the state to abide by the treaties and conventions it has signed, which include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In outlining freedoms of thought, conscience and religion, Article 18 of this convention explicitly guarantees “freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief.”

Less than 1 percent of the Afghan population is non-Muslim, mostly Hindus and Sikhs. Among the millions of Afghans living abroad during recent decades of conflict in their homeland, some have openly declared themselves Christians. But no churches exist inside Afghanistan, and local converts to Christianity fear retribution if they declare their faith.

Talking about the AEI . . . Had you seen this?

Click Here

I found this interesting. It sheds light on the Jewish attempts to disrupt the peace (ceasefire) in Lebanon

Click Here

I really don't understand how adding Nevada and South Carolina into the Party Primaries will even out the mix.

Nevada is such a red state that no Democrat dares to vote for a liberal issue. South Carolina is also.

Click Here

Any Religion, when allowed to be used to rule the government, can shut down Freedom of Religion.Like,for enstance,America's warped interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls aka the Holy Bible.If we allow that book to replace the United States Constitution,Americans by the million would be hung,stoned,enslaved and burned at the stake.The fortunate ones would be "deported" out of the country.That's why the Republican Party is so dangerous and should no longer be permitted to have the Majority in the United States because they have the same ideology as the Islamic Extremists do.The only difference is that the Islamists Koran has more writings from the Dead Sea Scrolls than the Holy Bible.Same exact information,just Cherry picked by Europeans who added Pagan rituals to it and called it Christianity.All one needs to do is read the Gnogstic Bible and they will realize that ideaology found in American Christianity is way off from what the real early Christians believed.There are so many Pagan Rituals that we call "Holidays" that would make Jesus Christ vomit.Yet,in his very name,we celebrate them and hand out presents and sing to a tree and ....ewwww disgusting.

BTW..Shot out to the (Discovery and History Channels)for true educated and factual enlightenment.

:)

THIS IS WHY THEY HATE SPIKE LEE

The only difference is that the Islamists Koran has more writings from the Dead Sea Scrolls than the Holy Bible

No reference makes it unlikely to be true, but if so could be the reason they died.

Why isn't the White House concerned about North Korea testing more rockets? Why are they pretending that China is our friend?
Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 20, 2006 at 08:45 AM

probably because China told Bush Jr how it's going to be.

Chinese envoy tells U.S. to 'shut up'

Paul - Thanks for the AEI link!

AEI Fellow After Meeting With Bush: President May Take Military Action Against Iran In 12-18 Months
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a member of a small group of analysts who were asked to discuss their views on the Middle East with President Bush at a private lunch this week, said this morning on ABC’s This Week that the mid- to long-term fallout from Israel-Hezbollah conflict could be a good thing because it may prompt Bush to take military action against Iran.
Of course, I never get invited to private lunch with President Bush. I have seen the political tea leaves showing a showdown between Iran's President and Bush.

MominTN, I thought you were going to find another Party where the minorities weren't "calling all the shots".

Saudi Arabia is the central front in the War On Terror.
Mississippi is the central front in the War On Poverty.

Domingo - excellent source! China is becoming a power of significance, and they do not afraid to tell America to shove it.

In light of the coming Iran President/Bush it will be interesting to watch China.

Nevada might not be as red as we thought:

The state's 2006 statistics show Nevada's registered Democrats slightly outnumber registered Republicans -- 485,378 to 475,019. That really isn't much comfort for Titus, experts said.

"People that rely on voter registration numbers will be sorely disappointed in the results," Ernaut said. "Ultimately in Nevada, you have more conservative Democrats that vote Republican. Also, independent and nonpartisan voters historically tend to break 55 to 45 for Republican candidates.

"That being said, with President Bush's numbers the way they are and the mood of the electorate turning toward Democrats, I don't think a Republican candidate will enjoy that kind of advantage this time, but I think they will still have an important advantage."

Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 03:14 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OMG! Talk about "Emboldening our Enemies" Bush , apparently knows how to do just that.

Shheeze. (shaking my head in disbelief)

MominTN, I thought you were going to find another Party where the minorities weren't "calling all the shots".

Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 03:21 PM
I'm certain MominTN believes that diversity in the party is a good thing. Consider that American history has changed because of minority involvement. History did not tell America's about Sally Hemings for example before minorites pointed out that the white men who wrote history seemed to omitted that Thomas Jefferson had a relationship with a black slave, and fathered children. Minorities are good in party, they help provide wider perspective.

No reference makes it unlikely to be true, but if so could be the reason they died.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 03:10 PM

Huh?

Why is Crazy Joe Lieberman against IRAQI SOVEREIGNTY?

Domingo,

Boi! Yoo dun bedda behayve yorseff fo I git my flaw swattah n tap dat ole tale now.

ROFLMAO!

Okay,just chill, k? ;p

I wonder if I went back in time and told part of my anscestors that one day their decendents would be so free, they'd mock Massah's language, they'd be all "Yu Hush now.Dont yuuz let O'le der Massah heer yu say dat" "Hush naw, chyled"

LOL.Okay,I'm done.

Teaching Hatred in Saudi Arabia and Egypt: The UN Response
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=15302

Hey FreedomOfSpeech, did you know that Sunday is the old Roman "Day of the Sun" and not really the sabbath?

They don't hate us for our Freedom, they hate us for our ARROGANCE......

If the United States did'nt go snooping for oil and butting in to their afairs, 911's would not be happening.

Ooops,I sraight sounded like a "Blame America First" fanatic,but ya'll know I'm telling the truth.

I betcha I just got the NSA's attention with that one.

LOL

Hi everyone!
I think it is one of the smartest things to change up the states process - NH.

Too many times spin comes out of the NH race. They take it and the press runs with and face it the Repubs - rove has always had a better voice and can dance around people like Donna Brazile and most of the other Dem spokes persons. This will be refreshing and takes alot of speculation and forcasting out of the equation, whoever thought of this is a genius.

In the past they take it and say they analized it and the predictions start flying, this way what can they predict? Its all unique and fresh.

N H - get over it. I am thrilled! I would like to know who came up with it - they must have some new minds - fresh thinkg out of the old box, at work.

All I can say is rove move over the DEMS are coming throug!

Sunday is on Sunday, the Sabbath is on Saturday. Saturday, when used as the Sabbath begins Friday and sundown and lasts till Saturday at Sundown.

Life is full such interesting things. In Ethiopia one can find 13 months.

Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 03:45 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yep.Also,a new day begins at sunset and not 12 midnight.

;p

Some years ago (many actually, I guess) my Wifes's Older Brother Visited from Kansas

We took Don on a tour of Washington and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. One of the things Don and Rhea enjoyed was seeing the Atlantic Ocean at Ocean City, Maryland.

About the time they were planning to go home, I asked them if there were some other sights they might like to see. Don asked about Monticello.

Actually, I saw Monticello as a kid once, but my wife never had. So, we took them to tour it. When the tour was about finished, I asked the tour guide about Sally Hemings. She said, old Tom never had a mistress.

:)

I told her (and the group who were with us) about Sally and her family and a few things I remembered from American History 602. She said, "Where did you ever learn that!" I answered, the University of Texas.

Don called a few weeks later and told my wife, Linda, that I had been right. He had actually done some research and learned about Sally.

Of course, years later we learned that the DNA tests had proved the heritage of the Hemings.

LOL

They don't hate us for our Freedom, they hate us for our ARROGANCE......
and our unfair and unbalanced handling of Middle East Issues, including using Veto power in unfair and unbalanced means in the United Nations.

They hate us because we aren't Muslim, something you won't hear from politicians.

The ideology of jihad was conceived after Muhammad death. It encompasses a doctrine aiming at the Islamization of the world, supported by military institutions and tactics of war, all being considered as binding the Islamic community (umma). Jihad represents the Islamic worldview of war and peace, it constitutes a specialized domain of Islamic theology and law.

Jihad doctrine divides the peoples of the world into two irreconcilable groups: the dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and the dar al-harb, (land of war) the non-Muslim world, destined to come under Islamic jurisdiction either by the peaceful conversion of its inhabitants, or by armed conflict. Jihad is the permanent state of war of the dar al-Islam against infidels until they submit to Islamic domination. Peace is accepted only temporarily according to circumstances. The institution of jihad regulates the conduct of war according to religious rules.

Yep, Roxies, Right....Oooops, I meant, "correct" "accurate" LOL.

Re: Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 03:45 PM

How about Monday? Or for that matter, the month of August?

lol

Re: "rove has always had a better voice and can dance around people like Donna Brazile and most of the other Dem spokes persons."

Gee. Even I can dance around Donna Brazile a few times, and I'm over 65 and disabled.

Brazile is one of the key reasons Al Gore lost . . .

They hate us because we aren't Muslim, something you won't hear from politicians.
I never felt hated by Muslims simply because I was not a Muslim. And, the far-right Islamics, are an extreme end, not any reflection on true Muslims or Arabs. Poor Middle East foreign policy has been the seed and fertilizer of these extreme groups.

Mom,

That started WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY before Muhammed died.

1.Jihad also represents the "SPIRITUAL" warfare one deals with "IN THEIR SOUL" not an actual war.

2.Retards defined it as a physical war.

3.The Ku Klux Klan,Tardian Nation Brothers and the KKKingdom Identity Church all have the exact same ideology.

4.The Republicans do as well which is why we are in Iraq.

5.Dang it.I wanted to talk to you some more,but I have to go.

Bye Everyone,It's been fun.

smak!

REAL DEMOCRATIC vs CENTRIST DEMOCRATIC vs REGRESSIVE FASCIST

i noticed a post this afternoon with a suggestion that readers here check out an article by a man named james arlandson- his article is at a website called "answering islam"- when i checked it out, i can't say that i liked what i saw there- as a scholar of religion, i am always keenly aware when i am reading apologetics or, in this case, something that i think is probably worse- this is an evangelical site dedicated not just to the promotion of chrisianity as the only true religion, but it appears to be a site dedicated to the promotion of falsehoods and hatred of those of the islamic faith-

surprisingly, and i must say sadly, this site seems to have been sliding under the radar of groups that watch for this kind of garbage that masquerades as scholarship- i did find some commentary from a conservative site (saneworks.us)- my brief glance over this site tells me i probably don't agree with most of their ideas, but i do think they have properly described this arlandson (based on what i see from him in the post above):

Interestingly, one of the tedious exceptions to this rule has been an ongoing condemnation of Islam by a Christian lecturing at a small community college in Southern California. James Arlandson has made it his business since 9-11 to speak of and detail the evil of Islam as a religion. His entries at the American Thinker and at a website dedicated to exposing the evil of Islam, www.answeringislam.org, are long and full of citations to the original Islamic sources. While Mr. Arlandson’s entries at AT and at AnsweringIslam are hardly scholarly or particularly well-written, certainly not the work of a “professor of religion,” they achieve their end, which is to debunk any myth of Islam as a noble or peaceful religion or that the Muslims, as faithful Muslims, are a noble or peaceful people. (While we at SANE doubt seriously that James Arlandson is what the academic world would call a scholar of comparative religion or of Islam, we still believe his analysis of Islam is worth publishing on the Internet mostly because real "scholars" like Bernard Lewis have given Islam a pass even when they bring some critical thought to bear.)

http://www.saneworks.us/An-Exchange-of-Emails-Do-you-propose-to-kill-em-all-article-105-1.htm

we need a candidate that knows the actual cost of a loaf of bread, gallon of milk, gallon of gas...
because like most of you, i live in the real world, not bushes fantasy island with his fuzzy math.

Religious persecution in the Middle East is common. Why do we support these countries?

Both types are against Human Rights and should be sanctioned by international law. a) Religious persecution was obviously practiced in Afghanistan, but is now institutionalized in Saudi Arabia for example, where by law you cannot be Christian to start with, nor convert to the Christian faith. Following the Wahabi teachings, Islamists around the Muslim world have conducted a variety of documented aggressions against Christians (and other Muslims as well) such as in: Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. b) Community persecution is a wide spread phenomenon. It takes the shape of ethnic oppression, examples: Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc. but also Egypt and Indonesia. In sum, the suppression of Christians in the Muslim world is an international problem.

Malik: In very few spots throughout the Islamic world where Christians live in Muslim-majority states do we find them enjoying an equal status with their Muslim counterparts. They are more often than not reduced to second-class status, or dhimmi status. In the Arab world, for example, the only place where native Christians have managed for centuries to avoid the dhimmi humiliation is in Lebanon. But even here matters have been deteriorating since the war in the country, which began in 1975 and since Syrian occupation and Islamist resurgence. All other Middle Eastern Christian communities (Copts, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, etc.) are quintessential dhimmis. So if dhimmitude represents a recipe for slow and gradual liquidation of the targeted community, then this is the most subtle and most insidious form of persecution and it is quite widespread.

Interlocutor: Is Muslim persecution of Christians something new or the continuation of an old pattern and Islamic tradition?

Marshall: There has nearly always been discrimination, and often violence, but we are now seeing an upsurge of persecution in the Islamic world.

Bat Ye'or: It is certainly not new. Jews and Christians ('People of the Book') in Muslim countries shared a same destiny: that of dhimmis, - native populations conquered and subjected to the laws of jihad. Islamic laws regulating their status were the same, whereas other native populations like the Zoroastrians in Persia were more discriminated against. The oppression of Christians started from the beginning of the Muslim conquest of their lands. It is attested in the narratives before these rules became codified in laws from the 8th century. It covers all aspect of life and imposes vilification and insecurity. It has often included slavery, deportations, forced conversions and mass killings, although Christians like Jews are 'protected' by Islamic law providing their submit to their inferior and humiliating status. Those rules are inscribed in the shariah, and with the re-Islamization of the Muslim state, the traditional thirteen-century-old pattern is being reactivated, after its suppression by the European colonization of Muslim countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Christians are persecuted also because they are secularists and oppose the return of the shariah.

Phares: First let's understand that there is a battle over this History. While many Muslim historians and a number of sympathetic historians in the West affirm that persecution has never (or almost never) existed, most Middle East Christian Historians and a growing number of Muslim humanist intellectuals affirm clearly that this oppression has existed since the 7th century. But facts from the history of the Middle East are difficult to deny. One, there is a whole debate about the real attitude of the theology of Islam towards the infidels (or Kafir).

The answer varies between moderates and radicals. It will remain a debate in the realm of theology and linguistics till a reform occurs. On the other hand, historical accounts of persecution are undeniable. Since the establishment of the Dhimmi status as of the 7th century AD/CE the Caliphate and the various other Islamic states have discriminated against Christians and Jews. Other powers -including Christians- throughout history have been discriminatory as well but later on, future generations have admitted this behavior. The problem nowadays lies in the fact that most mainstream historians of Islamic Politics still deny the past -and worse the present-existence of these discriminations.

Malik: Ever since the earliest Islamic conquests dating back to the 7th century AD when Invading Muslim armies overran neighboring communities, many of them Christian, there has been systematic persecution of Christians. Setting aside the anecdotes of tolerance that adorn so much of the specialized (and romanticized) literature on Islamic history, the real story is a sordid one of the systematic reduction of vanquished peoples and members of other religions to second-class status at best—mainly reserved for Christians and Jews—and physical elimination at worst. So this is quite an old story indeed.

Interlocutor: Is there an ingredient within Islam itself that makes it an oppressor of other religions? Is it possible for Islam to be tolerant of a religion like Christianity?

Marshall: Dhimmi status has led to continuing discrimination against Christians into the modern age, and in the last century, Christian rebellion against Dhimmi status has led to mass murder.

Apostasy and blasphemy laws have often required that any Muslim who wants to change his religion, or any Christian who talks to them about Christianity, be executed.

I believe to sum up what several people have been trying to communicate today, is that histories are now always true. Great measures are taken to support them. It did indeed take DNA evidence to finally get some to recognize that President Jefferson had black children.

One has to question beleif systems, especially if those belief systems are based on debating different religious beliefs, for in such prejudice has always existed.

From a Christian perspective, Jesus was asked, "What is greatest commandment?" He answer, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, and the second is like unto it." And many Christians stop reading, but the text continues...
"On this hinges ALL of the LAW and ALL of the Prophets." To love your neighbor as yourself is to love those Islamic Fundamentalists. If someone loves someone, they try to understand the person. In trying understand Islamic fundamentalists one must understand the history - not from a western perspective, but from a Middle East perspective. Just my two-cents, which of course will not buy anything today.

I think that's the way most people feel. They really don't care about other people's sexuality as long as they don't try to push it on someone else.
Unfortunately, that's one of the points of the gay movement, to push it on others.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 01:32 PM

Just because you may have had one experience like you claim you did, does not mean that gays 'push' their sexuality on anyone else! I know MANY gay females who would not even bother to look at you in a sexual way. that girl was trying to get a charge out of rattling your cage.

seriously, if there any race, creed, gender, religion,sexual preference, that you don't hold deep seated bigotry against?

I think this is the first time I have EVER seen a "local news" report of Code Pink demonstrating in Austin, Texas, where they were chanting, "Arrest Karl Rove!"

Maybe this is a new trend here in Fairfax County.

Here is an email message from the Chair person of the State of Ct Democratic Party:

Hartford - “On Wednesday, August 9, the day after the Democratic primary, the party's statewide and congressional candidates held a press conference at which I formally announced my full support for the entire statewide ticket, including Ned Lamont as the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Senate. As the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, I want to assure the members of my party that I not only have endorsed Lamont's candidacy but I am committed to working to ensure his election in November.

As some may be aware, I have known Joe Lieberman for more than 30 years and I have always had the utmost respect and admiration for him. I also appreciate all that he has done for Connecticut and for the state Democratic Party. I was especially proud when he represented Connecticut on the 2000 national ticket as the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

However, in the Aug. 8 primary, state Democrats spoke loudly and clearly. More than 40 percent of them turned out to vote and they decisively chose Ned Lamont over Sen. Lieberman. It is my strong belief that Sen. Lieberman should abide by the wishes of state party members and by the democratic process.

As such, I have asked Sen. Lieberman to drop his plans to pursue his independent candidacy. He respectfully declined my request and said he intends to go ahead with it.”

Why do we support countries that have religous persecution?

Why did we support a dictator in Iran, a plan which lead to the Embassy take over and the holding of American's hostage. Why did we support a Dictator in Ethiopia during the same period, who was also over-thrown. Why did America train Osama Bin Laden on how to be a terrorist and how to disrupt a superpower?
It is called, Middle East foreign policy, and America has made some mega errors for decades. It is time to recognize those facts and re-think Middle East policies.

Colored eggs and evergreen trees with presents under them are thousands of years old Northern European pagan costumes that have nothing to do with Christianity. Also Jesus could not have been born in the end of December because tax time back then was in mid-July. And according to history records of who ruled Rome and Judea at the time and when King Herod died, they got Jesus' birth off by four years too late. Of course they started the calendar off with year "one" because they had no concept of "zero" back then, so they were really only three years off. They needed those "nasty Muslims" to come along and teach them about zero.

Re: Posted by wackat on August 20, 2006 at 04:07 PM

You may not remember, but I do seeing Bush Senior being amazed at a Super Market bar code reader . . .

here is some interesting blog commentary that includes a "dialogue" with arlandson

http://gaymiddleeast.blogspot.com/2006/06/right-wing-christian-attacks-gays-in.html

here is a lovely book that arlandson glowingly recommends- "antichrist- islam's awaited messiah"- scrool down to read his approving comments- oh, he's a beauty all right

http://www.joelstrumpet.com/?page_id=9

Is it possible to be so heavenly minded that one ceases to be any earthly good?

You show your ignorance of the muslim religion's political impact. They have conquered countries since the beginning of Islam with their wars. In Ad 636 they conquered the Middle East. Jews and Christians were already there with many native peoples living peacefully in between small wars between kings. Non-muslims have been persecuted since. Why we ever thought we could "bring freedom" to those who despise freedom, I will never know.

Why we ever thought we could "bring freedom" to those who despise freedom, I will never know.
Some in the United States despise freedom. Palestine elected Hamas as their government, and some, including the current administration have refused to accept the freedom of choice made by the people.

The people of Lebanon are protecting Hezbollah. They have elected the to seats of government, again in a democracy, but this is not acceptable to some.

We brought them freedom, they exercized freedom, and we say - WAIT... you can't do that. It is no wonder the anger for the United States continues to grow. We tell them they can vote for their own government, then tell them their vote DOES NOT COUNT. Does that sound way republican or what?

Re:

You show your ignorance of the muslim religion's political impact. They have conquered countries since the beginning of Islam with their wars. In Ad 636 they conquered the Middle East. Jews and Christians were already there with many native peoples living peacefully in between small wars between kings. Non-muslims have been persecuted since. Why we ever thought we could "bring freedom" to those who despise freedom, I will never know.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 04:25 PM

Boy. What a mixed bag of stuff.

I thought MominTn was learning a little.

WE WANT OUR WAGES BACK!

Do some historical research. Muslim Arabs have conquered many nations and killed Christians and Jews who didn't become Muslim.

Do some historical research. Muslim Arabs have conquered many nations and killed Christians and Jews who didn't become Muslim.

And Christian's never did the same? The crusades did not happen? Oh right, the President of Iran says the Holicost didn't happen, it must be true. Maybe people only imagined that Christians tortured non-chrisitians is perverted days - ever read up on those issues? Very nasty things those Christians were doing. Some very sick.

Christians never burned people they decided were witches either. The Muslims sneaked in and did it and planted evidence that the Christains did it.

How about Monday? Or for that matter, the month of August? lol Posted by Paul

I take it you already know, Monday is the Roman "Day of Moon". Saturday is the day of Saturn. Tuesdays is the "Day of Mars".(Martes in Spanish) These are all old Roman Gods. August is named after Emperor Augustus, and July is named after Emperor Julius. For thousands of years the old Roman Calendar had ten, 30 day months in it, and they ended up figuring out they needed to add two more.

Theocracies are responsible for many deaths.

Then their was the Christian leader Chromwell in England, who over-threw the government and brought a Christian government into power, persecuted non-chrisitians and was so horrible that they actually dug him up after he was dead to make him pay for crimes.

Does this put to rest, the Christians have a brutal history too?

Should I shut up now? Yes, Roxie, SHUT UP!

How Jews Came to Live Under Arab Rule
Jews' presence in what are now Arab lands long predates Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East. Jews first arrived in ancient Babylonia in 586 B.C.E. as captives of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of the Kingdom of Judea, in which he destroyed the first Jewish Temple. The exile community of Babylonia (later to become Iraq) became the center of world Jewry, the site of the two great academies of Jewish learning at Sura and Pumbeditha. These academies produced the Babylonian Talmud, which forms the core of Judaism as it is practiced today. After his conquest of Babylonia some 50 years later, King Cyrus of Persia allowed Jews to return to Palestine to rebuild their sacked kingdom. However, significant Jewish communities remained in Babylonia, Persia, and throughout the Middle East, maintaining an unbroken Jewish presence for 2,500 years until the establishment of the State of Israel (Schleifer, 2003; Stillman, 1979).

By the time of Muhammad's birth, Jews had lived in the Arabian peninsula for centuries and were assimilated into Arab society, but still seen as a separate group. Arab society was organized into tribes, and the Jewish community also comprised three dominant tribes, which had formed alliances with different warring Arab tribes. Some of these Arab tribes welcomed Muhammad to Medina in the hope that he would arbitrate their disputes, and Muslim sources attribute their readiness to accept Islamic monotheism to their familiarity with Jewish monotheism (Stillman, 1979).

However, once Arabs began to follow Muhammad, their alliances with Jews - a group that would not accept the prophet - became strained. When Muhammad finally gained political power, he quickly moved against those who had rejected him. He ordered the weakest of the three Jewish tribes, the Banu Qaynuqa, to leave Arabia, sparing their lives only at the behest of the Arab tribe they were once allied with, and confiscating their property. After a military setback, Muhammad exiled the second tribe, the Banu l-Nadir, which was later massacred by Muslim forces and their property confiscated. Although the third tribe, the Banu Qurayza, tried to surrender, and their former Arab allies pleaded for mercy for them, Muhammad condemned the men to death and the women to slavery, calling it Allah's decision. The mass slaughter that ensued solidified Muhammad's strength as a leader (Stillman, 1979; Ye'Or, 1985).

There are two sides to every story. Tell both sides.

MominTN - Are you saying that the Jews were in the Middle East first, so the Arabs should leave, or submit to the Jew's wishes? If so, then all non-American Indians need to leave America or submit to the rules of the Native Americans.

Are we back on this Israel thing again? This is getting old.

MominTN

Did you see my post on the last thread about Tim Mcgraw in Nashville Sept 12 for Bredesen! ?

President Sitting Bull ruled today that Christianity is unacceptable, because it was never embraced by native American ancestors.

Shall I go to the time out corner?

Read the book The Dhimmi or search on the keyword. Here is one synapsis that is easy to read.
http://http://www.jewishmag.com/57mag/dhimmi/dhimmi.htm
Basically Jihad is a state that will exist until Islam rules the world. There is no freedom of religion nor much of anything else.

Well, I'm glad you settled that TN. When are we going to bomb Mecca?

pee-wee - it would be more productive to bomb the Dome Of the Rock. That would at least permit the Jews to build their temple on that site, which Christanity believes is their right.

There are two sides to every story. Tell both sides. Posted by pee-wee

Yep. There are two sides to every story. Everything "MominTN" is posting about the Arabs, the Hebrews also did to the Arabs. The Hebrews took over their towns and killed all the inhabitants. David conquered Jerusalem from somebody else. It's all in the Bible. So what's your point, "MominTN"?

The reason we have freedom of religion is because our founding fathers thought they were persecuted by the Church of England. Just wait til you have to wear your burka and be submissive to some Arab.

At my age I'll look better in a burka than a bikini anyway.

I would simply be stoned to death - I don't submit very well and my mouth would get me trouble.

I get 40 virgin men if I die a martyr right?

It's amazing that 33% of the world is Christian, 67% are non-christians, yet the Christians think they are the TRUE religion and can tell the others they are all wrong !

Review of Islam and Dhimmitude: where civilizations collide. Bat Ye'or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2002.

Mark Durie

The West has some awareness of jihad, but it comprehends little of its intended outcome, dhimmitude. The recommended antidote to this ignorance is a careful read of Bat Ye'or's latest book.

Bat Ye'or (a pseudonym) is the foremost historian of dhimmis, the non-Muslim indigenous peoples living in territory which has been conquered by Islam and is made subject to Islamic shari'a. In her most recent book, Islam and Dhimmitude: where civilizations collide, she documents the social, political, economic and religious consequences of the history of dhimmitude and documents its implications relations between faiths and civilizations in this new century.

Bat Ye'or points out that dhimmitude is founded upon Islamic replacement theology. The Qur'an regards Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Jesus' disciples as followers of Islam: "Islam is considered as the 'True Judaism' and the 'True Christianity'." (Islam and Dhimmitude p.375) This theological grid permits Jewish and Christian dhimmis to live on in the Dar al-Islam ('house of Islam ') as 'tolerated' adherents of what are regarded as debased forms of Islam.

Bat Ye'or ('daughter of the Nile') is herself of Egyptian Jewish dhimmi background. Her life-long explorations of the world of dhimmitude began as a study of the history of her own people in Egypt. This opened a doorway for her into the world of Eastern Christian peoples conquered by Islam, with their agonized past and precarious present as hard-pressed minorities in their own ancestral lands. They include Copts, Greeks, Maronites, Persians, Albanians, Armenians, Slavs and Syrians.

So what does it mean to be a non-Muslim living under Islam? Based upon the precedent of Muhammad's treatment of the conquered Jewish farmers of Khaybar in Arabia, the institution of the dhimma or 'pact of protection' was established to provide a legal status for the peoples conquered by jihad. According to the laws of jihad, the alternatives to the dhimma were conversion, slavery or death. The dhimma fixed the legal, social and economic place of non-Muslims in the Islamic state. In return, the people of the pact, or dhimmis, were required to pay tribute (jizya) in perpetuity to the Muslim Community (Umma), and to adopt a position of humble and grateful servitude to it, as enshined in the verse 9:29 of the Qur'an:

Fight against those who do not believe in Allah . of those who have been given the Book [i.e. Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya [tribute] readily and are humbled.

This divine revelation defines the inseparable link between jihad and dhimmitude. A powerful symbolic expression of the jihad-dhimmitude nexus, which defined the horizon of the dhimmi's world, was annual jizya payment ritual. Here is a poignant fifteenth century description of this event by the Moroccan jurist al-Maghili:

On the day of payment they [the dhimmis] shall be assembled in a public place . They should be standing there waiting in the lowest and dirtiest place. The acting officials representing the law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing them a favor in accepting from them the jizya and letting them go free. They then shall be dragged one by one for the exacting of payment. When paying the dhimmi will receive a blow and will be throne aside so that he will think that he has escaped the sword through this. This is the way that the friends of the Lord, of the first and last generations, will act toward their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His Apostle, and to the Believers (Islam and Dhimmitude p.70)

Historical sources show that this enacted ritual of military subjugation continued to be practiced in Morocco right up to the beginning of the twentieth century, more than thirteen centuries after initial jihad conquest.

Bat Ye'or shows how during the 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of the Great Powers, the lot of the dhimmis improved considerably. However dhimmitude is now returning with a vengeance all across the Islamic world, a trend which Bat Ye'or documents in disturbing detail. Islam and Dhimmitude advances her earlier work by exposing the mechanisms of concealment that nevertheless continue to make dhimmitude a taboo subject, hidden behind such terms such as 'peaceful coexistence' and 'Islamic golden age'.

Islam and Dhimmitude unveils a sad history of dispossession and decline of dhimmi communities. Like sexism and racism, dhimmitude is not only manifested in legal and social structures, but in a psychology of inferiority, a will to serve, which the dominated community adopts in self-preservation. Hanging over the head of each dhimmi community is the threat that they might be considered to have broken their dhimma pact, in which case jihad conditions could be restored. Bat Ye'or argues that the genocide of Armenian Christians - officially denied by Turkey to this day - was a retaliatory response to a perceived breach of the dhimma in the form of the Armenian's will to self-determination.

One recurrent theme of dhimmitude is the setting against each other of dhimmi communities. Bat Ye'or argues that the terrifying example of the Armenian genocide, as well as the still recent memory of massacres such as that of Damascus Christians in 1860, motivated some Middle Eastern Christians in the early twentieth century to nurture anti-semitism as an strategy of self-protection. Christians became enemies of the Jews, yet without succeeding in becoming the friends of the Muslims.

Bat Ye'or sets the politics of European-Arab-Israeli relations into the framework of dhimmitude, and produces some startling results. The policies of European nations towards the Arab world, she argues, demonstrate the features of gratitude and humble service which define the dhimmi mentality.

Bat Ye'or concludes that the study of dhimmitude also has great importance for Jewish-Christian rapprochement. A fundamental principle of dhimmitude is that it 'constitutes a global condition, not solely of Jews but common to Jews and Christians alike'. (p. 348). Therefore Jews cannot remain indifferent to the sufferings of dhimmi Christians such as the Copts of Egypt, the Pakistani Christians, and the southern Sudanese, nor to the theological and political mechanisms that generate and conceal their suffering, for these are the same mechanisms which help fuel the jihad against Israel.
...
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/520.htm

What does Islam really teach?

Why would you post Muslim propaganda in a democratic blog?

Name a democracy that has a Muslim majority who has respect for civic, human and minority rights.

yet the Christians think they are the TRUE religion and can tell the others they are all wrong ! Posted by PamB

There's more to it going on here. "It", and they, are trying to instill a climate of victimization in order to justify war. I think Tracy is falling down on the job by not cleaning this constant racism and religious bigotry off this blog, (even though I know there's a couple of "so called Dems" who want this kind of hateful crap posted on here). Everyone knows I like to fight with trolls, but screen full after screen full, sixteen hours a day, day after day, is just too damn much.

{{{Jen}}}

nice video. thanx for sharing. have you seen the Kris Kristofferson? or Neil Young Video: “Families”

Our constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Islam doesn't. Fact.

Domingo,

ignore and entertain an intelligent discussion on the topic of your choice. you don't have to take the bait.

Name a democracy that has a Muslim majority who has respect for civic, human and minority rights.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 05:25 PM
Many would argue that even the United States of America does not respect civic, human and minority rights. The American "civil liberties union" is looked upon with destain. Ask gays and lesbians if they feel they have minority rights? Minorities, including American Indians still face problems in the nation.

I believe you set a standard for Islamic democracies, NEW democracies that even a 200+ year old democracy falls short one.

The problem with oil and the wealth it generates is that the states' rulers have the wealth to remain in power, as they can pay off or repress most potential opponents. Brian Whitaker argues that as there is no need for taxation there is less pressure for representation. Furthermore, Western governments require a stable source of oil and are therefore more prone to maintain the status quo, rather than push for reforms which may lead to periods of instability

Okay name any Islamic democracy....an oxymoron.

has anyone asked themselves why someone who comes here professing to be a democrat posts from extreme right wing evangelical sites? my posts above were an attempt to offer some counterbalance to an article from one of these extremist sites- it seems to me the book claiming that the messiah that the muslims are waiting for is the antichrist that was given positive remarks from this writer should say all one needs to know about this dems reading habits

why are you posting fanatical fundamentalist christian propaganda on the democratic national committee website?

I am not posting propaganda, I posted a video with Muslim teachings in it.

Fanatical fundamentalists, be they of the Muslim, Christian or any stripe are dangerous. Osama and Bush had LOADS in common. Wake up.

Osama Bin Laden is trying to bankrupt our country!
Why has King George sided with the enemy?

Re: Posted by fade2bluz on August 20, 2006 at 05:31 PM

Thank you for the breath of sanity here today.

I must say, I am tired of the Muslim stuff.

MominTN -- Let us step back to your coments about gays and lesbians pushing their lifestyle on others - you have very little patience for people pushing their lifestyle on others.

Funny thing however, no gay or lesbain has ever come to my door handing out tracts to convert me, but I can not say the same about Christians. One might argue that is the Christians trying to push their lifestyle on others. I never say the gays and lesbians saying we need a constitutional amendment to ban heterosexual marriage. I can not say the same about the Christians, who believe they must amend the consititution to discriminate against those evil sinners.

Your posting very hard to show that we as a nation should destory Muslims, which I find strange, because I see no Biblical reference to killing off populations that do not support Christianity. I do see God gave all people a choice. It appears that some of today's Christians think God screwed up, and people should not have a choice. We should kill of those Muslims, not respect their choice.

So do Christians really believe in God, and Christianity, or do they simply use it to promote their own selfish agenda?

Okay name any Islamic democracy....an oxymoron.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 05:39 PM
Palestine!

Palestine is an islamic democracy. It does exist. An infant democracy. It has it problems, but so this nation, keeping slaves, no rights for women -- one can not expect a new democracy to be a far progressed as the USA in a short time.

Re: Posted by Roxie on August 20, 2006 at 05:47 PM

I love it.

I am not responding to your worthless attacks on my posts. I can post anything that educates people on the issues. And one of them is preserving our democracy and our freedoms that are in our constitution, one of which is freedom of religion.

Re: Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 05:26 PM

Verily.

Many would argue that even the United States of America does not respect civic, human and minority rights.

Posted by Roxie on August 20, 2006 at 05:33 PM

not to mention our country's response to the desires of people to have a better life. it's always been about greed, the socialist or almost any other boogie man being merely an excuse.

The Ludlow massacre was the death of about 20 people during an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families, at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914. This attack was the culmination of a day-long fight between strikers and the militia in which 17 strikers or their family members, three Guardsmen and one bystander were killed.

not exactly the sort of stuff you find in high school civics classes.

roxie- that is the irony that the lebanese blogger who i presume is also gay points out with his posting of that muslim-hating evangelical from some podunk school in california- the guy is taking this muslim to task for their extreme punishment of gays while all the while harboring his own hatred of gays

how about Lebanon? 60% Muslim, 35% Christian, 5% Druze, etc.

Re:

I am not responding to your worthless attacks on my posts. I can post anything that educates people on the issues. And one of them is preserving our democracy and our freedoms that are in our constitution, one of which is freedom of religion.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 05:52 PM

BULLSHIT.

Freedom of Religion does not give this nation permission to destory other nations and their religious beliefs. Any Church teaching such isn't a Christian church.

sadly, the hatred expressed on those sites toward muslims could be interpreted as the evangelical's self-loathing of that in "the other" that most disgusts them about themselves

Canadian troops under NATO and Afghan soldiers killed dozens of Taliban in southern Afghanistan, as they fought for hours to safeguard the main highway between Kabul and Kandahar, local officials say. Read more . . .

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/08/20/afghanistan.html

Gunmen kill at least 20 people and injure 300 as Shias attend a pilgrimage in Baghdad, Iraqi officials say.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5268206.stm

Okay name any Islamic democracy....an oxymoron. Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 05:39 PM

Lebanon. And Turkey. Pakistan used to be one, until the CIA put a pro-Western military dictatorship in charge. Let's not forget the democratic government in Iran the CIA overthrew back in 1953. So if you're trying to say they're not capable of democracy, you're full of $!t ! Of course, all you Right Wingers are.

the sites you post from don't believe in freedom of religion, MominTN, they advocate a Christian theocracy which goes against the constitutional laws for separation of church and state. I'm all for education, but you need to educate yourself first before you try to teach others. You might want to expose yourself to views that might not reflect your own opinions and seek unbiased sources. If you need help finding some, I'd be happy to assist. Something tells me that you are not interested though.

Afghanistan - the forgotton war

Roadside bombs
The deadly and changing threat to coalition forces in Iraq

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4779437.stm

Baghdad Bob reporting, "There is not civil war her in Baghdad. Ignore that bomb blast, it was I'm sure an accidental event. There is peace, not civil war here in Baghdad. No, there are no snipers, just a few people who hunt like Dick Cheney and hit innocent people - purely an accident. There is no civil war here.

Why would you post Muslim propaganda in a democratic blog?
Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 05:22 PM

YOU are the one with Muslim propaganda, as well as racism and gay bigotry. We HAVE to keep posting the truth so that 'lurkers' here do not think that YOUR warped views are those of the Democratic Party!

Has anyone ever seen the Monty Python skit were John Cleese is looking for pay for an argument?

Well, that is what this blog is. Everytime I check this site out there is a massive argument going on.

I guess I have even been guilty myself.

I just hope that in the midst of all the jousting, that Democrats are working hard to first oust the DLC and then the Republicans.

2 cents: All organized religion is evil.

From Martin Kramer
The most basic building blocks are not elections, or political parties, or a free press. You can have elections in countries that are not free—the Arab world has them all the time. These countries have voting; they just don't have counting. Or let's just say they have selective counting, which produces those famous 99-percent votes in favor of the ruler. As for political parties, the Arab world also has them—mostly in the form of ruling parties. There are lots of those. And thanks to the proliferation of technologies, the press has never been freer in the Arab world—freer to disseminate hatred, lies, and incitement. These are not the building blocks of democracy.

The basic building blocks are attitudes—above all, a tolerance of political differences, indeed even a celebration of political differences, debated openly and decided freely.

Arab society lacks that tolerance. It is very sharing of many things—but not of political power. That power is like the honor of one's women: it cannot be compromised without being lost. And in the Arab world, historically, the loss of power has meant the loss of everything: honor, possessions. home, life itself. I do not claim here that the Arab world is imprisoned by Islam, as some might argue. I do claim that it is burdened by its history—history transmuted into memory, and preserved as a mindset. And I would summarize the mindset in a simple axiom: rule or die.

Hence, the dearth of what is called civil society. Civil society is that panoply of associations that are greater than individual, family, clan, and tribe. These associations organize people around shared ideas and interests; democratic societies are replete with thousands upon thousands of such associations, from the PTA to the Pac.

Not only are liberal democratic attitudes toward pluralism, majority rule and equality before the law mostly absent from the Arab world, that world counterposes entrenched attitudes that are their antitheses: concepts of monadic political authority, consensus forms of decision-making and natural social hierarchy. We know that attitudes acquired and reinforced over centuries maintain a grip on the patterns of any group’s social relations, for better or for worse, even long after the conditions that spawned them have disappeared; so it seems indeed a reach too far to expect Arab societies to become liberal democracies anytime soon--certainly not soon enough to supply us with help for the problem of apocalyptic terrorism. And though we certainly wish them well, there is little that even the best efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy, of the new White House Office of Global Communications, of Charlotte Beers marketing Uncle Sam as a brand name from the State Department, and of U.S. government-sponsored Radio Sawa, pumping out news in Arabic along with Jennifer Lopez and Lionel Ritchie music, can do about it.

These efforts, after all, are unlikely to change the contemporary Arab view of liberal democracy as an alien Western idea at a time when Arab societies are struggling to cope with Western-wrought modernity. They cannot erase the fact that most Arab societies tried but failed during the late 19th and 20th centuries to adopt Western ways to achieve wealth, power and respect, or erase the legacy of simultaneous envy and resentment created by that failure (explaining why many Arab youths who in the morning declare their enmity for the West in the afternoon express a desire to emigrate there).

good news.

GOP's Financial Edge Shrinks:
Challengers Gain On Incumbents

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082006H.shtml

Re: Posted by jen on August 20, 2006 at 05:58 PM

You are always kind, Jen.

:)

Arab Democracies are NEW. Our early history isn't pretty as a democracy. We killed off native americans, we made slaves of black people, we denied women and children any rights. Women could not have any say-so in the government and were not permitted to vote. They were jailed if showed too much skin while swimming.

To judge NEW democracies one has to careful. Democracy is an evolotionary process. It begins with existing conditions and grows.

The Pakistani's remind us that voters can use the ballot box to kill democracy by installing an Islamist dictatorship. Most disturbing, even wealth and middle-class status are no guarantee of immunity against Islamism's appeal.

so much for Martin Kramer !!

Kramer is a member of two think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Middle East Forum, both have been linked to the neoconservative movement. His advocacy of Campus Watch and his promotion of bill HR 3077 in the United States have been viewed as major neoconservative-backed initiatives.[13][14]

Martin Kramer was an early advocate of attacking Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, arguing in December 2001 that regardless of a possible involvement, he posed a threat to the entire Middle East.[15] However, he was critical of the shifting rationale for the war in October 2002, questioning the United States' "tools of social engineering" needed to promote an eventual democracy process in the Arab world.[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kramer

Evening Dems. I hope everyone is having a great weekend.

The Pakistani's remind us that voters can use the ballot box to kill democracy by installing an Islamist dictatorship. Most disturbing, even wealth and middle-class status are no guarantee of immunity against Islamism's appeal.
Your American government has supported dictatorship in Pakistan many times over the past decades. Your American democracy has paid dictators millions of dollar to keep them in power, even when their nation's people were starving and they knew the money was not going to the people.

Promoting democracy is a better alternative than supporing repressive regimes.

haven't we managed to vote in a christian neocon dictatorship under Bush?

All organized religion is evil Posted by ranger995

I would flat out say NOT "All organized religion is evil". Evil men "use" organized religion to further their evil goals. They are a minority of all religious people.

momintn, what you post supports the CURRENT BUSH repressive regime. Do you realize that?

organized religion is composed of human beings, all of which are capable of evil. cutting a wide swath and generalizing that all of something is anything is dangerous.

I just hope that in the midst of all the jousting, that Democrats are working hard to first oust the DLC and then the Republicans.

Posted by ranger995 on August 20, 2006 at 06:02 PM

your right, ranger, but i think the order of your concern should be reversed. we don't have to worry so much about the dnc untill '08, the pugs are the immediate worry and as such we should be wary of rovian attempts to divide us. pug bashing may be a fun sport, but ignoring trollish attempts to divert productive reason and getting on with the job of winning in november is funner.

hi Kelly! Hi Fade, thanks for the links!

Hi {{{Paul}}}, oh would that it were so! Sometimes I am and sometimes I ain't. But I thank you for saying that.

pamb- i could not agree with you more- there have been endless posts today from a certain dem that have all been taken from extremist right wing sites that preach hatred of muslims and a foreign policy that is right out of the pages of the neocons- these are the people that we are trying to wage political battle with in our attempts to take back our country- i thought that maybe the poster just didn't understand that these sites were sympathetic to the extremist vision of the zombie brigade, but my patience has run out

I don't see how knowledge of the problem supports Bush in any way. He is one of the most ignorant people on any subject that I have ever listened to. He thought the people were going to welcome us with flowers. He didn't have a clue. You would at least expect our intelligence agencies to brief him on how they reject anything that reminds them of us.

In 1963, while America's were watching black and white television in the United States, I was in the horn of Africa, on top of a mountain. America had a 70 foot dish and a 150 foot dish and were "listening" to the soviet space program, international telephone communications and the like. It was the world of "spooks" or spies.

Haile Selassie was paid millions of dollars each year so that the base of operations could be maintained their in ethiopia. Outside the gates, people were starving. On the streets of Asmara it was no uncommon to see men sitting on the street covered in flies. Women walked down the mountain to collect sticks for fire wood and carried them on their backs, back up the mountain.

I returned to America in 1967. The starvation, and lack of human rights was not reported in this nation until the Ethiopian people overthrew the dictator and America was asked to leave. Then the television was filled with starving Ethiopians.

Welcome to the world of American propganda. Sometimes a person has to leave the nation, then return to understand it. When considering all the reasons for the war on terror, one must consider this type of foreign policy that has lead to hatred of the United States. It not that they dislike freedom, it is that they have seen America to be what it has been.

(oops.... shared a bit of my childhood.)

hey ranger, love that MP skit. I think that debate is a good thing, but it can degenerate into mudslinging which is not. most of the dnc regular bloggers here do more to help with campaigns than just post here.

Here's the part I don't get. Why do they teach in their schools such a hatred for the "west" when we are one of their main customers for oil. We are their ticket to continuing wealth indefinitely. Would you teach your children to despise your customers?

Posted by jen on August 20, 2006 at 06:18 PM

heya, jen...would certainly do more for local campaigns if only were'nt so out in the boonies. so, am gonna print up and pass out the dem 'postcard'. maybe that'll help a bit.

if you're talking about the madrassa schools, those are fanatic fundie muslim schools and their hatred for the west comes from our foreign policy and what we've done to control their oil.

how about those christian fundies teaching their children to hate gays, muslims, etc.?

Hello Kelly from Georgia,

You are right boilerman, I just think the DLC is really hurting the party overall and that they need to be ousted in the primary season--they have taken the fight out of the party in favor of cowing to the right. Once they are gone, we will have a much more united platform. Then, no more being afraid to stand for something.

Articles like the one PamB posted are encouraging, but the numbers are still in favor of the republican incumbents--which to me is amazing. However, Dean's strategy appears to be the right one and it is bearing fruit at just the right time. GO DEAN!

Kos has an interesting post about incidents that occured on planes recently, which suggest to me that we are losing the war on terror--people seem pretty terrified and disruptive, which is exaclty what terrorists want.

I just can't see how anyone is backing Bush at this point.

Actually, I remember the reason now, from reading one of the authors excerpts from the middle east. They teach the population to hate America so that they do not blame their own government for their poverty. It a way to unite them together as Muslims. When they get angry or feel injustice, they encourage them to march in the street and protest the bad America.

Posted by jefro on August 20, 2006 at 06:17 PM

hey jefro...have enjoyed reading your posts today. sorry, if i got a bit beligerent over the energy thing a few weeks ago.

boilerman, every bit counts! good for you! how are things down south?

Hello all Fair Dems

Mom, the revenues from the oil haven't trickled well to the "regular folk" in those areas...we have a history of coming into a country with big promises and then screwing the people over.

America's religious schools teach hate? Oh my stars. Now you tell me. I thought they teaching the children to feed the hungry, heal the sick and love their neighbors.

Oh wait, their neighbors might be gay. We shouldn't feed them, they might reproduce.

I really need to go the time out corner don't I?

Christians in general do not hate anyone, despite what someone might post. They just might not be as supportive as you would like when they disagree with them on principle. There is a difference in disagreeing with someone and hating them.

Why doesn't someone do a story on exactly who the oil money goes to in Iraq?

The trickle down economy only works in the USA. It began in Regan Administration and today their are no homeless people, and no poverty.

I agree Jen, and that is why I try not to spend too much time here. Sometime I just feel like getting things off the chest, or seeing what's going on here.

I really think the DNC has improved tremendously since Dean arrived, and I hope that the DCCC, DSCC and other organizations follow his lead. The 50 state strategy is the only way. It won't only serve to fight republicans, but also to bring more voices into the party outside of the "beltway". I think Joe L. losing is the first step in this process.

I think all the governments in this world are in cahoots on that Roxie.

no worries boilerman, jefro is my spouse, and i'm certain he understood. he's away from the pc for a sec...

jen...HOT! HOT! and HOTTER! just about having to stay inside all day to escape the heat (might have meant something different in the '60s)

OK Go, on treadmills

h/t Total Positive

Oh...my dinner is ready...be back soon.

Oil money from IRAN buys rockets for Hezbollah. They use them for Israeli fireworks displays.

--going to the time out corner.....

i am glad you stop in ranger and i'm not too proud of the leadership of the dscc or the dccc but i hope that change is going to come. i agree, lieberman losing is hopefully a sign of good things to come.

hi Deb!! ltns, i haven't been here hardly at all lately

lol, boilerman! go underground, i hear it's cooler there. hehe

no worries boilerman, jefro is my spouse, and i'm certain he understood. he's away from the pc for a sec...

Posted by jen on August 20, 2006 at 06:31 PM

jen...:) you're lucky, mine is 3000 miles away. coming home soon, though...*cheer*

Posted by Roxie on August 20, 2006 at 06:30 PM

lmao, Roxie.

those who follow Christ ought not hate and ought to help the downtrodden but unfortunately there are many who call themselves Christians who are pharisees.

indeed there is a difference between disagreeing with someone and hate. but when the disagreement involves you advocating that those you disagree with have less rights than you have and should be condemned, even punished, for their very existence, then that's a problem. and hateful actions, regardless of rhetoric, must not be excused.

Hi folks,

TN mama, when you are at your life's end and entering the mysterious, will your meaness and intolerance help your to close your eyes in peace?

All belief systems that try to help others along this sad and beautiful journey are welcome. No one has proof and they are just beliefs. Show respect for other's beliefs and yours earn respect.

Man's bloodthirsty nature and ignorance have caused more deaths in the name of God than we can count.

Be a positive force for respect and education to stop this insane intolerance and murder.

IRAN News: Ayatollah Khamenei said that the true path of Islam calls for insight and wisdom to distinguish between the right and wrong and move in the right direction which of course stands vis-a-vis the wrong as a heavy responsibility.

"The contemporary world is full of great challenges for the humanity. Every Muslim is expected to propagate Islam and invite fellow believers to undertake heavy responsibility to do so. They should refrain from any deviation, backwardness, narrow mindedness and misinterpretation," the Supreme Leader said.

Ayatollah Khamenei said that organized attempts were made before the Islamic Revolution to misrepresent religion as being in conflict with science and human progress but fortunately the Islamic associations of the university students managed to deal with such a perception.

The Supreme Leader said that going along with progress in science and technology has no contradiction with religious values.

"Under the Islamic lifestyle, acquisition of modern science and moving in direction of progress in different aspects of life is considered as a value," the Supreme Leader said
Suppose they will be ordering Charles Darwin's Book?

glad your honey is on the way home, 1234, that's a long ways!

The Pakistani's remind us that voters can use the ballot box to kill democracy by installing an Islamist dictatorship. Most disturbing, even wealth and middle-class status are no guarantee of immunity against Islamism's appeal.
Posted by MominTN

They didn't "use the ballot box to kill democracy", they used guns, you lying piece of $#!t.

The problem with oil and the wealth it generates is that the states' rulers have the wealth to remain in power, as they can pay off or repress most potential opponents. Brian Whitaker argues that as there is no need for taxation there is less pressure for representation. Furthermore, Western governments require a stable source of oil and are therefore more prone to maintain the status quo, rather than push for reforms which may lead to periods of instability

Instability and price fluctuation was what OPEC complained about and why they wanted the regime change in Iraq according to Cheney's Energy Report in March of 2001. I wonder what OPEC thinks now. I think they should all have to attend public hearings on the price of energy after we have spent all this money on wars.

They didn't "use the ballot box to kill democracy", they used guns, you lying piece of $#!t.

Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 06:44 PM
Domingo, she is a devote Christian, she can't lie. I'm sure it was an oversight.

fade love that ok go video, they rock and what a great choreography concept !

i know you guys will hate me for saying it but it's all lot more fun reading a debate with MominTn over Sally*Sally*Sally anyday and everyday of the week.

I wonder what happened to that loser anyway?

The USA was initiated to protect religious beliefs, and be a haven from intolerance.

The experiment is in jeopardy when its leader says the magical word "crusade".

You would at least expect our intelligence agencies to brief him on how they reject anything that reminds them of us.
Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 06:18 PM

Did you miss the part where they said that Bush/Cheney do not Listen to them?

Oh, and Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Saudi could stay just as wealthy as they are, just shipping oil to China and Japan. They do not need the USA at all.

domingo- mom is getting her history, news and other information from right wing evangelical sites- you are right, of course, for as the reality-based crowd knows, musharrif came to power through the military not the ballot box- just like most of our buddies around the globe came into power- i'd say go easy on mom, but the thing is, when you post stuff that was just published that week, she doesn't bother to read it and claims she read "a long time ago"- if it isn't from worldnetdaily, answer(wehateislam) or some other right wing site, she just says she's read that or denounces you as not worth her time- not unlike many other right wingers out there

It never ceases to amaze me how mean spirited liberals can be. My experiences in life fortunately have kept me away from the hateful dialog I see in the blogs and I certainly am thankful for that. The only thing I wonder is if the dialog is a pretense of those whose heart is more like one of Coulter. Do all hateful people pounce on the internet to type out their diatribes against their dislikes and foes, when they don't even know the people they are talking about?

War: What's It Good For?

Like most liberals, I am not a pacifist. I believe military power has its uses, and it does some things very well. If, for example, our goal in Iraq had just been to capture Saddam - well, we did that, didn't we? A similar operation might have captured Bin Laden. Bosnia is far from paradise these days, but at least people aren't dying by the tens of thousands. With similar care the genocide in Rwanda might have been stopped, and the one in Darfur still could be. And if anyone knew a way to go into North Korea and come out a few days later with Kim Jong-il and all the North Korean nuclear weapons, I'd be for it.

But military force is a blunt instrument, and used badly it creates more enemies than it kills. If you're not prepared to kill millions of people - and I'm not - then you have to find a way to circumscribe your enemies, so their numbers aren't instantly replenished, with interest, as soon as you kill them. In the long run, if you aren't willing to commit genocide against your enemy's recruitment pool, then every use of force has to be carefully calibrated.

Because it might not be a pool, it might be an aquifer.

Pakistan
The president is chosen for a five-year term by an electoral college consisting of the Senate, National Assembly, and the provincial assemblies.
Pervez Musharraf has been chief of state since June 20, 2001. A prolonged confrontation over authority between Parliament and the President ended in December 2002 with a compromise which permitted passage of the Legal Framework Order (LFO) of 2002, under the terms of which President Musharraf made his pledge to resign his military position as Commander-in-Chief in late 2004. In 2004 General Musharraf announced that he would retain his military role

that's the problem, Mom, you experiences are so limited, that you rely on sources for your news, which are Biased and slanted. You find what you want to hear. Like those who listen to Fox News and Limbaugh and Hannity, etal.

In my opinion, you need medication for your paranoia and depression.

Gawd Benji...you are rubbing the genie's lamp!!!

FYI: I am a Christian and liberal (Jesus teaches me to be) and more of the Jimmy Carter persuasion...but Episcopalian.

So I go by the philosophy of "Who would Jesus bomb?", "Who would Jesus deprive of equal rights under the law?", "Who would Jesus deprive of healthcare?" etc., etc

Food for thought:

Thou will have no other Gods before me

Who is the neocons God? Is it God or is it money?

Thou should not take the name of God in vain

Using God's Name for money or political gain is doing just that.

this would be hilarious if it were true, but I don't think the poodle would DARE and say Bush was Crap!

"The alliance between George Bush and Tony Blair is in danger after it was revealed that the Prime Minister believes the President has 'let him down badly' over the Middle East crisis.

A senior Downing Street source said that, privately, Mr Blair broadly agrees with John Prescott, who said Mr Bush's record on the issue was 'crap'.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401414&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=

MominTN offers additions to the blog, and offers far-right religious issues. These are not issues the Democratic party should run away from.

I am sorry she believes some have been "mean spirited," and she most likely includes me in the group. I do try not to be mean spirited. At the time time, I laugh at myself, at life, at our political leaders and the bloggers too.

I do believe the democratic party has to get to understand people like MominTN, and learn from the experience of discussion exchange. I appreciate her postings. It is far better than some of the less interesting discussions.

i wish i could understand what you are talking about mom, but i have to say you will have to be more specific- and as for your 7:06 post- are you again trying to suggest that the leader of pakistan didn't take over in what is known as a bloodless coup?

{{{fade}}} love that kristofferson video, he's so great!

No, I'm not arguing with you at all about Pakistan. This was the vote that supposedly legitimizes what Musharraf did:
"
The deadlock ended in December 2003, when Musharraf made a deal with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party, an alliance of Islamic parties sympathetic to Talibans agreeing to leave the army by December 31, 2004. He subsequently refused to keep his promise. With that party's support, pro-Musharraf legislators were able to muster the two-thirds supermajority required to pass the Seventeenth Amendment, which retroactively legalized Musharraf's 1999 coup and many of his decrees."
All of their political parties look to me to be Muslim or religious parties.
It certainly isn't a good example of a democracy.

I am really tired of being called right wing. If most people are tired of hearing about gays, does that make all of them right-wing? Are all Christians right wing? You sound very foolish in your name calling.

The Leader of Pakistan should have simply used a signing statment to change things to his liking. It seems to be the democrat way.

yes, roxie- i agree that it is important for us to know that many in america are getting their news from sites that cater to extremist evangelicals and offer a forum for scholars who teach at backwater evangelical schools so that they can preach/publish their nonsense- nonsense because it is so obviously mean-spirited in its devotion to christianity while denouncing other religions as the work of the devil and nonsense because the majority of mainstream scholarship in academia would not give these people the time of day let alone a place to publish

I think positive debate in Arabic about government in their media should be encouraged instead of their street protests with guns.

amen deb

i'm not calling you right wing- look at the sites that you routinely post here as if they are going to offer insight into world affairs- i have yet to see one that wasn't considered right wing and what is worse, even the conservative site that i posted this afternoon had enough sense to trash that guy and his article that you posted (even while they, of course, still agreed with his contention that all muslims are evil)- you don't seem to have any interest in undertstanding the fact that the things you request people to read here are all right wing sites

{{{Jen}}}} Good to "see" you too. Are you guys going to make some time for a visit in this neck of the woods??? I have been getting local, but always enjoy this blog.

Just a reminder this web site gets 100K hits a day and it will definately start heating up. The primary goal is to rid the country of the neocons. We need the vote of every lurker if we want to take the House and Senate big time.

Those of us who have educated ourselves need to be patient with those who have trusted mainstream media for their education. Even though it is frustrating, I try to be nice and post links that will assist in educating the uninformed. I have found that Abraham Lincoln's words hold true:

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

All across the country, progressives have taken note of the success of the Ned Lamont campaign in Connecticut. People are hungry to learn lessons from the Connecticut experience. What can people do elsewhere to begin to be as successful? What lessons does Connecticut have for Florida, Ohio or Oklahoma?

Every state is different, but the fundamentals of building grassroots progressive networks are not all that different. The Connecticut success we’ve recently seen started quietly, years ago, among committed activists with little or no support, and there were no blogs involved. That’s the real untold story of the Lamont primary miracle, and it has nothing to do with blogofascists.

While it is true that bloggers can have an effect in the age of post modern political campaigning, as Jerome Armstrong points out, bloggers can only help amplify and maybe assist in organizing what on-the-ground people are doing. Bloggers are in many respects the media manifestation of a much larger people-powered movement, but the people-powered movement comes first. How can you build that in your home town?

SEE THE 50 SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/08/20/fdl-book-salon-50-simple-things-you-can-do-to-fight-the-right-part-ii/#comments

you don't seem to have any interest in undertstanding the fact that the things you request people to read here are all right wing sites

Posted by jefro

That's a lie. Just because someone is a Christian or a Jew it doesn't mean they have no knowledge of a subject nor does it mean they are "right wing". Quite frankly I think you are ignorant.

Ignorance is understandable. We all have to learn somehow.

Willful ignorance is just stupidity. This site encourages posters to ask questions and get help.

Repeated posts of extremist bullshit do not show learning and improvement and are disruptive.

Paul you add nothing to the discussion on any subject other than attacks.

AMAZON.COM donations $44,000 to Democrats
$62,250 to Republicans
BARNES AND NOBLE donations $88,250 to Democrats
$0 to Republicans
$8,000 to Others
courtesy of BuyBlue.org

I list this because FireDogLake suggests buying "50 SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO" from Amazon...but the book its self suggesting buying from those who support dems.

I'll buy a copy from my local bookstore...but if you buy online, I suggest you go to Barnes and Noble

o good lord, go away

Paul is a brilliant and passionate contributer on this forum, you silly old wench.

give it a rest and stop attacking my friends.

enough!

If you want an EXCELLENT synopsis of how Washington works, how the entire system works, read this post by Matt Stoler, on Mydd.com
Easy to understand, and some unknown facts.

http://mydd.com/story/2006/8/20/0629/46094#56

This is just so typical from the democrats and needs to be stopped. You should assume things about people.
August 14, 2006) — To many people, Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" was fightin' words. And much to his surprise, Keith found himself right in the middle of the feud.

"Whether you hate the president or not is not my deal," he says, his voice rising to fightin' level over the phone from his Oklahoma home. "I wrote a morale-boosting song — a call for justice for our black eye — and all the sudden I'm the guy who's attacked. That ain't a political stance; that's reasonable justice. And all of a sudden I'm a right-wing, ignorant Republican?"

Actually, he's a lifelong Democrat. Like him or not, Keith is also at the top of the country-music haystack, in all of the drinkin' and cheatin' glory of his No. 1 hits.

folks...let's remember that the very most favorite thing a 'little' person wants to do is try to bring other people 'down' to their level. let's kept our eyes level, don't look down, and maybe someone'll accidently step on and smuch the pest. if not, then maybe it'll drown in its own frustrated filth...

Good afternoon, all.

Program abuses may be costing Americans’ jobs
By Ron Harris
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
08/20/2006

WASHINGTON

Mike Emmons still remembers the day he met his "replacement," three Indian computer technicians who had been brought to the United States on special temporary visas for highly skilled workers.

Emmons and other workers for Siemens Information and Communication Networks in Orlando, Fla., were told in 2002 that they were to train the incoming workers and afterward they would be laid off and their jobs eliminated.

In addition, if the Americans refused to train the workers, they would lose their severance pay.

"I was shocked," said Emmons, 44, who now supervises management information systems for the Florida state attorney's office in Orlando. "It's all legal. Our country created these programs, and they're using them to take jobs from Americans."..

This is what is wrong with the mass media in this country. This is an old story. It's been going on for over a decade.

May be costing Americans' jobs? Where in the hell has the press been living? Did they retreat into Rove's propaganda cave and stop observing the world around them? I call it unintelligent design journalism. Unless it has something to do with a dead or missing rich girl, nobody in the news room cares.

No, I'm not arguing with you at all about Pakistan. This was the vote that supposedly legitimizes what Musharraf did Posted by MominTN

Well, it wasn't a vote "by the people", of Pakistan. It was a vote by his partners in crime, just like Bush's Republican partners in crime are trying to help him overthrow democracy in this country here.

Re:

Christians in general do not hate anyone, despite what someone might post. They just might not be as supportive as you would like when they disagree with them on principle. There is a difference in disagreeing with someone and hating them.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 06:28 PM

Interesting point.

If they don't hate them, why do they mistreat them?

If they do not hate them, why do they condemn them to Hell?

Senator Byron Dorgan recently wrote a book "Take This Job and Ship It."

FRom another great diary by devilstower on Daily Kos:

There's been some discussion on the Internet about the idea of the Overton Window, a means of framing a discussion that -- not incidentally -- originated at a right wing think tank. The idea is that is you want to move a political position from point A to point B, the first thing you need to do is move the national discourse way out to point D. Maybe voice a little support for point E, or M. Keep it up long enough, and B looks so tame even your opponents are supporting it.

In the Overton Window of general political discourse, where are the Republicans? On a line where A starts with "Democrats are my worthy opponents" and B is "Democrats are incompetent" and C is "Democrats are fools," the right is somewhere around P or Q. They've pushed the limits to the point where it's common to turn on a national news program and hear Democrats discussed as "terrorist sympathizers." Have you looked at the bestseller lists? Liberals are traitors. Liberals are "godless." Liberals deserve to die. They should all be lined up and shot.

Like freedom fries, that language may sound silly. However, don't think for a moment that it's not effective in moving the national feeling about the political positions. The language has been so effective that for many people "liberal" and "immoral" have become intractably entangled. It's so effective that a "moderate" Republican senator has no qualms about calling Democrats "appeasers" of terrorists. It's so effective that what Will Rogers once used as a joke -- the disorganization of the Democratic Party -- has become accepted wisdom and as often quoted by those on the left as the right.

When it comes to the battlefield of political discourse, we've surrendered the middle ground. We're fighting full time in Republican territory.
****

Sound familar? Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh even the trolls that visit this site.

When Republicans trash talk call them what they - filth! Don't play their game and don't "move to the middle" to appease them.

I have always wondered why Kerry lost. I still believe it was mostly from vote fraud. I think if someone knew why people voted Republican it could be stopped. I think the media plays a big part in it. I really think the negative ads like swiftboat hurt big time and shouldn't be allowed. It's a sad day when people who fought in Vietnam can't get elected, and a loser drunk who doesn't show up for his national guard does.
The one thing I remember for sure was the lack of good coverage on speeches for the democrats. I hope every democrat that has good speeches starts getting them on tv now. I feel the media was complicit in the Republican campaigns.
The only other thing that I've run across is a reason someone gave that might be something you dem bloggers need to hear:
The party that hates America always loses
I think the love for America needs to shine thru the crap that gets posted on here.

while i stepped away to work on dinner and play the guitar, i come back to find that i have been called a liar- i take offense- you, my friend, are the one who is mistaken because the sites that i mentioned that you have routinely posted here are without a shadow of a doubt right wing sites- now, that might make you uncomfortable to know that (or maybe not)- but there is no question that they are right wing- you are correct in your assumption that just because someone is of one religious persuasion or another does not mean that they have no knowledge of a subject, but my point is that this character (arnoldson) that you posted earlier is obviously not all that knowledgable about reliable scholarship on islam (or comparative religion for that matter) and is offering the things that he offers more as a way to prove his own biased viewpoint which is that his religion is the only true religion and others (in this case, islam) are to be chastised as wrong- that is bad scholarship and it is mean-spirited as far as my religious convictions are concerned

Yep, Sandy...the corporations who put the neocons in office also have bought up our media.

They couldn't get away with what they are doing if the "FAIRNESS ACT" were still in place.

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

President Reagan rescinded the FAIRNESS ACT in 1987.

Mark Crispin Miller, professor of Film and Media Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, has written about the increasing concentration of ownership of media companies in the United States. Miller has created charts that trace the holdings of four major conglomerates: Time Warner (CNN), Disney/Cap Cities (ABC), General Electric (NBC), and Westinghouse (CBS). These corporations also own radio stations, newspapers, magazines, cable TV, and motion pictures. The (non-media) holdings of these conglomerates create "alarming conflicts of interests" says Miller.

Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act (predecessor to the Fairness Act) of 1927 said: "American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people."

Democrats are being villified by Republicans. Learn about the Overtun window and you'll understand why we lose battles to these thugs.

rjsnj...I'll check out the Overtun Window...but cheating voting machines are the true culprit I believe.

They couldn't get away with what they are doing if the "FAIRNESS ACT" were still in place.
****

Republicans don't believe in fairness. We need to give up the illusion that we are fighting a fair fight; it's a street battle, if you not willing to get a bit "bloody" we won't win.

Don't play fairly with them as they have no intention of playing fairly with us. That much is oh so clear to me. Just listen to their discourse - the war on terror is really a war on Democrats!

Religion, by its very nature is about exclusion, not inclusion. Among Christians there are many denominations because they even exclude among Christians. This is nature of Religion.

Religion can be misused. The KKK was a Religious based group. The Branch Davidians were a Religious based group. Religion was used to justify keeping slaves, and justify the denial of women's rights.

It is important to note, that Religions are made of people, and fraught with errors because people are not perfect. Religion can be an addiction, just as eating can be an addiction.

Religion can also be good. It can offer insight into peace. It can offer insight into forgiveness. It can offer values.

It all depends on the person chooses to use Religion.

I think the love for America needs to shine thru the crap that gets posted on here.
Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 07:51 PM

The only crap and hatred on here, has come from you. I asked you before, and I will again.

Is there ANY group that you have anything good to say about?

You know, a smart person would have taken the hint by now, that this is the wrong place for them, and have left with some grace and dignity, instead of being the article of contempt!

I honest to god feel sorry for a heart and soul so filled with racism and bigotry and hatred . You have to bring others down in order to have any self worth yourself, and that is sad.

Two interesting notes from my neck of the woods:

Willie Nelson is stopping by a fund raiser for Claire McCaskill while he's in town this week for a concert.

And George Will was in town last week dining and talking politics with Jack Danforth. They both love baseball and are fed up with Bush.

Actually all four of them are fed up with Bush. Interesting that the same consenus is being reached by such a wide variety of liberal, moderate, and conservative voices from both parties.

rjsnj...was that a typo? I did a search on Overtun and nothing significant showed up on the first page.

heading out for the evening.

I have had my fill.

Have a good evening, Dems.

'll check out the Overtun Window...but cheating voting machines are the true culprit I believe
****

Perhaps in some cases ... but I also refer to why we lose debates with these thugs. Darn it, we are just too civil to them. There is no reason to be civol with Republicans. They been smacking us around for years now. Stop taking it from these bullies!

Night Pam...as always I am so proud of all you are doing...keep up the excellent work...PEACE!

rjsnj...was that a typo? I did a search on Overtun and nothing significant showed up on the first page.
****

Sorry about that ... my mind works faster than my fingers. It is spelled Overton. Here is one diary that mentions it:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/20/165952/521

be back soon

I think the love for America needs to shine thru the crap that gets posted on here.
Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 07:51 PM
We should not be calling what one writes in a forum crap. It is poor maners. We should not call the thoughts of people "ignorant" because people of all education groups visit this forum. In addition, educated people who have never traveled outside the USA may not know as much as a less educated person about things outside the USA.

It is wise, and wanted to debate issues. It is the issues we seek to discuss. It is unwise to debate personalities, for we are not here to discuss personalities.

Pam, it keeps saying it's going to leave and never come back, but it never does.

it just keeps posting from its right wing sites and then calling anyone a liar who dares to call it out for posting right wing sites- it isn't about seeking the truth, it is about proving its contention that muslims are to be feared and hated, american conservative evangelical christians are the greatest and the democratic party should stop trying to be the opposition party to the party that is screwing this country, get right with god and go with the flow

I'm going to behave...
I'm going to behave...
I'm going to behave...

if i don't get off here and let my dinner digest, i'll wind up with ulcers...later.

But I'm soooooooooooo dying to misbehave!

It is wise, and wanted to debate issues. It is the issues we seek to discuss. It is unwise to debate personalities, for we are not here to discuss personalities.
****

It also is wise to share ideas on how we can win over supporters, frame our ideas in an effective way and what we can do to win elections in 2006. If we aren't thinking about how to win then we will miss yet another opportunity. I fully appreciate the need to vent your spleen now and then but the best conversations are ones that lead to ideas on winning elections.

Good post on Lieberman stealing all the thunder, via DK at TPCafe...Matt's rebuttal at MyDD. One of the best I've seen.

Benji, the Kos link was excellent, too. You surprise me, sometimes.

those who are informed here, forgive me- but look at this site and tell me that anyone who is posting stuff from it might not be suspect, unless it is for the purpose of pointing out the kind of mindless drivel that passes as informed comment in the right wing world- i do occasionally check this site and others out, but i have yet to read anything that i would feel comfortable posting here unless it was to post it for the purpose of enlightened derision

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/

America’s unique blending of corporate militarism and Christian radicalism has resulted in a dysfunctional culture of plutocracy and Puritanism. As the mega rich avoid paying taxes and playing by the same rules as everyone else, the middle class and working poor can’t earn a living wage or afford healthcare. A corporation such as Kaiser Permanente is not accountable for their misdeeds but there are women who can’t buy morning after pills from their local pharmacies.

This duality of maximum autonomy for corporations and plutocrats while eroding civil liberties and prosperity for individuals is producing an era of entropy. Entropy at home and abroad is the legacy of modern conservatism and our collective susceptibility to their assault on truth. Meanwhile, the so-called libertarians and “moderates” dismiss their culpability for empowering a reign of indecency and decay.

What is the antidote to this condition? We need more than a “new direction” or change from Republican rule to Democrats. America needs a progressive reformation that detoxifies our culture from corporate militarism and Christian theocrats. The time has come for a modern enlightenment.

Read, Power, Politics, Principle and Overpriced Latex Gloves in the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Good post on Lieberman stealing all the thunder, via DK at TPCafe...Matt's rebuttal at MyDD.
***

Matt is one heck of a political thinker. He knows how to win and what counts. He did a great job for the Corzine Connection.

Matt is one heck of a political thinker. He knows how to win and what counts. He did a great job for the Corzine Connection.

Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 08:23 PM
If I was more like Matt, I could do a better job with debating issues with MominTN.

Posted by PamB on August 20, 2006 at 07:40 PM

yikes, great minds think alike. i left here in disgust and followed the Kos link to MyDD. Matt's best post yet, i think. Pam posted it just after I left.

Sandy Good for Willie and Claire! Has she started revving it up full tilt? it's getting to be time...
we are up and running here.

Here is a site with some good ideas on how to win back all states for the dems.

http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/premiere/marshall.php

America needs a progressive reformation that detoxifies our culture from corporate militarism and Christian theocrats. The time has come for a modern enlightenment.
****

Whew! Now that really puts the finger on the pulse. What a toxic combination of crazy theocrats and corporate militarists we have today.

jefro, Roxie--

Mama is not here to debate, she is here to disrupt, distract and dominate.

that is, by definition, a troll's objective.

We will not "argue" with her in a logical fashion, since her purpose here is to distract, distrupt and dominate our conversation.

SO, what's your take on the new rules?

xdebx, every year like clockwork former Senator Everett Dirkson used to hold a press conference and propose making our national flower the marigold. It became a joke among the media, but they always covered it.

Has any Senator or Rep in our party made the Fairness Doctrine their personal project? We're talking about something here that is a lot more important than a flower. We are talking about freedom of the press. I don't understand why our side layed down and died on so many important Constitutional matters after Reagan took action against the lst ammendment.

Why didn't Clinton do something about the Fairness Doctrine in his first term when he still had the power to do it? Why did Clinton go along with NAFTA? Why didn't he enforce the immigration laws? Why did he give up on national health insurance...he just let it drop. Whatever happened to that place called "Hope" he used to talk about so much?

He just gave up and so did the rest of our party. And these apologists like Lieberman have the nerve to say we must work with the people across the ailse who are destroying the middle class standard of living and the American Dream?

The priorities are all screwed up in the Beltway. Politicans need to start attending to the business of the people and take the Constitution serious instead of pursuing their own selfish careers and pet projects.

Sorry about the rant, but I'm so angry. I just can't believe a journalist would not know about this visa situation. It's beyond disbelief....sort of like the the border security situation. How could they not know? It's their job to know and inform the public.

Here's a good diary I was reading over at Dailykos lastnight. The writer talks about how he changed his mind about Howard Dean and went from not liking him to now thinking he was right all along. He's a pretty good story teller. Oh, and the name of the diary, that's an "inside joke". A couple of weeks ago a troll wrote a diary titled "Kos, delete my f**king account!", promising to make life hell for the entire blog if it's account didn't get deleted. (There's no way to do that). Anyway, others started writing diaries called "Kos, wash my f**king car!" or "Kos, paint my f**king house!" and on and on. When a person over there gets a lot of recommedations on their posts, they achieve what's called TU (trusted user) status, and can troll rate people. I have TU status over there now. Well anyway, this person was really giving us all a ration of $#!t day after day, and we kept banning it as fast as it would come on and start ranting and raving. It was great to see it's posts disappear minutes after they appeared. Here's the link to the diary.

Verb my fucking noun, Kos

fade2bluz - you mean I should say what think?

Dissappearing posts - now there's an idea! Can we make my typos dissappear too?

Bush administration has somehow managed to lose ground in the ideological war against a fanatical creed that exults in barbaric violence against civilians.
****

Okay ... I agree with that. But do be careful not to fall into the same traps as Bush. When you demonize Islam, as this person from Jihad Watch is doing right now on C-Span, you are making a big mistake. Islam does have some violence in it but so does Christianity. Sadly, all religions tend to see themselves at war with non-believers.

Yes, Bush gets an F for the war to win the hearts and minds. It;s our task to come up with better ideas.

well, if you can't ignore it, perhaps a little honest commentary might enable one to move forward.

just a thought.

and, fyi, mama didn't make any comments at Will Marshall's site. hmmmm

War for the Hearts and Minds Grades:

Bush F
Hezbollah A

Hello Fellow Democrats,
Today, my neighbor was telling me he saw on MaxNews.com Michael Moore was attacking Hillary Clinton on the war in Iraq as he did with Joe Liberman. Has anyone ever heard of this news? It was Bush who started this war not Hillary. Michael Moore may be hurting our party with his mouth.He must be very careful.
I am a big supporter of Bob Casey and Ed Rendell.
It's time for a change.

The site I mentioned has some good information but some of the articles look to be written by industry lobbiests to me.

Jeff,

It doesn't take any time at all to come to an understanding that "worldnetdaily" is a right-winger's wet dream.

Paul

The only other thing that I've run across is a reason someone gave that might be something you dem bloggers need to hear:
The party that hates America always loses

That doesn't even make sense. Why would anyone not love their country? You know, I don't even want to know your answer. Post somewhere else if you like those other blogs so much that you have to repeat their gospel here. We don't believe it and frankly don't care what they think.

Iran's President's blog won't list my comments. I must be writing something that can't past the censors. Suppose I wasn't submissive enough?

They're morphing into several personalities again.

I'm going to read. Good night.

I love my country! I think my President sucks! Oh my stars... I promised to behave.... I need to correct that... I think my President is acting like he doesn't have the good sense God gave a billy goat.

Oh I give up... the animal rights groups will upset that I have insulted billy goats.

Watch the map get bluer and bluer

This is sobering, from Raw Story:

Taliban's terror tactics reconquer Afghanistan
By Nelofer Pazira in Kandahar
Published: 20 August 2006

Meanwhile, the Taliban have issued a new law which they have posted on the walls. It says: "We have no courtrooms to take people for questioning. Judgment is made on the road - wherever an infidel is captured. The order is carried out immediately. The punishment for spying for the government and working with foreigners is beheading."

and, fyi, mama didn't make any comments at Will Marshall's site. hmmmm
****

Hmmm, reading some of Will Marshall's site. I can't I agree with it very much. For instance there is this "gem":

This should be a boon to Democrats, the natural party of public remedy. But crafting new ways to modernize underperforming public sector systems will bring the party's unresolved tensions to the surface. Many Democrats, for example, cling to the illusion that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid can be preserved in their 1935 and 1965 incarnations. They reject later retirement as well as progressive indexing or means testing of benefits-both necessary to create a modern retirement system for a rapidly aging society.

****

So, let me understand this ... Will Marshall believes that Democrats should back privatization. I couldn't disagree more. What we need to do is strengthen social security by increasing the salary cap (most people won't be impacted) and possibly means testing for the upper tax brackets who don't need the money in retirement. I have also supported the idea of investing the total security fund partially in shorter certificates of deposit rather the "special treasury bond" - that is the essense of the lock box concept (put the money somewhere that government can't spend it).

I agree that Medicare is a problem but it must be seen in the larger context of rising health care costs. There will be no reduction in costs until health care is regulated.

Dear President Shrub,

I know you refuse to talk to terrorists, but can you please contact the Iranian President and ask him to quit censoring my comments on his blog. I have been asking fair political questions. For example, I asked:

Mr. President, How is your advocating Britons to Evict Mr. Blair's government, which is interference in another nations internal affairs, any different than President Bush advocating the Iran overthrow their government because it is a terrorist nation. Please answer in 20 words or less - I have a short attention span, and if you go on too long like you did in your first post it will be too big for a sound bite and I won't be able to sell it to CNN and make money that I am donating to an Iranian resistance group.

Now, Mr. Shrub, there is no reason for the President of Iran to censor that post. Please contact the little dork and I'm sure one dork can talk to another dork in a way they can understand.

Sincerly,

Blue Blooded Democrat

Raid the Red Zone

Still, the oh-so-slender GOP majority is in trouble because independents and moderates seem ready to defect in droves. If Democrats can make inroads among these voters this year, then pick a 2008 nominee whose themes resonate in red states as well as blue, we could fashion a new progressive majority.

How to seize the opportunity? There are basically two choices. One, favored by many liberals and lefty bloggers, sees partisan belligerence as the key to mobilizing a Democratic majority. The idea is that by intensifying attacks on our opponents, we can galvanize the party faithful while also projecting the strength of conviction that swing voters have supposedly found lacking among Democrats.

But this approach is based more on wishful thinking than rigorous electoral analysis. The party's core problem is not a pandemic of cowardice among its leaders, it is that there are not enough Democratic voters. Since the late 1990s, Democrats have been stuck at about 48 percent of the vote in national elections. Moreover, polarizing the electorate along ideological lines plays into Karl Rove's hands because conservatives outnumber liberals three to two. Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MominTn,

Very interesting article.

Michael Moore may be hurting our party with his mouth.He must be very careful. I am a big supporter of Bob Casey and Ed Rendell.
It's time for a change. Posted by Mel_in_Pa on August 20, 2006 at 08:42 PM

Mel, Michael Moore is not a Democrat. He's a member of the Green Party. We can't control what he says about Democrats any more then we can control what the Republicans like this "mominTN" say, except to disagree with it.

rj,

he's an old DLC-er. nothing he says is something i agree with.

Danger, Will Domingo! Danger, Will Domingo!

(note the pattern--identifying by geography...just a thought.lol)

Michael Moore may be hurting our party with his mouth.
****

Michael Moore speaks for himself and not the Democratic party.

he's an old DLC-er. nothing he says is something i agree with.

****

fade, I figured as much. I recognized the losing method of operation.

I don't lose sleep when it comes to Michael Moore. Him and RUSH should go on the road together... it would be a good show.

The DLC is the very embodiment of the Overton Window. The Republicans move way way to right with their mouthpieces such as Coulter, Limbaugh and Malkin. The DLC quivers in fear and comes up with a position that is in the "middle" but further to the right than we are right now. That is how we keep getting dragged further to the right.

I shoulda put the link up to the post that started it all also. It's a "bear" to load though because it has over 18 hundred comments. I'll put parts of it up here so even dial up folks can get a peek.

I want out of this farce of a website. Now that I want out, a fair minded and liberal website would let me delete my account and go. Instead, DailyKos will give me no such option. Like some sort of cult, I was welcomed in freely but am now being barred from leaving. I do not want to simply leave and let my info remain here at a website I am disgusted by and want no further part in. Since Kos won't allow me the decent option of deleting my account (just about every blog DOES let you delete your account when you want to), then somebody here needs to delete my account for me. To deny me deletion of my own account is unacceptable.

You all suck. A lot of you wouldn't know what a progressive thought was if it bit you in the ass. Churches and political parties are full of blind conformists that are simply towing the line they've been told to from the get go, with little regard to actual political thought, let alone progressive political thought. The amount of blind conformity that goes on in America is what fuels the corrupt two party system. DailyKos exemplifies blind conformity, and I regret any and all association I have had with it. I should be allowed to delete my account and go; Why should I be forced to stay amid this pathetic cult of personality? The herd mentality that goes on here sickens me now, AND I WANT OUT. Regardless of my personal experience here, EVERYBODY WHO SIGNED UP TO THIS WEBSITE SHOULD BE FREE TO DELETE THEIR ACCOUNTS IF THEY SO WISH TO. For Kos to deny us this is downright fascist.
Since I can't delete my account myself, my only recourse is to be as abrasive and disruptive as I can be UNTIL MY ACCOUNT GETS DELETED. As long as my account remains here, I do not feel comfortable leaving. Is it really such a tough request to delete my account so I can go? Just what kind of website lets you join up but won't let you leave?

DELETE MY FUCKING ACCOUNT, KOS. You don't want me hanging around, and neither do I.

Delete my fucking account, Kos

Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MominTn,

Very interesting article.

Posted by Benji
__

What I've been trying to say. Most of the time something that sounds extreme causes a moderate to turn off.
However increasing numbers or percentages and some rational proof can win a cautious person to give support. The plan for the Dems sounds good to me. Just need to make sure that the illegal immigration bill from the Senate is a dead door nail. I think Kennedy and McCain should apologize for their lack of concern for legal workers in those industries that have been affected.

rj,

they're the old "elite" and they want to play the center. i'm with Hightower--only thing in the center is dead armadillo.

we are very different from the other party. we don't have to be shrill or use Coulteresqe demonology to express ourselves. Average American workers will support our ideas if we reach them personally, at the local level.

back to the phone banks tomorrow, for me. picnics coming up--those are great too. i'll be working at the college to help get the young people better organized, which means more drinking liberally.

life is beautiful in a blue state.

Republicans like this "mominTN" say, except to disagree with it.

Posted by Domingo

__

Sorry you are wrong again, I'm registered Democrat.

Domingo, why are you talking to KOS here?

Posted by SandyH on August 20, 2006 at 08:34 PM

Yep, I am angry too...therefore I post.

The situation the way I see it is that there is ZERO accountability with the neocons...and maybe 50% with the dems.

We therefore have to get dems in office and then cover the backs of the ones who are willing to work for real people, lift them up the same way we have supported Ned Lamont and brought people like Larry Kissell in NC 8th to the forefront.

It is going to be just regular people like you and me who devote a portion of time every day for the rest of their lives forcing our gov't to do the right things.

Restoring the Fairness Doctrine and even shoring up the loopholes is something that we must demand from our elected officials.

The fate of the country and perhaps the world (see Al Gore's movie) depends on us. We, the informed people of the US, are our only hope.

they're the old "elite" and they want to play the center. i'm with Hightower--only thing in the center is dead armadillo.
****

I agree completely. Playing into the Overton Window by aiming for the center simply makes us look weak.

It's going to be real interesting when that movie comes out about income taxes in Sept. It's going to be worse than Michael Moore.

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT

SUSA

Liberals are Leftist Conservatives are the Rightest so we Conservatives are always Right and you Liberals are always Liars and Wrong.

August 20, 2006 Phil

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

if you guys think MominTn really doesn't contribute with her perspective on this blog,

you should really considering reading the right-wing remarks on this conservative blog.

maybe the way MominTn expresses herself is more the issue than what her genuine intentions are.

if you read this blog you won't have a hard time understanding how these conservatives express themselves and their intentions are also quite clear.

Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 09:11 PM

exactly, rj. if there were a fair media presentation of ideas expressed freely--this would never have happened. it took Reagan to begin the corporatization of the media to enact this rightward ho! (why do i think of coulter?)

the whole damned thing is an illusion. that's what drives me to distraction! working people haven't changed and we still have their interests at the front of our mission statement. our vision is not fairly presented through the t.v.

it is my privelege to talk with union people on a regular basis. they know. i'm stunned to hear people putting unions down. yeah, there is corruption. so root it out. don't destroy the only organization that gives workers the voice they need to get fair wages and benefits.

that's the worst thing ronnie raygun did, i think. destroy the strike.

Does anybody know what the deficit was when w took office? It stands at 9 trillion right now.

Posted by xdebx on August 20, 2006 at 09:21 PM

There was a surplus when w took office.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:12 PM

A gentle hand turneth away wrath.

our vision is not fairly presented through the t.v.
****

Even worst, our vision gets no air time at all. You can see conservative after conservative on TV but rarely does a liberal get a word in. It's very hard getting the message out in that sort of media environment.

No Benji, the way I express myself is just fine. It's the way I think.
The posters do not like it when someone makes them rethink their narrow-minded talking points. For example, posters that want to bash Christians or people who do not support the gay agenda do not want to read any opinion that opposes them. Unfortunately all Americans have a right to be in the Democratic party, not just the freaks.

i'm stunned to hear people putting unions down.
****

I still hear that today. The unions have been systematically demonized by conservatives. They knew how important unions were to the Democratic party and that is why they proceeded to propagandize against them. In addition, they have changed the labor laws so that it is very hard to unionize.

Sure unions aren't perfect but is a work force without any protections at all really better off? There is a good reason why real wages have gone down since the 1970's. I think in no small part it's been the weakening of unions.

Benji, there was an annual budget surplus which meant that we were not increasing the deficit...but the deficit wasn't paid off. I think we owed most of the money to US savings bonds and the like, and as far as I know we didn't owe anything to China at that time...but there was still a deficit. I have searched and didn't find the deficit for Jan. of 2000...but I sort of remember it being around the 3 trilllion mark...if so w has tripled the deficit.

Unfortunately all Americans have a right to be in the Democratic party, not just the freaks.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:32 PM

Tolerance. Yours is monumentally difficult to perceive. and my question: "UNFORTUNATELY"?

It's a big tent, mama, a mighty big tent.

Experts: Sex Slavery Widespread in US
By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer
Sun Aug 20, 2:30 PM

NEW YORK - Raids that uncovered more than 70 suspected sex slaves focused on 20 brothels in the East, but they illustrated a long-ignored national problem found in towns large and small, experts say.

"It's a very overwhelming subject for a lot of people to recognize that there is slavery at this time in our country," said Carole Angel, staff attorney with the Immigrant Women Program of the women's rights advocacy group Legal Momentum in Washington. "It's hard for us as humans to contemplate what this means."

The concept of slavery in the 21st century is foreign to most people, agreed Jolene Smith, executive director of Free The Slaves, a Washington-based organization dedicated to ending slavery worldwide.

"Americans are conditioned to believe that slavery was a thing of the past," Smith said. "We have to reeducate ourselves about this reality."

On Tuesday, federal and local law enforcement raided brothels disguised as massage parlors, health spas and acupuncture clinics in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, arresting 31 people on trafficking charges.

Authorities said they also freed more than 70 sex workers, taking them to undisclosed locations for questioning and to provide basic services such as health care and food. Authorities said it might take weeks to get the Korean immigrants to trust them enough to discuss their ordeal.

"Human traffickers profit by turning dreams into nightmares," said U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia in Manhattan, where the majority of the traffickers face prosecution. "These women sought a better life in America and found instead forced prostitution and misery."

Angel said the raids should not give the impression that trafficking is limited to immigrants, who are often enticed into coming to America for legitimate jobs but then forced to work in brothels, sweatshops and restaurants to pay off debts of up to $30,000 to their traffickers.

"There are so many faces on this," she said. "It happens in rural communities, big cities. It spans all education levels, different countries, different races."

Such forced labor also thrives in agricultural and domestic work, as well as in sweatshops or unregulated industries, said Laurel Fletcher, law professor at the University of California at Berkeley International Human Rights Law Clinic.

Fletcher was one of several authors of a 2004 report believed to be the first comprehensive study of forced labor in the United States.

That study, by Free The Slaves and the Human Rights Center of the University of California at Berkeley, concluded that at least 10,000 people are forced laborers at any time across the United States.

The State Department estimates there are among up to 800,000 trafficking victims worldwide.

The Berkeley study concluded that forced labor victims came from more than 35 countries, with the most from China, followed by Mexico and Vietnam. It found reports of forced labor in at least 90 U.S. cities, most often in areas with large immigrant populations.

Fletcher cautioned that trafficking in smaller communities is likely harder to detect.

The study also concluded that prostitution and sex services accounted for 46 percent of the documented forced labor. Domestic service made up 27 percent, agriculture 10 percent, sweatshop factory work 5 percent and restaurant and hotel work 4 percent.

Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the federal government has begun numerous investigations and seized tens of millions of dollars from traffickers.

With increased investigations, the number of arrests has risen more than 400 percent in recent years, Myers said. And the amount of assets seized from human smugglers and human trafficking organizations has gone from almost nothing in 2003 to nearly $27 million in 2005, she noted.

Myers said criminals look at the slaves as a commodity.

"But we know that the victims of trafficking and smuggling are not cargo," Myers said. They are human beings who often have been mentally and physically broken down in every way possible."

_______

This is a human rights issue right in our own country. The Democrats, especially all the women, should jump on this!

Unfortunately all Americans have a right to be in the Democratic party, not just the freaks.
****

Now this is an odd way of complaining about narrow minded people. You complain about Christian bashing and then you bash I presume gays. If you want parity then you need to have tolerance as well.

By the way, I don't bash Christians - I am one myself. I bash the so-called Christian right who want to re-write our constitution. I think they are the true subversives - Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerrry Falwell and that bunch. I see no reason to make nice with them as they are dedicated to destroying the Democratic party.

Good Evening Gentle (and not so gentle) dems,

Please stop by dailykos and "Tour NC With Me" this week we visit Seagrove, the pottery capital of NC and some say the world.

Unions are the reason the USA became the terrific country that it is. After WWII unions were the norm, they protected people's rights and enabled us to have a strong middle class. Countries with unions have the best economies. The destruction of unions will take the country back into a scenario similar to the gay 90's where a few rich people, many living in poverty, and a small "business service" class exists.

I shoulda put the link up to the post that started it all also. It's a "bear" to load though because it has over 18 hundred comments. I'll put parts of it up here so even dial up folks can get a peek.
****
Domingo,

Geez, disappointing that the Kos web site got under your skin. I find most of the journals there to be very good. There are on occasion a few that get on my nerves. I didn't realize they didn't allow a way to delete your account. That's actually dumb on their part.

No Benji, the way I express myself is just fine. It's the way I think.
The posters do not like it when someone makes them rethink their narrow-minded talking points. For example, posters that want to bash Christians or people who do not support the gay agenda do not want to read any opinion that opposes them. Unfortunately all Americans have a right to be in the Democratic party, not just the freaks.
Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:32 PM
Perhaps it isn't because you are a Christian that causes people to bash you, or because you do not support the "gay agenda." Perhaps it is because of your foul mouth. You call people freaks, you say they post crap. You openly run down gay and lesbian people, as if it is a crusade for you. I can't help you were propositioned by another woman, but I'm personally jealous - no other women ever considered me attractive enough to come on to me - I would have considered it flattering that someone would be interested in me - you see it only as insult.

Perhaps if you were less nasty, people might take what you write more seriously. If people are turned off before you post, because you are intollerent, then they most likely won't give anything you post much thought.

It is also a very bad example you set for Christians when you present so nasty and rude. Jesus was never nasty and rude. So you are giving Christians a bad name. This is bad reflection on Christianity.

I doubt you will take any of this to heart. You dismiss ideas from anyone who does not agree with you. I doubt you can learn from this experience because you believe you are better than anyone else.

I would kindly suggest, if you must be nasty, then please go be nasty somewhere else. The folks here have been very patient with you. You are forcing your rudeness and nasty self on all of us, and it is really time for you stop.

{{{momo}}}
i'm a potter and thoroughly enjoyed the "tour"! great job, you little tecchie you...

i'm stunned to hear people putting unions down.
****

I still hear that today. The unions have been systematically demonized by conservatives. They knew how important unions were to the Democratic party and that is why they proceeded to propagandize against them. In addition, they have changed the labor laws so that it is very hard to unionize.

Sure unions aren't perfect but is a work force without any protections at all really better off? There is a good reason why real wages have gone down since the 1970's. I think in no small part it's been the weakening of unions.

Posted by rjsnj

You are correct! They have always wanted to destroy the unions and look at how the workers and the retirees have suffered!!! Their strategy is to blame any thing they do not like, taxes,soc sec tax, public education, unions or any guarantees for the worker, etc. You notice they are big on reducing litigation by individuals against corporations, preventing individuals from buying drugs abroad, preventing medicare from negotiating drug prices, etc. So if it's for corporations, Repubs are for it. If it's for the American worker they are against it. The only thing that confuses the voter is when the Dems aren't for the workers either, such as in illegal immigration. The no child left behind is just a ploy to get rid of the public school system. They probably already knew that with the bad economic situation, we wouldn't have the money to move the disabled students forward and we wouldn't be able to prevent high school students from dropping out. Those are the two problems that make the Tenn numbers look so bad, and it's probably true of the other states. So if it's a money problem, who's to blame? Certainly not the teachers.

No Benji, the way I express myself is just fine. It's the way I think.
The posters do not like it when someone makes them rethink their narrow-minded talking points...

...Unfortunately all Americans have a right to be in the Democratic party, not just the freaks.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:32 PM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

narrow-minded?

freaks?

interesting way of expressing yourself.

nevertheless i understand your message.

A gentle hand turneth away wrath.

p.s. some of your posts are too long, you may want to try to paraphrase and reference a link, it is a way to show courtesy for those with dial-up.

Roxie, you are not worth the time to rebutte. NO one would ever be interested in you. I'm sorry but that's the truth.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:36 PM

Human rights? Republicans are in favor of forced prostitution, forced abortion and slave labor. Think I'm kidding? To those who enjoy such things this is what Tom Delay said as he toasted them.

You are a shining light for what is happening in the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we're trying to do in America and in leading the world in the free market system.

Family values--they make me wanna puke. Read all about it here
and here.

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:48 PM

I find Roxie's point of view just as interesting as I find yours point of view.

Posted by Benji

__

links do not look that long until I post them. I'll just post the links.

don't you find freaks narrow-minded?

Hey {{{Fade}}}

Glad you took the tour. Have you had a chance to follow the first link, "Pottery Capital of NC"? It lists all 100 potters, has a pic of a sample of their work and contact info.

That is so cool that you too are a potter. Do you do it for a living or just for fun?

freaks? Who are freaks?

Hey Roxie...I think you are cool;)

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:51 PM

Some people think I'm a freak.

I don't think of myself as a freak and I would hope that I have an open mind.

Nevertheless, some people think I'm a freak.

Freaks are people who are anti-establishment anti-Christian anti-marriage anti-everything their parents were...you know the people who smoke pot

She's a super freak

super freak

she's super freakin'

yow

-Rick James

thank you xdebx - I do try understand everyone, and everyone's point of view. When I find out who the "freaks" are, I will even try to undertand their point of view.

It's okay if you want to be a freak, just don't be a narrow-minded freak. ;)

There are anti-marriage people? God I thought everyone was in favor of marriage. Well the Mormons are MORE in favor of marriage than some, but I never knew anyone was against marriage.

Roxie, if my friend xdebx says you are cool, you are cool!

Thank you momoaizo - Actually in the winter, I'm beyond cool - I'm like waaaaaaaaay cold!

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:56 PM

I'll take your advice. :)

Have a pleasant day everybody.

It's been a great day of political discourse and discussion.

We should never be afraid to share our thoughts and listen to the thoughts of others.

From that we can build a stronger nation for our children.

lol Momo...and thanks. I posted at your diary on Kos

Snakes on Plane sounds positively gross!

Goodnight Benji

Hi {{{OFG}}} I found a terrific online magazine!

Psyorg.com

momo--(sorry, a little technical problem, but i'm back) i was a professional potter for a few years. now, i just do it for a creative outlet. my work is not as good as it was, but it's coming along.

there was a nice representation of clay art in that beautiful display you created, momo. you're getting to be quite the cyber-magazine writer...o and i can say i knew you when...

I saw it Deb, Thanks for taking the "tour" with me. I think that you have the right idea, BUY AMERICAN when possible. There are so many towns in NC that depended on textiles. People like Robin Hayes after PROMISING his constituents that he would NEVER vote for CAFTA, was the DECIDING VOTE after all. Guess what, more mills are closing down and going to CENTRAL AMERICA, sure now, and that's what CAFTA was for!

Driving thru little towns like Robbins (last weeks spotlight) and Seagrove, you see these people struggling to just be able to make it to their next pay check.

Do you think this nation will be able to rebuild it's manufacturing?

Lol Fade, (blushing)

you are too much. ;)

CAFTA
****

NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA - all of these free trade agreements have hurt workers in our country. I am glad that the majority of Democrats were against CAFTA. Finally, they seen that free trade did not work out in favor of the American worker.

Read Byron Dorgan's book: Take This Job and Ship It ... it's really good.

wow- things have now devolved to calling people freaks on this site-n what's next? calling people godless heathens? wow- benji, you are such an openminded guy- gotta love ya brother- you must know that mom runs this site now and she is not interested in reading what anyone posts here unless it happens to be from worldnetdaily or answerislam or some other site that she deems to be suitable free from any infiltration from the "freaks"

Domingo,

Geez, disappointing that the Kos web site got under your skin. I find most of the journals there to be very good. There are on occasion a few that get on my nerves. I didn't realize they didn't allow a way to delete your account. That's actually dumb on their part. Posted by rjsnj on August 20, 2006 at 09:42 PM

That wasn't MY account, that was some person over there calling themselves errinf.

I have enjoyed KOS - I would think manual deleting of accounts would be expensive.

I need to help my husband get to bed. Goodnight everyone.

goodnite roxie, you freak you

I'm a good freak, and I haven't felt this way since that house fell on my sister.

mad as hell and your not going to take it anymore?

No, I had a lot of fun today.

glad to hear it

I was considering having a political change operation, and becoming a Republican. When they told me the only way they they could make it successful was to suck out half my brians, I gave up the idea.

Yep, it's called thread hijacking. And for all those that say we should let "other points of view" post on here, OK, but they shouldn't be allowed to hijack the thread like this.

Roxie,

I think that small towns are in the process of redefining themselves. What I see are people who decided early in life that they didn't need much of an education because of the promise of the mill. They could start out at a decent wage and if they worked hard and kept their mill profitable, could somewhat share in that profit.

All of that is going away and now they look around and try to re-invent themselves. Even in the little town of Seagrove, if you weren't a potter, then you worked in the Luck's Beans factory. (Famous for their pinto beans). That mill too had closed down. So the people of the area are trying to buy the mill, employee owned, and encourage farmers in the area to plant the crops that they will can and market. There are already a number of farms in the area with the "River Friendly Farmer" designation.

I believe that we won't be the manufacturing state we use to be, maybe not even the manufacturing nation. Too many people gave their complete loyalty to these mills, the mills weren't loyal back. The younger generation seeing this, imho, will not be willing to work in these places like their folks did.

The world has changed, our representatives sold us out (both sides!) I think that this is why the netroots are so important. We write about the truth, we keep our legislators in the "sunshine".

Started to watch the "Grapes of Wrath" the other day, had to stop watching, reminded me too much of what's happening now.

Still though, love Henry Fonda's last line in the movie, "Grapes, We don't need no stinkin' grapes!" Brings a tear to my eye everytime!

Roxie, I believe that alternative/renewable energy will clean our air, stop wars for oil and put people to work. Solar panels on every roof in the nation, plug-in bio-fuel cars, and wind energy. (search Tower of Power)

What we must do as a nation is to regulate corporations so that people who work for them are earning a living wage with benefits. Put the entire nation on Medicare. Tax corporations adaquately. Demand that our media provides unbiased real news or take away their liscenses....etc. It can be done and we (yes us bloggers and posters and real people who are aware of the situation) are the ones who must continue to stand up and demand our rights.

I am tired of paying a greater percentage in taxes than the average millionaire. I am tired of Wal-Mart making trillions while their workers are living off of state funded Medicaid and state funded Public Housing. And I am REALLY tired of a war for oil based on a pack of lies. Oh, and tired of owing China so much...every worker in the US owes like a half million toward the deficit.

Who's a Democrat? is a new one up at the Nation. I find it partly envigorating and partly terrifying, as it would be unspeakable to see this party go down any further at this point in time.

It raises the interesting question, though. What's in it for Joe? What did he get in his deal with the devil, kkkarl?

Hi Jefro, send my love to {{{Jen}}}

Good night Roxie, you frostie cool lady!

Good night everyone, pleasant dreams of a Dem takeover and peace again in the world.

Momo, I like the "river friendly farmer" designation. I have been reading that algae can be 1/2 oil by volume. It grows like crazy in a nitrate rich environment. I've been thinking that farmers can capture the water on the way to the river and grow algae in ponds for bio-fuel...it will provide liqiud fuel, pay the farmer, and clean the river all at the same time...win/win for all.

Sweet dem dreams {{{Momo}}} maybe we can do lunch when I come that way to check out the pottery:)

goodnight {{{friends}}}

paint it blue!

Posted by momoaizo on August 20, 2006 at 10:36 PM

g'nite, momo...loved your post.

Oh Deb, that is interesting! You should do some research and post an article on that.

My daughter and her family are looking at having a home built, so I have been looking into green building materials and ideas.

One we all like is "Photovoltaic Shingles". they are solar collectors, but look just like shingles, even come in colors. If you did your whole roof with them, you could get off the grid and even sell power back on some days and in sunnier locales. The govt offers a 30% tax credit and some states offer additional tax credits.

I have been writing my legislators about this tech. Supporting the idea that developers when building large new areas should provide this on the houses. This way they don't strain the already strained powerplants.

Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.
What I've been trying to say. Most of the time something that sounds extreme causes a moderate to turn off. Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:12 PM

Yeah, but non-stop bashing of non-Christians isn't extreme, now is it? Nah, not in Right Wing world.

Good night again :) and thanks Boilerman!

Would love it Deb, let me know when!

domingo, shhh!- don't you know that is mom's little secret- she's been trying to hide that dominionist project until the time is just right- until then, it's important that we just play along- don't rock the boat brother or you might get labeled as a freak - you know the type, reads more books than they really oughtta, likes to point out when someone posts things that sound even the slightest bit bigoted or extreme, has leanings toward understanding that people of other faiths should not be demonized by two-bit academics at no-name christian schools- you know the type, the freaks

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 08:45 PM

Bullshit!

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 06:05 PM

Bullshit!

the dominion's other foot soldier- enjoy yourselves

ok...here's a narrow minded pot smoking freak who's a friend of presidents and isn't afraid to speak to the truth. forget what i said earlier about not engaging trolls...humiliate 'em, fill 'em with guilt, make them fell like the worms of the earth they are. our passionate committment to our ideals will resonate with americans and clearly distinguish us from our opponent's lies and deceptions.

I am proud to be a part of a community of artists and filmmakers who have shown their activism and social consciousness through their work; a group that is committed to examining our world and revealing the truth. Sure, the entertainment industry is not perfect. With every groundbreaking, courageous film that is produced, there are also films made that contribute little to the betterment of society.

barbra streisand

It's amazing that 33% of the world is Christian, 67% are non-christians, yet the Christians think they are the TRUE religion and can tell the others they are all wrong !

Posted by PamB on August 20, 2006 at 05:11 PM

I think that a Religion that flies airplanes loaded with passengers into buildings full of people is wrong and should be told so in the harshest of terms.

Yeah, and I know what you mean about her not bothering to read links. I posted a link to someone elses Dailykos diary here with a link, and "mom" asked why "I" was putting "MY" dailykos stuff over here. I like how "mom" keeps making these Right Wing claims, like the other day when the court ruled against Junior on the wiretapping and it said, "The ACLU only defends murders and pedophiles". When some makes these kinds of sweeping generalizations, such as "All Muslims are bad" or the one above about the ACLU, what's to stop it later if it were Protestant for example to say, "All Catholics are bad", or if the other way around, "All Protestant are bad"? I've heard people talk that way many times in my life. These people go after one group at a time and they are never satisfied. Once they get done with one group, they'll be coming after yours next.

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout
Documents Altered To Conceal Data

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. " . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before."

The report comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information. The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency had for years kept secret a reclassification program under which the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies removed thousands of records from public shelves.

One month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft instructed federal agencies to be more mindful of national security when deciding whether to publicly release documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Last year, in a study of FOIA requests at 22 agencies from 2000 to 2004, the nonpartisan Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that agencies cited reasons to withhold unclassified information 22 percent more often than before Ashcroft's directive.

The administration's affinity for secrecy also was exemplified in its legal battle to withhold the names of oil company executives and others who attended meetings of a White House task force in 2001 that helped draft a national energy policy. More recently, President Bush has made clear his administration's willingness to prosecute individuals it believes unlawfully possess classified material.

Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials strive to properly apply rules governing what should be classified and are researching why the missile information cited in the archive report was blacked out. The report was released Friday.

"The Department of Defense takes the responsibility of classifying information seriously," Ryder said. "This includes classifying information at the lowest level possible."

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said the Pentagon excised the missile numbers. Under a 1998 law, Wilkes's agency focuses on scrubbing declassified documents for sensitive U.S. nuclear weapons information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to harm Americans, he said.

"It's not our call to do missile data," Wilkes said. "There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back," he added. "And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."

Archive officials say the Pentagon was using guidelines developed by the Energy Department in blacking out the missile data.

During the Cold War, the United States devoted substantial manpower and money to counting Soviet missiles, experts said. At the same time, U.S. officials sometimes were quite open about the number of American missiles, using the data to illustrate the deterrent power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and to make the case for more defense spending. Indeed, such numbers were routinely disclosed in annual reports to Capitol Hill by secretaries of defense dating to at least the 1960s, according to Burr.

In a 1971 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird offered a toaster-shaped chart showing, among other things, that the United States had 30 strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles.

Those numbers, made public on March 9, 1971, are redacted in a copy of the chart obtained by the archive's researchers in January as part of a declassified government history of the U.S. air and missile defense system, according to archive officials.

"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director.

In another case, Burr cited two declassified copies of a 75-page memo on military policy issues that Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara sent to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, one obtained from the National Archives in 1999 and the other from the Pentagon this year.

In the 2006 copy, Pentagon reviewers blacked out numbers that were left untouched in the earlier version, including the number of ballistic missile launchers and the number of heavy bombers the United States expected to have in 1965, 1967 and 1970. (Comparative numbers for the Soviet Union were left alone.)

Burr also compared two copies of a memo that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote for President Gerald R. Ford for a 1974 National Security Council meeting on arms control negotiations.

One copy, obtained from the NSC through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1999, has visible references to "200 older B-52 bombers" and 240 Trident missiles, among other weapons data. In the second copy, released by the Gerald R. Ford Library in May 2006, such information is blacked out -- as is similar data for the Soviet Union.

Experts say there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information under wraps -- especially when it has been publicly available for years.

Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said U.S. officials handed more detailed accounts of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over to the Soviets as part of the two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) and the two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

"Is that now going to be reclassified?" asked Norris. "I would say that the horse is out of the barn and they are only making themselves look ridiculous. At someone's direction, declassification reviewers have gotten carried away and are applying the rather vague and open-ended guidelines to the point of absurdity."

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said the report illustrates how arbitrary the classification system is.

"Information is classified not because it's sensitive, but because somebody says it is classified," he said. "Several years into the 21st century, we still haven't figured out how to do classification policy right, and the government is still botching the matter."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

I honest to god feel sorry for a heart and soul so filled with racism and bigotry and hatred . You have to bring others down in order to have any self worth yourself, and that is sad.

Posted by PamB on August 20, 2006 at 07:58 PM

How do you reconcile that pomposity with the fact that you hate Jews?

$#!t, one took off and the next one takes over. They must be working as a team.

I think that a Religion that flies airplanes loaded with passengers into buildings full of people is wrong and should be told so in the harshest of terms.

There's no such thing as a "Religion" that flies airplanes into buildings, jerk. I thought you crazies always said things like, "Guns don't kill, only people do!" Yeah, when it's group causing the problem, it's not the group, but when it's some group you don't like, then it is the whole group. That's all you Right Wing scum do, is talk out both sides of your @$$'s.

August 20, 2006
Democrats Set Primary Calendar and Penalties
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

CHICAGO, Aug. 19 — The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to penalize 2008 presidential candidates who defied a new nominating calendar devised to lessen the longtime influence of New Hampshire and Iowa, the two states that have traditionally kicked off the nominating process.

The sanctions will be directed at candidates who campaign in any state that refuses to follow a 2008 calendar of primaries and caucuses that was also approved Saturday. Any candidate who campaigns in a state that does not abide by the new calendar will be stripped at the party convention of delegates won in that state.

The party adopted a broad definition of campaigning, barring candidates from giving speeches, attending party events, mailing literature or running television advertisements.

Iowa will continue to start the voting process, with a caucus on Jan. 14. But under the new calendar, there will be a caucus in Nevada on the Saturday between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 22. South Carolina will hold a primary at least one week after New Hampshire.

The penalties were adopted in response to threats by New Hampshire officials, who said they might defy the new Democratic calendar and schedule their primary earlier in the year or in 2007 to retain their long-held influence over the nominating process. The New Hampshire secretary of state has the authority to move the primary earlier to make sure it complies with a state law requiring that no state hold any kind of nominating contest within seven days of the New Hampshire primary.

Kathy Sullivan, the leader of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, warned that the calendar vote would create strife for the party and “rob presidential candidates from doing what they need to take back the White House.”

“Mark my words, in 2008 when our presidential candidates start to introduce themselves to the American public, the changes in the primary calendar will continue to take attention away from where it should be — on their visions for this country,” she said.

The calendar and penalties were adopted by what appeared to be an overwhelming margin in a voice vote. The decision, which embraces the recommendations of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, is the biggest shift in the way Democrats have nominated their presidential candidates in 30 years.

Despite the vote, the fighting over the calendar may not be over. A number of potential 2008 contenders — including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts; John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina; and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana — have expressed support for New Hampshire.

Several Democrats said candidates might make the calculation that it is worth losing delegates — assuming New Hampshire defies the party and the party penalizes candidates — to get the attention that might come from an early New Hampshire victory.

A spokesman for Mr. Bayh, Dan Pfeiffer, said that the senator had asked the Indiana Democratic delegation to oppose the rule change, and that he intended to campaign in New Hampshire.

“Senator Bayh, should he decide to run, intends to stand by his commitment to New Hampshire,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “At the end of the day, the D.N.C. and the various states will set the final calendar and all Senator Bayh can do is compete in the contests as they come — and that includes New Hampshire.”

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 11:23 PM

Bullshit!

Re: $#!t, one took off and the next one takes over. They must be working as a team.

lol

Pakistanis find no evidence against ‘terror mastermind’

By GLEN OWEN 22:46pm 19th August 2006

Students read the Koran at an Islamic seminary, where suspected British al Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf was believed to have visited.
Enlarge the image
Headlines

* Official probe into CT scan safety
* One in three criminals arrested simply get a ticking off
* A third of firms have to teach staff the three Rs
* Pensioner's £75 fine for dropping cigarette ash
* French to reopen Diana death probe
* 'My baby died of meningitis after hospital sent her home to take Calpol'
* One in three Britons will be obese within four years
* Islamic radical backs suicide bombing
* Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed
* Pakistan forfeit fourth Test after day of controversy
* Who is secret Tory in sex novel?
* BBC accused of making perfect 'BNP propaganda' drama
* Going bust, the wannabe WAGs
* Nursing home matron jailed after stealing £100,00 from dying patients
* NEWS HOMEPAGE

Pictures & video

Video: Hilarious spoof video of Prescott in 'Brokeback Mounting'

Gallery: Our eye-catching pictures of the day

Big Brother: Delighted Pete wins the final

Gallery: Stars take the stage at the V Festival

JonBenet murder: Incredible audio tape of suspect confessing to killing

Footage: Britney's ranting 'I'm ugly' video

MORE PHOTOS & VIDEO

The Briton alleged to be the ‘mastermind’ behind the airline terror plot could be innocent of any significant involvement, sources close to the investigation claim.

Rashid Rauf, whose detention in Pakistan was the trigger for the arrest of 23 suspects in Britain, has been accused of taking orders from Al Qaeda’s ‘No3’ in Afghanistan and sending money back to the UK to allow the alleged bombers to buy plane tickets.

But after two weeks of interrogation, an inch-by-inch search of his house and analysis of his home computer, officials are now saying that his extradition is ‘a way down the track’ if it happens at all.

It comes amid wider suspicions that the plot may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed.

Analysts suspect Pakistani authorities exaggerated Rauf’s role to appear ‘tough on terrorism’ and impress Britain and America.

A spokesman for Pakistan’s Interior Ministry last night admitted that ‘extradition at this time is not under consideration’.

Rauf’s arrest followed a protracted surveillance operation on him and his family which, The Mail on Sunday has established, dates back to the 7/7 bomb attacks on London.

The possible link between 7/7 and the alleged plot emerged when this newspaper spoke to Rauf’s uncle, Miam Mumtaz, in Kashmir.

Mumtaz was approached by two members of ISI, the feared Pakistani security service, as he nervously denied any knowledge of his nephew’s alleged activities.

One ISI man said it had been monitoring all movement by Mumtaz and the rest of Rauf’s relatives since the 7/7 attacks.

It is the first official acknowledgement of any suspected link between the London bombings and the plot to blow up planes flying from Britain to America.

But it comes against a welter of claims made by Pakistani security sources about Rauf, who is being interrogated by British and Pakistani agents in Rawalpindi.

The sources believe Rauf went to Afghanistan twice, where he made contact with senior Al Qaeda commanders. They also say he visited the border city of Quettain, where Taliban and Al Qaeda have a heavy presence.

They believe that at least seven of the suspects in custody in Britain travelled to Pakistan while planning the bombings.

Rauf left for Pakistan four years ago after another uncle was stabbed to death in Birmingham following an alleged dispute over an arranged marriage.

Meanwhile, Rauf’s 54-year-old father Abdul was held at Islamabad airport as he tried to leave the country yesterday.

He was involved in setting up Ilford-based Crescent Relief, which is being investigated by the CharityCommission over claims that money donated for victims of the Kashmir earthquake last October could have been diverted to extremist groups.

There's no such thing as a "Religion" that flies airplanes into buildings, jerk. I thought you crazies always said things like, "Guns don't kill, only people do!" Yeah, when it's group causing the problem, it's not the group, but when it's some group you don't like, then it is the whole group. That's all you Right Wing scum do, is talk out both sides of your @$$'s.

Posted by Domingo on August 20, 2006 at 11:31 PM

Your diatribe might be believable if muslems around the world had denounced these murderous slugs rather than dancing in the streets waving Osam Bin Lauden pictures. They were orgasmic with glee.

Don't you remember that asswipe?

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 20, 2006 at 11:31 PM

holy crap! it knows how to spell!

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 11:37 PM

Bullshit!

A Tortured Past

Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse
By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse

Special to The Times
Salt Lake Tribune

In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations.
An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.
But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public accounts of his war experiences.
"This package & provides sufficient material to impeach this man's credibility; should this need arise, I volunteer for the task," wrote Col. Henry H. Tufts, commander of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.
Now, declassified records show that while the Army was working energetically to discredit Herbert, military investigators were uncovering torture and mistreatment that went well beyond what he had described.
The abuses were not made public, and few of the wrongdoers were punished.
Tufts' agents found that military interrogators in the 173rd Airborne repeatedly beat prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks and forced water down their throats to simulate the sensation of drowning, the records show.
Soldiers in one unit told investigators that their captain approved of such methods and was sometimes present during torture sessions.
In one case, a detainee who had been beaten by interrogators suffered convulsions, lost consciousness and later died in his confinement cage.
Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.
The accounts of torture and the Army's effort to discredit Herbert emerged from a review of a once-secret Pentagon archive.
The collection - about 9,000 pages - was compiled in the early 1970s by an Army task force that monitored war crimes investigations. The files, examined recently by the Los Angeles Times, include memos, case summaries, investigative reports and sworn witness statements.
Those and related records detail 141 instances of detainee and prisoner abuse in Vietnam, including 127 involving the 173rd Airborne.
The Army task force, created after journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the 1968 My Lai massacre, served to give military brass and the White House early warning about potentially damaging revelations.
The war crimes records were declassified in 1994 and moved to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed.
The Times examined most of the files before officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Other records were taken by Tufts in the 1970s and donated after his death to the University of Michigan.
The two collections do not provide a complete accounting of prisoner abuse during the Vietnam War. They contain only cases reported to military authorities and flagged for special attention by the Army chief of staff's office or taken home by Tufts. But they represent the largest pool of such records to surface to date.
Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, said the files provided important lessons for dealing with the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.
"If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem," said Johns, 78.
A Supersoldier's Charges
A coal miner's son, Anthony Herbert was one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers of the Korean War. He went on to become an Army Ranger and a Ranger instructor.
In 1968, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in early 1969 was awarded command of a battalion in the 173rd Airborne.
The brigade was based in Binh Dinh province in the central coastal region when Herbert arrived. Over the next two months, his unit reported more enemy contacts than any other battalion in the 173rd Airborne.
Then on April 4, 1969, Herbert was relieved of his command for allegedly unsatisfactory performance. He later told investigators from the Criminal Investigation Division that, before his removal, he had informed his superior of war crimes that he had witnessed.
Herbert recounted a series of atrocities.
He said South Vietnamese troops had executed detainees in the presence of an American military advisor in February 1969. One of the victims had her throat slit as her child clung to her pant leg, Herbert said. (Investigators later concluded that about eight detainees had been slain.)
The following month, U.S. and Vietnamese interrogators tortured a teenager or young woman by electric shock and subjected a male detainee to water torture, Herbert said. He said he also saw interrogators beat two Vietnamese women held in metal storage containers.
Herbert told the investigators that he had reported these incidents to Col. J. Ross Franklin. On learning of the allegations, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. William C. Westmoreland ordered Tufts to create a task force to conduct the investigation.
Before it was finished, Herbert took matters into his own hands and brought charges against Franklin and his superior, Maj. Gen. John W.
Barnes, in March 1971, saying they failed to investigate reports of war crimes.
As Army officials feared, the case received widespread coverage because of Herbert's distinguished combat career and Barnes' rank, and because Franklin had served on the commission investigating the My Lai massacre.
Herbert achieved celebrity status as the case played out in the media. He appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show," was interviewed by Playboy magazine and was featured in a New York Times Sunday magazine article titled: "How a Supersoldier Was Fired From His Command."
Barnes and Franklin denied that Herbert had reported war crimes to them. According to news reports at the time, Barnes told an investigator he removed Herbert as battalion commander because he was "a keg of dynamite" who was "completely oriented to killing mercilessly."
The Army dismissed the charges against Barnes and Franklin, and removed Herbert's negative performance review.
Nevertheless, Herbert continued to accuse military leaders of a coverup. The Army responded by releasing "fact sheets" that said the investigation had substantiated only seven of 21 allegations by Herbert and had found no evidence that his superiors knew about them or retaliated against him.
In February 1972, Army magazine said that Herbert's "eminence is undeserved" and devoted six pages to the fact sheets.
Herbert retired from the Army, citing harassment and strain on his family.
In January 1973, his memoir, "Soldier," hit the bookstores, and the Army's public information office scoured its pages for inconsistencies, records show.
Around the same time, the Army leaked internal reports on Herbert to CBS News, according to an Army memorandum. The TV news magazine "60 Minutes" aired a segment on Feb. 4, 1973, that attacked Herbert's claims of coverup and retaliation.
Unknown to the public, Army investigators probing Herbert's charges had learned that abuse of detainees by soldiers of the 173rd Airborne was much more extensive than he had alleged.
When contacted recently at his home in Colorado, Herbert declined to be quoted about the Army investigation, except to say: "If they'd really taken action about the bad apples and been honest about it & then they wouldn't be arguing about Abu Ghraib and different places today."
Earlier Reports
The problem centered on the brigade's 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment, known as the 172nd MI.
Reports that interrogators in the unit were torturing prisoners had begun to surface several years before Herbert first made his allegations.
Among the first to speak out was Peter N. Martinsen, an interrogator from another unit who had worked with members of the 172nd MI.
Testifying at the International War Crimes Tribunal, an unofficial forum in Stockholm, in 1967, Martinsen said he had taken part in beatings, and witnessed the use of field telephones to shock prisoners.
Army investigators interviewed him in November 1968. He requested immunity, but the Army's office of the judge advocate general rejected the request, citing "the general nature of the allegation, Mr. Martinsen's attitude and his record," documents show.
Martinsen refused to give a statement. Efforts to reach him for comment for this article were unsuccessful.
Investigators marked his allegations "unsubstantiated" and closed their inquiry.
At the time of Martinsen's interview, Robert Stemme Jr. was serving in the 172nd MI's counterintelligence section. His job was to gather information about the enemy from friendly local sources, such as hamlet officials.
He did not conduct interrogations, he said in a recent interview, but he heard and saw them. Interrogations were conducted around the clock in a building about 10 yards from the tent where he slept, he said.
"My bed was maybe 30 feet from where all this stuff was going on. So I could hear this & all night long," Stemme told The Times. "It was pretty standard practice that people got slapped around or hit with things, or guns pointed at them, or whatever. Field telephones - all those things - were tools of the trade."
The telephones had hand cranks that could be turned to generate electricity and two wires that could be attached to sensitive parts of a prisoner's body. The shock could be intensified by wetting detainees and placing them in contact with metal objects.
In the spring of 1969, about a dozen members of the 172nd MI organized a letter-writing campaign to complain to higher-ups about the abuse, Stemme said.
"Next thing we know, we have this major coming up from IG's office who is Miranda-izing us and asks us if we're admitting to committing war crimes," Stemme said, referring to the inspector general. "It was all about us, when this was de facto command policy. It was really scary."
They decided as a group not to give any statements, he said.
Stemme returned to the United States in June 1969, and left the service in 1970. In April of that year, he spoke out about prisoner abuse at a news conference at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club.
Martinsen and Frederick Brown, another former interrogator with the 172nd MI, joined him.
Army investigators contacted Stemme and Brown that summer. Brown told them that he and others "participated in water-rag and field telephone interrogations of detainees," according to an investigator's summary. Brown, who lives in Orange County, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Stemme met with Army agents in San Francisco. According to an agent's statement, Stemme described abuse of detainees by 11 members of his unit over 12 months beginning in June 1968.
Under oath, Stemme said he saw interrogators punch and kick prisoners, beat them with sticks, administer electrical shocks and urinate on them.
Records show that Stemme detailed specific instances of maltreatment, offering names and approximate dates. Yet a case summary produced by the Army chief of staff's office reported that investigators closed the investigation because Stemme "declined to provide any specific information concerning his allegations."
"I spent hours with these guys," said Stemme, now 63 and retired from his job as an investigator for the San Francisco public defender's office. "There was no reason for me to be reticent."
Interrogation Methods
Stemme identified former Staff Sgt. David Carmon as one of the interrogators who had tortured detainees.
Herbert also accused Carmon of subjecting a detainee to water torture. Herbert said he found Carmon involved in the torture of a Vietnamese man, pouring water onto a rag placed over the captive's nose and mouth.
This technique, called the "water rag," causes a drowning sensation and is banned under international law. Bush administration officials have come under pressure in recent years to explicitly denounce a similar method known as "water-boarding" as an interrogation technique. In May, a Pentagon official told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the revised Army Field Manual now specifically prohibited water-boarding. On Friday, a spokesman said the U.S. Army did not permit water-boarding - in past wars or as part of today's intelligence-gathering procedures.
When investigators questioned Carmon in December 1970, he admitted using the water rag on a detainee, records show.
"I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth. The suspect, after becoming choked on the water, confessed that he was a VC and stated he was a propaganda man," Carmon said, according to his sworn statement.
He admitted using electrical shock on detainees, the investigators' summary states.
Carmon also told investigators that in the fall of 1968, he took part in interrogating a captive who died soon afterward.
The man had been "beat and kicked," lost consciousness and suffered convulsions, according to summaries of statements given by members of the 172nd MI. A doctor was brought in to examine the detainee, identified as Nguyen Cong, and said there was nothing wrong with him, the records say.
Carmon said he and another member of the military intelligence team "slapped the Vietnamese and poured water on his face from a five-gallon can," according to the investigators' summary
Nguyen passed out "and was carried to the confinement cage where he was later found dead," according to a May 1971 Army report. The investigators' summary said the cause of death was listed in a hospital log as a ruptured spleen, probably due to malaria.
In a 1973 memo to Army Chief of Staff Abrams, Tufts said "maltreatment was not established as the cause of death."
Reached by e-mail in Ohio, Carmon told The Times that abuse of prisoners was widespread in Vietnam and was encouraged by officers.
"Nothing was sanctioned," he wrote, "but nothing was off-limits short of seriously injuring a prisoner."
In another e-mail, he described the electric shock technique:
"What I saw were leads hooked to the legs of a metal folding chair.
It was primarily used with the mountain/country detainees that weren't familiar with electricity. They would [tell] them it would make them sterile or something to that nature. When you turned the phone crank, a light tickle of electricity would generally scare them into talking."
He added: "I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would most likely conduct myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again."
Part of a Pattern
Investigators contacted 31 members of the 172nd MI before submitting a report to headquarters that detailed a pattern of "cruelty and maltreatment" from March 1968 to October 1969.
The report said the evidence warranted formal charges against 22 interrogators, some on active duty at the time. It concluded not only that interrogators repeatedly abused prisoners, but that the unit's executive officer, Capt. Norman L. Bowers, had been present during some of the torture incidents.
Yet none of the interrogators nor Bowers was punished, records show.
The three soldiers who were disciplined for mistreating detainees served in other units of the 173rd Airborne.
In an interview with The Times, Bowers said he had not witnessed or approved abuse of prisoners, contrary to what his subordinates said.
"It could likely happen, and I wasn't told about it," he said.
"Mistreatment of prisoners is a very serious issue, and it's not something someone's going to bring to my attention."
Bowers, now 67 and living in Missouri, said the men may have falsely accused him in hopes of getting him removed because they were working long hours.
"There was a lot of stress on people," he said.
J. Ross Franklin, one of the two superiors whom Herbert accused of covering up war crimes, was deputy commander of the 173rd Airborne from December 1968 to June 1969.
In a recent interview, he said that he was not aware of the investigators' findings, and that no one had ever reported prisoner abuse to him.
"I didn't even know what water-boarding was," said Franklin, now 78 and living in Florida.
He said he did not recall the letter-writing campaign or the nighttime beatings that Stemme described. He said he was housed in an officers' area, in a structure with air-conditioning. "I really wouldn't hear much of anything, other than friendly 'arty' shooting once in a while," he said, referring to artillery.
He added: "Interrogators obviously are under pressure and encouraged to get information, and some of these guys are sadistic at heart. I wouldn't bet my soul that it didn't happen in the 173rd. If the Army found it, I'd say it probably happened."

Amusing . . .

Lieberman insists he is "devoted" Democrat
Sun Aug 20, 2006 1:13 PM ET

By Stuart Grudgings

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sen. Joseph Lieberman, seeking to slip out of a perceived White House embrace, insisted on Sunday he was a loyal Democrat and criticized the Bush administration's post-invasion Iraq war policy.

The 2000 vice-presidential candidate lost the Democratic primary vote in Connecticut to an anti-war rival this month, but is now running for re-election as an independent candidate in a contest that has exposed deep U.S. divisions over the unpopular war.

Some Republican officials have shifted their support to Lieberman, and the White House took the rare step of declining to back the Republican nominee, leading critics to accuse him of becoming the de-facto candidate for President George W. Bush.

Lieberman, who according to a poll released last week now leads the Senate race in the Democrat-leaning state, said in an interview on CBS television that he was "devoted" to his party and would remain in its congressional caucus if elected.

"I am a Democrat. Look at my voting record - I voted 90 percent of the time with the majority of Democrats in the United States' Senate," he said.

However, he said, "I feel I allowed my opponent to distort my position on Iraq," he said. "What I mean is he made me into a cheerleader for George Bush on everything that's happened."

Lieberman reiterated his call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign due to setbacks in Iraq and said that despite his own support for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, he thinks Bush has mishandled Iraq policy after the invasion.

"I've been very critical over the years, particularly in 2003 and 2004 about the failure to send enough American troops to secure the country," he said.

But he said there would be all-out civil war and a "disaster we pay for a generation" if Washington sets a deadline for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, a call that helped his Democrat rival Ned Lamont win the primary vote.

"The position that my opponent and others take to set a deadline by which we will get out is the surest way to get to a civil war, which would be dangerous for our troops, a disaster for Iraq, the Middle East and for the United States of America."

He said the president and Congress may need to consider a troop withdrawal in the event of "all-out" civil war in Iraq.

Leading Democrats said the senator's defeat showed voters' anger at Bush and the war ahead of November mid-term elections, while Republican and administration officials have painted it as an example of Democratic weakness on national security.

Democratic party Chairman Howard Dean has called for Lieberman to drop out after his primary loss.

Lieberman's decision to shrug off the defeat and run as an independent has ensured the war will stay in the election spotlight as Democrats try to wrest control of the House and the Senate from Bush's Republican Party.

Hello all,
I see we have some ignorant trolls on board again tonight.

Another Interesting Item

Nagin: Racism, red tape slowed recovery

New Orleans mayor: Katrina response elsewhere would have been different
The Associated Press

Updated: 2:30 p.m. ET Aug 20, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Friday blamed racism and government bureaucracy for hamstringing his city's ability to weather Hurricane Katrina and recover from the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast nearly a year ago.

In remarks to the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Nagin said the hurricane "exposed the soft underbelly of America as it relates to dealing with race and class."

"And I, to this day, believe that if that would have happened in Orange County, California, if that would have happened in South Beach, Miami, it would have been a different response," the mayor said.

Nagin, who earlier this year apologized after declaring New Orleans would again become a "chocolate" city, condemned federal regulations that discourage rebuilding in the largely black and low-lying Ninth Ward.

While tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have flowed to Louisiana and other states devastated by Katrina, much of it has gone to developers and contractors, Nagin said.

"Very little of those dollars have gotten to the local governments or to the people themselves," Nagin said.

Katrina dispersed three-quarters of New Orleans' pre-hurricane population of about 460,000. Today, it's a city of about 250,000 people. Nagin suggested that Louisiana and federal officials would prefer the city remain smaller.

He said the city is struggling to deliver services and rebuild with a quarter of its former municipal budget. The federal and state aid the city has received is inadequate and comes with too many rules, he said.

"We are being strangled, and they're using the money to set local policies to try to take control of the city to do things that they had in mind all along, and that's to shrink the footprint, get a bunch of developers in the city, and try to do things in a different way," Nagin said.

"We're not going to let that happen. They're going to give us our money, and we're going to rebuild this city."
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14414777/

Evening, Chicago!

:))

I would love to see an add that goes something

Fool’s Choice

The Republicans believe you are stupid and will make a fool’s choice.

They believe they can convince you that you must choose between “cut-and-run” or “stay-and-die”. The Democrats want you to understand that we can have an exit strategy that gets our young men and women home safely by turning control over to the Iraqis.

They believe that they can convince you that you must choose between wiretapping or no wiretapping. The Democrats want you to understand that we can have every wiretap we need as long as there is a warrant.

They believe that they can convince you that you must choose between tax cuts for the top 1% or tax increases. The Democrats want you to understand that we must be fiscally responsible and that tax cuts for the rich mean tax increases for the middle class unless we continue to finance our deficits with money from foreign governments.

The Republicans don’t want you to understand. They want you to be afraid and they want to you to make a fools choice. In November, that fools choice would be a vote for a Republican.

Hello all, I see we have some ignorant trolls on board again tonight. Posted by Chicago on August 20, 2006 at 11:52 PM

Not just tonight. All damn day long.

Evening Paul,
I see you have been doing your research on the web and are well informed on the facts (as usual).

Sheehan’s rally disrupts Rove reception
One woman arrested in scuffle with police

Updated: 12:02 a.m. ET Aug 20, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas - Chanting "Try Rove for treason," Cindy Sheehan and more than 50 other war protesters disrupted a reception before President Bush's top adviser Karl Rove spoke at a fundraiser Saturday.

One woman was arrested during a scuffle with police after Sheehan and the anti-war demonstrators rushed toward the closed doors and kept chanting loudly after the guests went into the dinner.

Rove was speaking to the Associated Republicans of Texas, and ticket prices started at $200. He was not in the Renaissance Hotel lobby during the reception.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

"I want him arrested. He planned the war that killed my son," Sheehan told officers guarding the door. Sheehan's oldest son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Police then ordered the group to leave, but some protesters had paid for rooms for the night. Those protesters went upstairs, including Sheehan.

Earlier, wearing shorts and T-shirts while guests of the lobby reception walked past in sequined dresses and expensive suits, anti-war demonstrators carried American flags and signs, including one that read "Check your conscience." A few protesters unfurled a large banner from a sixth-floor hotel balcony that read "Rove v. Truth: No Contest. Pink slip Rove."

Those at the reception sipped their drinks and largely ignored the protesters before they started chanting. One man looked at the group and said, "Go Bush!"

Earlier Saturday, the group of more than 70 gathered at the hotel entrance, carrying a large banner that read, "Rove: Guilty of crimes against humanity." Ann Wright, a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in protest over the war, yelled through a bullhorn, "Karl Rove, you are a criminal!"

After about 30 minutes, Austin police made them move onto grass at the edge of the property about a block away. Dozens remained later Saturday, holding signs as cars drove by, honking their horns.

Sheehan and the group left their campsite in Crawford near Bush's ranch, where they have held vigil the past two weeks, and drove about 100 miles south to Austin.

The war protest will continue until early September, although Bush's ranch 10-day ranch vacation ended last weekend. Sheehan's 26-day protest last August drew more than 10,000 people to her campsite in ditches off the rural road leading to the ranch, but she recently bought land near downtown for the group to camp on.

You are always kind, Chicago . . . :)

Domingo,
Hello, I wonder,
do you think these trolls are really so stupid that they believe the garbage they spew, or do you think they are paid to come in and disrupt things?

Posted by Paul on August 20, 2006 at 11:55 PM

it's all very reminisant of what wolfowitz in his new role at the world bank has in mind for indonesia...big money, big business...and the people who used to live there?...what do they matter?

Hi ho gentle Democrats! Sunday evening greeting from the Left Coast! Did I just read correctly that polls have Lieberman/ Loserman winning the election in November?!? How is that possible- it's staggering to me. What am I missing? Has CT gone nuts?

This how a country should be run.

For those who find prayer helpful,

Let us pray for peace.

We thank You, O Lord, for destroying the dividing wall of enmity and granting peace to those who seek Your mercy.

We pray, O Lord, for all those who suffer from acts of war.

We pray for your peace and your mercy in the midst of the great suffering that people are now inflicting on each other.

Grant us Your Peace.

Amen

Good Night, Friends & Democrats!

Good Evening,

anyone awake?

Big Dawg Dumps on Loserman

Posted by NotSoldonPelosi on August 21, 2006 at 12:13 AM

the way down south left coast as like, san diego?

Thats how wacked out you are, mom is a mainstream Democrat who doesn't buy into the nutty views of the leftwing. ANd just like with Lieberman, you can't win an election without her and you can't put up with her views. She represents the party you are screwing up (as in CT) She will be a Democrat long after you all drift off into the Communist party.

Posted by GusDaffodil at August 21, 2006 12:18 AM

Well if it isn't,

Sally "Stevie" Lloyd Thornburg from Hinkley MN.

aka LillyPad,

aka MarciaClarke,

aka Sally*Sally*Sally,

aka Whoopee,

aka Whimsquat,

aka CosmoTopper,

aka TecumsahBoinky,

aka Peaches,

aka GooberEinstein,

the banned republican troll who likes to pretend he is a female.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Remember that time when DPD said you were a deadbeat and you said you were going to sue the DNC.

Whatever happened to that lawsuit?

I was just wondering.

Good Night, Rev.

;p

Well I guess it's time to get some sleep.

night, night.

Yes Chicago, I think they believe it. Whether they get paid to spew it or not, I couldn't say.

Posted by Benji on August 21, 2006 at 12:18 AM

thanks benji, not at all surprising...
time for bed...g'night all.

I agree with everyone on this website that has said Joe Lieberman and other Republicans must be voted out of office.

1) Joe and the GOP have refused to support a strategic policy change in Iraq in spite of the fact the policies that Lieberman and the GOP have pursued in Iraq have not worked and are not working.

2) Joe and the GOP have refused to support a strategic policy change elsewhere in the Middle East in spite of the fact that policies Lieberman and the GOP have pursued elsewhere in the Middle East are not working.

3) Lieberman and the GOP passed the Bush/Cheney energy bill instead of adequately funding the development of alternative fuel sources that could end our dependence on oil from the Middle East (drilling in ANWR will not provide a long-term solution to this problem as that will only yield 1 million barrels of oil per day -- not nearly enough to address our energy needs).

4) Lieberman and the GOP have perpetuated tax loopholes that encourage companies to out-source manufacturing jobs. As a result of Lieberman and the GOP's tax and trade strategies, our manufacturing base has eroded. In the event of a large-scale war, we would not be able to produce enough weapons to arm ourselves. What do Joe and his Republican friends think we could do in such a situation?? Buy the necessary arms from the very countries with whom we might be at war? We would have to buy our bombs and our fuel from potential enemies. That doesn't seem like a very effective national security strategy to me. We should close tax loopholes that encourage outsourcing and fund alternative energy research.

5) The pay-gap between equally skilled/experienced/educated men and woman is still between 15 and 20 percent. Joe and his Republican friends haven't done anything about it. Woman should receive equal pay for equal work. I don't know why the GOP and Lieberman never talk about this.

If Lieberman is so good at reaching across the isle to work with Republicans to get things done, how come there are so many problems? How come Iraq is a bloody mess? How come the rate of terrorist attacks is increasing? How come the budget and trade deficits are still incredibly large? How come turmoil is on the rise in the Middle East? Why have we not done more to perfect an alternative source of energy? How come nothing has been done to effectively clamp down on political corruption? If Joe Lieberman is so effective, how come we have so many problems even though he has served 18 years in the United States Senate?

good night everyone

Here's that racist George Allen in a film about the Confederacy.

I don't know what dude's got about the Confederacy. He's from Los Angeles, California, but he keeps trying to pass himself off as a "good old boy".

Hi Kev, how the bar exam go!

Paul: is there some reason you can not para-phrase and post a link. It makes is hard on the ones here that dont have broadband.

500+ post is alot.

dk2,

sorry for the long post. I don't know how to post a link to a post like that. I'll have to start breaking posts up into shorter pieces.

dk2,

the bar exam went okay. It was very time intensive. I felt like I knew more information than I was able to express. On the other hand, I don't think it went poorly. It's hard to say whether I passed. I'll know in a couple of months.

FreedomOfSpeech, you being at work and all, are you allowed to have sound playing on your computer. I'm wondering if these links to these videos I'm posting are doing you any good?

Jeez, that faggot Benji (aka pee wee) has nothing to do but make a list of my various names.

I am not trying to fool anyone ya cornholer.

I have been instructed to not discuss that suit here, in fact I was instructed to stay off of this site but you will be hearing more fairly soon.

Whew! I was just reading back over the last posts from after I left earlier today,I find it interesting that some of the posts here resemble the same white supremist and anti-semitic propeganda that I read off these unsolicited faxes that are being sent around to local businesses in my area.I mean, they are literally quoting shet to the tee.

MomTN, Do you have a fax machine by any chance?

dk,

I'm off to sleep, but I'm going to try to hope on line more regularly as we get closer midterm elections.

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 12:35 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No.

;(

Kev your post are not long, look up the thread at some of the others.
To post a link - type your lead in info, then if you want to link add something like:
Link here
Next high light "link here"(or whatever you called it)
Next up above this comments box to the right you should see B I U and then the box that looks like a chain link. - click it and you get a mini-window - type your link there in the mini,

(you can cut and paste it also by opening a second browser window to the internet look up the page and cut and paste the url)

after typing click OK.

then post - your link should be there.

BoilerMan- no San Diego for me... I'm just outside San Fran. Go Giants!

I find it interesting that some of the posts here resemble the same white supremist and anti-semitic propeganda that I read off these unsolicited faxes that are being sent around to local businesses in my area.I mean, they are literally quoting shet to the tee.

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 12:37 AM

You need to stop reading PamB Paul and Jefro, most others here don't hate Jews.

Have a good night Kev. I will pray for a good outcome on your test. But I still believe you will do well.

I hope you can come back more here, we need some level headed post, some of these are off the deep end. IMO

Oh, and Domingo too.

You need to stop reading PamB Paul and Jefro, most others here don't hate Jews.

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 12:45 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trust me.I know who's real and who's a fake racist troll.

Don't I "Mom" LOL

I have a good memory.

Freaks are people who are anti-establishment anti-Christian anti-marriage anti-everything their parents were...you know the people who smoke pot

Posted by MominTN on August 20, 2006 at 09:55 PM

What about people who make comments like,oh I don't know.Like this?

I'm giving up on this party. As long as they have the minorities and the Kennedys calling the shots we will lose. There is no desire in America to become North Mexico. Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:41 PM

Or what about this.Would freaks say something like this>?

I can't believe the Democratic party would allow your filth on their website. I'm emailing them now. And I thought the democraticunderground was the slime of the earth. Your language puts you on par for a race to the bottom. I guess the freedom in your name is just another word for "nothing left to lose".

Posted by MominTN on August 18, 2006 at 09:52 AM

Or maybe this.

If I were black, I'd never vote for Sheila Jackson again.

Posted by MominTN on August 18, 2006 at 12:31 AM

Oh, how about this one,

Too long to cut and paste.

A promise abviously unkept.Typical Republican

I am writing Kennedy now.

Tomorrow I'm going to find a new party to blog with.

Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:54 PM

Yeah,this one has "FREAK" written all over it.

I just hate Kennedy for this immigration bill because it isn't what America wants and it's losing us to more years of subjugation by the Republicans. I think his brain is burned up. I think other people are writing the bills and he is too old to realize what is happening. He probably has illegals writing his bills.

Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:45 PM

Oh yeah,this one is totally freakish

Is Kennedy ever going to retire? Does he realize how much he is hurting this country?

Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:33 PM

You call this mainstream DEMOCRAT?

The Dems are going to lose. And you can just go ahead now and write Kennedy and the rest, because no American is going to vote for a Dem who agrees with the Senate bill.

Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:28 PM

TALK ABOUT A FREAK!

GusDaffodil, what you talk'in about, ya neo-Nazi some-a-bitch?

I am writing Kennedy now.
Tomorrow I'm going to find a new party to blog with.

Posted by MominTN on August 17, 2006 at 11:54 PM

TODAY IS AUGUST 21ST,SO,WHEN EXACTLY WE'RE YOU PLANNING ON HEADING OUT THERE MISSY MOMinDENIAL?

I find it interesting that some of the posts here resemble the same white supremist and anti-semitic propeganda that I read off these unsolicited faxes that are being sent around to local businesses in my area.I mean, they are literally quoting shet to the tee. Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 12:37 AM

It all just seems like the "Driftwood gang" all over again to me. Same subjects. Same typing speed. Same number of hours blogging.

Here is where "mominTN" is getting all his stuff.

Ugliness on Parade: A dive through Free Republic

Yea, whatever....it's about time that people stood up for their concern against those "religion of peace" members. It's their own fault...let's hope it happens more often.

If they don't like it, they should take it up with their local Imam, who is advocating terrorism.

Islam delenda est

I rather be a live racist then a dead liberal

Unpleasant enough to fly with Islamofascists, but what of those who in our dark times keep frightening beards, and yammer away in Arabic? On a plane?

It would take them under one minute to shave their bears. To act live civilized human beings should require no extra burden on their part.
Given our recent history, people everywhere should give extra attention to people who harbor an unusual attraction to goats, or clad their women in army surplus tents.

I may be an intolerant bigot, but I'm not gonna be a sacrifice to satanallah!

If I have to drive in certain areas of Baltimore, It's common sense to have my doors locked and my confederate flag furled. If I get on a plane loaded with Muslims, I don't need to to be told to stash my Star of David for the duration.
If I'm an African American and I really don't like being pulled over by the cops all the time, maybe I'll ditch the gangster clothes, subwoofer,gold teeth & chains,car, dope,weapons and expired plates. And say "Sir".
If I'm a Muslim and I insist on wearing a beard and a diaper on my head while I read the Koran out loud, perhaps I shouldn't board an EL AL jet.

Arabs should be forced to fly in bomb-proof compartments. In the company of pigs.

Some of you folks may live in areas where you work and play with muzlims...I don't...

I'm afraid if I walked onto a plane and saw someone who appeared to be muzlim, I'd get right back off...

A few weeks ago, I was at one of the local 'box' stores...This person comes walking thru the parking lot...He's talking on a cell phone and he's got what must be a bedspread wrapped around his head...Looked like a large beehive...
I said to my wife (within earshot of this guy), hey, there there's one of them rag heads...He didn't turn around and look...I was surprised... The parking lot was full of people and it seemed everone stopped, turned and stared as this guy went into the store... You could feel and 'see' the tension...

Dailykos

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 01:21 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yep.You noticed that shet too? See, when you're up late and the Blog is slow,you have the opportunity to go back and read these posts, study them and see the similarities and the little coincidences that others don't notice.I can even tell that the "Gina" and "MoMinDenial" charachtures seem to be posting at the same times on the same days.I also notice that Mom has never used the word "WE,US or OUR" when posting about our Democratic Party.Also,she continues to assert that we are going to lose and has an obsession with blaming this on minorites and the Kennedys.She can't even hide her hatred for the Latino Community.I wonder if she's really from New Hampshire.LOL

TODAY IS AUGUST 21ST,SO,WHEN EXACTLY WE'RE YOU PLANNING ON HEADING OUT THERE MISSY MOMinDENIAL? Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority

I remember when it seemed like a big deal that the year 2000 millenium was coming up. I can hardly believe that six and a half years have gone by already and these ignorant hateful fools haven't changed a bit.

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 01:31 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh yeah,that's got MOMinDenial written all over it.The next time she posts here, whether under that user or another,once she is recognized, we should provide her a link to the Free Republic.She will be in heaven.LOL.

And every web-site it links to, (I don't think it's a female), is a Right Wing web-site.

And every web-site it links to, (I don't think it's a female), is a Right Wing web-site.

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 01:45 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well,it sounds like a fan of "CULTer" and "Mockin".He He.Male or female,we know it's a right-wing troll.

Bush and Blair BFF? Not so much.

Blair 'feels betrayed by Bush on Lebanon'

The alliance between George Bush and Tony Blair is in danger after it was revealed that the Prime Minister believes the President has 'let him down badly' over the Middle East crisis.

A senior Downing Street source said that, privately, Mr Blair broadly agrees with John Prescott, who said Mr Bush's record on the issue was 'crap'.

The source said: "We all feel badly let down by Bush. We thought we had persuaded him to take the Israel-Palestine situation seriously, but we were wrong. How can anyone have faith in a man of such low intellect?"

The disclosure comes ahead of a mini recall of Parliament to allow MPs to vent their fury over Mr Blair's handling of Israel's war with Hezbollah and whether the recent terror plot in Britain was affected by his role in the Iraq war.

Foreign Affairs Minister Kim Howells, who has criticised Israeli attacks on women and children, is to be summoned before an emergency meeting next month of the Labour-dominated Commons foreign affairs select committee.

Whot A Bloody Pitty, I do say.;p

Blair 'feels betrayed by Bush on Lebanon'

Blair always says that. I wouldn't believe a word he says.

EWW ALERT! EEW ALERT! EEW ALERT! EEW ALERT!

Brainwashed and Uneducated Right-Wing Racist Polygamists on the March Demanding the Right to Rape and Molest their own Children as well as disobey the Law.....

Let's not forget that their leader is none other than one of F.B.I.'s MOST Wanted Fugitives, Warren Jeffs.This cult leader has married off small nine year old girls to his nasty fat nasty pervert relatives all in the name of Jesus Christ.He has also, raped many of his own daughters as well as other family members.Also, these Mormon Extremists , yeah I said it, preach that the real Semitic Jews are not really the Jews,but that White People are the true and only chosen of God.They teach that Blacks,as well as all other races,are beasts and untamed animals.They teach that God wants them to have Plural Marriages which is against the law.They have been quiet for some time now,but have emerged into the POLITICAL Arena.There are already Republican Members of Congress who support legalizing their ungodly lifestyles.These freaks are going to be voting as well.I bet MOMinDenial is one of them.I wonder why this is so quiet in the Mainstream Media except for CNN.I wonder why the Fake Christian Conservative Republicans arent screaming about how this jeapordizes the "family unit" I wonder why the Republicans oppose Gay Marriage and Adoption by people who are going to love and protect the unwanted children, yet, sit silently while White Morman Christian Polygamists rape their children and throw the boys out of the community so the old men in the CULT can have more little girls to rape.I wonder why Republicans are so sick and warped in condoning this with their silence.

Trust me.I know who's real and who's a fake racist troll.

Don't I "Mom" LOL

I have a good memory.

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 12:55 AM

Everything is racism to liberal Negroes.

Warren Jeffs is a Democrat he was campaign manager for Woodrow Mcbride the Democrat candidate for the house of Representatives from his district in Utah. Woodrow lost.

Everything is racism to liberal Negroes.

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 02:57 AM

"Uh yessir,iz uh reckons it iz."

Come back when you realize this is August 21st 2006 and not August 21st 1936,Okay maggot?

GusDaffodil thinks it's OK for Republicans to rape little girls, right GusDaffodil? First he told me well they weren't "well known Republicans", so who cares? Then he told me, "when the girls reach puberty, they're ready for sex so it's OK". Then when I kept after him, he lashed out and said, "well Clinton did it too!" What other excuses do you have up your sleeve for child rape, GusDaffodil?

TALK ABOUT A FREAK!

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 01:13 AM

MominTN did not say a single thing. that you quoted, that is outside the mainstream of the Democrat party.

Liberals in general are out of touch with the American people. Not just liberal Negroes.

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 03:10 AM

Feel free make up quotes that I did not say. When my posts are deleted, the scholars who no doubt study this blog for strategy ideas, will say "This Domingo mofo is an idiot - he has an imaginery friend name Gus Daffodil.

Feel free make up quotes that I did not say. When my posts are deleted

That's the B.S. you've been pulling for almost three years. You say some crap, then when it gets deleted, you deny you ever said it. You said it sucka, quit lying.

OK, lets do it this and start from the begining, GusDaffodil. What do you think of all those Republican child molesters?

Warren Jeffs is a Democrat he was campaign manager for Woodrow Mcbride the Democrat candidate for the house of Representatives from his district in Utah. Woodrow lost.

What a retarded fool you are.The Cult,up untill this point, has had absolutly no political affiliation and has never campaigned.You are the most retarded troll yet.This Mormon Cult is just NOW entering into the Political Arena and they fit in well with the Republican Party IDEOLOGY!

BTW! All the states that are harboring the Polygamits Cult just so happen to be BLOOD SHOT RED STATES!

Hmmmm.I wonder why that is.

STOP REPUBLICAN PEDOPHILIA

Your full of crap Domingo,/I>

"My" full of crap? You know, I don't think you're as smart as you keep on claiming to be.

Hey,you lying maggot.Where's your proof that there even is such a person as Woodrow Mcbride(D-Ut)candidate running for the House of Rep ? I can make up names too,but then again ,I'm a Democrat and it's hard to sway away from the facts.So,where's the link? News clips, old Campaign websites, anything.

You pathectic lying piece of crap.

Now quit playing your damn word games and tell me what you think of this.

Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.

Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.

Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.

Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.

Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.

way, way, more

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 03:48 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is no such person,you idiot.You have not one fact to back up what you post.Not a single one.Wait a second, OMG! Domingo! run! it's John Mark Karr! Somehow, he got a hold of a computer and he's imagining shet again.

AWWWWWWWWWW1

he's imagining shet again

I know FreedomOfSpeech. He's even imagining he won every argument he ever had. He's a legend in his own mind.

I don't post links here to prove a point. You all just attack my sources. You attack the messenger. So fogetaboutit. Ya brilliant smart progresseive woman who just caught me in a lie.A woman whom I cannot compete with you sassy intellegent godess,you .

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 03:57 AM

Thanks for the compliment,tard.

Can I have an answer about the Republican child molesters at least sometime tonight? Or are you having a hard time thinking about it?

My mother was Mormon. My brother and sisters still are.....Mormons control the legislature in Utah and plural marriage is illegal there. I dont know what the polygamist criminals teach but I got good grades in Mormon seminary and I never heard about white jews or humans being animals til I read the post here....
I wonder if this is how an american muslim feels

Domingo,

Now I understand why Mom-in-Denial was so upset at the regulars here who posted links to back up their arguments.It makes it harder for them to just post bull shet and get away with it unnoticed.

FreedomOfSpeech, you'll notice no matter how much you hassle him, he just won't say child molestation is bad. That's exactly what he did the last time we had this conversation that a little while ago he tried to claim never occurred.

Posted by heathenjohn on August 21, 2006 at 04:07 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PREPARE TO BE ENLIGHTENED.

Warren jeffs On Race

"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, or rude and filthy, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits; wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is usually bestowed upon mankind."
"So I give you this lesson on the black race that you can understand its full effects as far as we are able to comprehend. And that we must beware – if we are for the prophet, the priesthood – we will come out of the world and leave off their dress, their music, their styles, their fashions; the way they think, what they do, because you can trace back and see a connection with immoral, filthy people."

"It was necessary that the Devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God. So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God.

"So the Negro race has continued, and today is the day of the Negro as far as the world is concerned. They have influenced the generations of time; they have mixed their blood with many peoples, until there are many peoples not able to hold the priesthood. …

"And the lesson is, if anyone mingles their seed, their bloodline, with the seed of Cain, the Negro, they also would lose all rights and priesthood blessings."

Would you like some more? I bet you would.You love your Mormon Religion Don't ya!

PEACE, love an hippie beads !!!! yall dont have a cardiac while blogging OK ???
nite
john

Domingo,

We both know it's the same stupid fool changing his user.What a joke.

1 I am not Mormon
2 niether is Warren Jeffs

PEACE, love an hippie beads !!!! yall dont have a cardiac while blogging OK ???
nite
john

Posted by heathenjohn on August 21, 2006 at 04:17 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall, either set you free or run you off.

LOL.

There's a lot of Mormons in Navada I run into when I go over there. I know they all don't think like those cult ones do. We can't blame the ones who didn't do anything wrong because of the ones who did. That's the same thing I've been trying to say about the Muslims and the Jews and the other (good) Christians. It works the same way with race. Can't say all whites are bad because "some" are neo-Nazis or in the KKK, or you can't say all blacks are bad for this or that reason. That sounds a lot different than that crap from freepers up above, don't it?

This is the Anti Spin, Anti Right-Wing Propeganda and especially Anti Republican Liars Blog.

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 04:29 AM

I'm glad you finally figure it out.

;)

He has to change his name because they keep canceling his account. He's not trying to hide. The problem is, he can sign on again within minutes with a brand new name. Over at Dailykos they make you wait 24 hours before you can post when you open an account. So over there, when a troll gets deleted after a few minutes, they have to wait 24 hours just to get deleted within minutes again the following day. It usually doesn't take long for them to give up. This sicko here is taking advantage of a weakness in our system.

Posted by Domingo on August 21, 2006 at 04:31 AM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yep.I don't let their false accusations bother me because they are just a confirmation of how hypocritical they are.It's okay for them to lump everyone into the same group and post negetive comments about them , but if you cast White American FAKE Christians (most of the trolls are)in the same light and treat them the same way,they get all offened.These same hypocrites want us to racially profile Muslim "looking" men at the airports.These same people want to demand that "Hispanics" learn english so that they can tell the difference between the legals and the illegals I guess.These same people say they are leaving the Democratic Party because they don't like the fact that Blacks are treated as "eguals" and not "minorities".These are the same people who claim the Jews own too much of the American Corporations.They are the ultimate of hypocrites.

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 04:29 AM

Try telling that crap top my friends.They'll get a kick out of it.They can use a good joke.

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 02:55 AM

the following is cut and pasted directly from the link provided in the above post

First brought to Utah by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1846, polygamy was abandoned by Mormons as a condition of statehood in 1890. The church now excommunicates members found to be practicing plural marriage. It also disavows those who call themselves "fundamentalist Mormons," although most Utah-based polygamists identify themselves with those terms.

now I go bye bye ( unless I lurk ) :o)

Jewish people used to post here (Lynn Miller Nachman) no more. Mormons used to post here (Eli Bake) no more though - too much bigotry and hate I guess.

Well you guessed wrong. They said they coundn't stand the "troll problem" over here. You're the one who ran them out, scum-bag.

Posted by heathenjohn

MOMORNISN is NOT I repeat NOT Christianity.It is a religious CULT.

Latter Day Shets

Mormons

Church of Jesus Christ
The Bible specificaly warns,

"Though I or an ANGLE from HEAVEN come to you preaching ANY OTHER GOSPEL than that which ye have already heard,LET THEM BE ACCURSED!"

Paul the Apostle
I don't care what you call it.It's a damn cult to every Christian Denomination nationwide.

The teaching has never changed.The practice of polygamy has,in some sects, but they haven't denounced the racism.They haven't denounced the "levels" that you go through to get to the Priesthood.They haven't denounced the teaching that that only White people are allowed to be a High Priest and everyone else is on lower levels based on their race.I see no DENUNCIATION of that crap.

Posted by GusDaffodil on August 21, 2006 at 05:17 AM

Are you really 60 years old. If you are that's pathetic.

The embarrassing truth
about Mormonism

I'm not going to post the racist texts from the Book of Mormon because you get a hard on when you read such vile racists beliefs.It's right there in that link.You can read for yourself. As for the other point,read the snip below and you'll see exactly why the Mormons "preach to Blacks".

snip:

At one stage of the interview, the American Leroy Turner became visibly upset by my questions. As the blood rushed to his face and reddened his skin, he leaned forward in his swivel chair and said, 'I don't like the, the direction. which this is going. I am not going along with this. I am going to terminate the interview.'

Flustered, he eased back in his chair, removed his fixed stare at me, then silently sucked in a gulp of air as the interview continued.
We are told that on June 8, 1978, it was 'revealed' to the then president, Spencer Kimball, that people of colour could now gain entry into the priesthood. According to the church, Kimball spent many long hours petitioning God, begging him to give worthy black people the priesthood. God finally relented.

Even in this 'revelation', God is not given the glory- instead it is the wisdom and the prayers of Kimball which tipped the balance. But what was the true story behind this?

In 1978 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was under increasing pressure by the US government to end its racist doctrine and teachings or lose its tax-free status. Additionally, the church leadership saw the expansion in countries such as Brazil to be one big embarrassment to them.

Add to that the fact that not only black athletic teams were refusing to compete with teams from the racist Brigham Young University and the die was cast. Assuming that poor and ignorant black people in large populations like Brazil were joining the church, what would it do when some of the smarter ones decided to ask the unspeakable?

An extract from a 1978 interview sheds more light on the 'revelation,' which was nothing more than a socio-political sleight-of-hand brought on by the realities of the times, including especially the church's need to justify black populations tithing (10% of income) to the church as requirement for membership in good standing.

Isn't it odd that The Mormons only get revelations when the Supreme Court hands down a ruling or when Congress passes legislation?

Based on the history of the Mormon Religion, what they did to both my Native American and Black Ancestors,and the fact that they have not denounced those teachingings found in the Book of Mormon,it is my personal opinion that all and any form of Mormonism is racist and a discrace to the Message of the "Real" Jesus Christ;the DARK skinned Jewish Jesus Christ who died on the cross.The sole teachings and fake scriptures found in the Book of Mormon are utter and complete BLASPHEMY against God! The Mormon's,whatever sect they are in, have not denounced the Book of Mormon.They still use it till this very day and they still believe in their hearts what's written in them.I understand that some Democrats are Mormon and that one of them is in a very high position within the Democratic Party, but anyone who reads the Book of Mormon and thinks I'm going to accept those racists beliefs just because a top Democrat is one of them,is out of their mind.So bring on the critizsm and the rebuttals,I don't care.As a matter of fact,I'm curious to find out just who would criticize me after knowing what's written in that racist book.

One more thing to reiterate here.

Let me make this very clear for all you stupid Republicans out there.I have no problem supporting Sen. Reid as a member of congress.I have no problem with the fact that he's Minority (soon to be Majority)Leader.It doesn't bother me because as a Progressive Democrat,I keep POLITICS and FAITH separate.So,Sen. Reid can worship jellie beans for all I care so long as he keeps it off the Floor of the Senate.If he tried to introduce legislation that gives those Incest Babies the right to have fifty mommas and those perverts the right to rape their children, then I will have a serious problem with it.So far,Sen Reid has not tried to bring his religion to the Floor of the Senate and that's why I still respect him.However,it needs to be made very clear that any attempt made by the senator, or anyone else in Congress for that matter,to legalize Polygamy in the United States, will be met with fierce oppostition.That's all I'm saying.I think that's fair.

wow this is a long thread!

CNN POLL RESULTS.

The worst of worst on both sides.

Who would get your vote for president?

Sen. Hillary Clinton 51% 11677 votes

Sen. John McCain 49% 11291 votes

Total: 22968 votes

At least, ours won.I guess.

Hi gregg

No.It's three in a row.I got "passionate" about an issue.

LOL

Gregg,

Go here.

Good Morning, Friends & Democrats!

Gee, the trolls were frantic last night. LOL

Things must be getting better for liberals today.

Hope you all have a nice day.

Morning FOS and gregg,

Now I know why I hate senator hatch. I thought it was his utter disregard of Jesus' teachings in his senate votes but now I know that he is a racist SOB.

He needs to be voted out this November.

Hi, Freedom, GregG!

:)

Posted by Johnedwrd on August 21, 2006 at 07:28 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is Sen. Hatch one of them?

Morning, JohnEdward

Hi Paul.

;)

Is Sen. Hatch one of them?

Posted by FreedomOfSpeechForProgressiveMajority on August 21, 2006 at 07:30 AM

I believe he is a mormon.

good morning

gregg, this one's for you, from DK at Josh Marshall's TPM:

Pat Buchanan coughs up another xenophobic hairball, while anti-immigration counter-demonstraters in Riverside, N.J., show their true colors:

Opponents of a local law cracking down on illegal immigrants clashed on Sunday with residents chanting "go home" as both sides proclaimed their loyalty to the United States.

An estimated 300 to 400 people gathered outside the town hall to protest a recently passed ordinance that bans hiring or renting to illegal immigrants, who are accused of overburdening local services such as schools and hospitals without paying taxes.

The protesters, representing the largely Brazilian immigrant community of Riverside, were heckled by about 500 counter-demonstrators kept at bay by police on the other side of the town's main intersection.

As immigration supporters accused the town's council of racism, opponents chanted "USA, USA" and waved placards saying "Scram" and "Stop Illegal Immigration." A passing pickup truck drew loud cheers by flying a Confederate flag with the motto "The South Will Rise Again."

I like that last part. The South will rise again--in New Jersey?

Update: Apparently there was a secret pact between New Jersey and the Confederacy heretofore unknown to historians. More here.

I am beginning the think that a large part of the congress is a stinking cesspool of corruption and hate for the American people.

VOTE THEM OUT!!!!!!

we've quietly moved to an undisclosed location

Hi Fade,

One of these days that "Flag" is going to be outlawed.We should have a Law that prohibits that .......nevermind.They'll just get another one and pay ommage (sp) to that.

;|

Hi Johnedward & Paul,

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

NEARLY NEW RECYCLED THREAD OVER HERE

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

OPEN THREAD HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE THREAD TITLED "

DNC FALL MEETING VIDEOS". ITS THE THIRD THREAD DOWN FROM THE TOP.