LowerCaseRepublican

Nah, they just engineered the Atlanta Olympic bombing, murder doctors outside their clinics, the woman who wanted to sacrifice her kids to Jesus recently, send fake anthrax letters to abortion clinics, etc... They preach the same intolerance in the name of Invisible Uber-Daddy: Take Jerry Falwell "I believe we must blow [the terrorists] away in the name of the Lord" in the same way that Falwell and the rest of his ilk pervert a religion for to justify their own intolerance and violence.

It wasn't policies of appeasement towards N. Korea -- it was the US having nukes targeted at them that made them want to create nukes. United Press Int'l broke the story a couple months ago about that. http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/2004...55605-6954r.htm You know, come to think of it, as long as you're trying to protect S. Korea, given the situation as it stands now, there are only two choices. 1. Disarm and remove all trace of American presence in the region. Renounce any responsibility for protecting South Korea. 2. Nuke those Northern bastards right now. Don't pass go, don't collect $200, right frickin' now. And, for God's sake, make damn sure none of them are left alive, because that can become a problem down the road (when they repopulate the region and decide they have a problem with you wiping out their ancestors and all). This option would have the added bonus effect of giving the rest of the world a demonstration that the US is still willing, in this day and age, to use these weapons against anyone, at any time, for any reason, or come to think of it, for no reason at all.

I don't doubt there have been and it's completely asinine for both sides to have officials be vocal supporters of one candidate. Why not then have a Libertarian or a Green party member etc. do the election stuff since we both know that those parties have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning the election.

I was on antiwar.com and found this: Poor Kevin Sites. All his war reporting in Kosovo and Afghanistan and Iraq, and the fact that he's embedded in the most dangerous place in Iraq isn't enough to save him from Neo-cons on Auto Smear. As with the Abu Ghraib torture photos, the problem for the pro-war With Us Or Against Us crowd isn't the act that horrifies the world, it's the fact that the pictures came out. On FreeRepublic.com, they had this to say about Mr. Sites *"Journalists" like this should be treated as ''enemy combatants." *No. They are traitors and should be hung. *OK, you're a Marine searching enemy bodies in a mosque. One of the bodies is starting to move and there is a reporter filming in the room. You only have two rounds left. Quick! What do you do! Shoot the reporter twice.... *It would be fitting to see him become the next "Salman Rushdie". *72 Virgins to you mother f***er! You media f***s who want to burn those Marines are not worth the sweat off my......just go f*** yourself! *Would it be a threat to suggest that mister sites be left in the next Mosque with a billet [sic] in his head? *[beneath a photo of Sites] Kevin Sites - - Next Friendly-Fire Victim Then these gems from Little Green Footballs *Journalists should wear bright orange clothes so the murdering terrorists can see who they don't need to shoot at but can if they want. *I just thought, there are very many Marines in California once Kevin Sites returns home. Just a thought. *The Marine in this situation deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. *Note to Marines: save at least one round for embedded terrorist sympathizers. *"Oops, sorry, I was aiming at the rat behind your head and about to eat at your eyeballs. Damn, I wish I had trained harder during shooting practice. Third time this week I've missed a friggin' rat." *If I were in a Marine squad, the first thing I would do is make sure the embedded "reporter" and "cameraman" somehow got "lost". Failing that I'd make sure that the camera was damaged by "enemy" fire. *May be this smug elitist "blue stater", POS, will catch a live grenade....to save the life of a soldier, of course.....

I don't mean to hijack the convo here but why not just call them 'bombers' because I'd figure homicide would be part and parcel of bombing?

Exit polls were right every year until 2000 with the problems of DBT Choicepoint and voter purges. Katherine Harris was the head of the elections and also a vocal Bush campaigner in FL (conflict of interest much?) In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania says: "As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one. 250 MILLION to ONE. He concludes the paper with this: "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election’s unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate." http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf

Schools, health care and all sorts of social programs are over-rated. All Hail the Military Industrial Complex!

That was part of the billions that went to Saddam as compensation to Palestinian families for suicide bombings. And the reason it's not covered is because it's what's known as "spinach" in the media (I'm reading a book about media ownership right now and the section happens to just be talking about this sort of stuff) It is filled with information but having people on who actually know what they are talking about and discussing it does not interest the viewers (just like most people don't like spinach) They instead go for "pudding" stories that increase ad revenue, ratings and involve pundits yelling at each other and acting like dumbasses.

I was just watching former head of the UN Oil for Food program Denis Halliday who said that billions of what went to Saddam in this program from Turkey, Jordan and a couple other countries I can't remember the names of off the top of my head was known to the US and was engineered by Washington as compensation due to the negative impact on trade with those countries and Iraq. Not all the countries involved but the US helped set up some of them.

Ah LOL. But this does burn my ass...fleecing taxpayers out of $100,000 for their own personal gain...and how does he run in Pennsylvania as a senator when he doesn't technically live in the state?

If McDonald's has the parts of 1,000+ different cows in one of their patties, I can only wonder how many are in this thing.

This is just like the justification of what went on at Abu Ghraib that Rumsfeld gave cuz hey, we're not beheading people. Guerrilla warfare isn't pretty but then again neither is neo-conservative ideology that perverted the Truth and got us involved in this mess in the first place. It never fails that those who claim most vocally to support our troops are also the most hell bent on keeping them in harm's way -- be it Vietnam, Gulf War I, Gulf War II etc. In August 2002, the first public hints of a new U.S. secret counterintelligence group -- the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) -- emerged from a report of the Defense Science Board (DSB), a Pentagon advisory group, and found its way into daylight. Its purpose is to "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception". The PPOG's role is to manufacture the terrorism that is to be combatted. They do this by carrying out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces. Does it scare the s*** out of anybody else that the US government is trying to get terrorist attacks to happen and hopefully, just hopefully they'll be able to stop it?

Nuke the AP covered the story. http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/1104/187355.html http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/1-1...004-399535.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138485,00.html I looked for a while and found nothing that said it was a fake.

http://rittenhouse.blogspot.com/2004/11/sm...picking-up.html Sen. Rick Santorum ®, Pennsylvania's biggest embarrassment in the U.S. Senate, though only by a hair, continues to draw scrutiny for his unconventional use of local taxes to pay for the unconventional education of his children. According to the Associated Press ("Paying for Santorums' School Costs Questioned," by Jennifer C. Yates), Sen. Santorum in 1997 bought a two-bedroom house in Penn Hills, a small town east of Pittsburgh, for $87,800. Right off the bat that simple statement should raise eyebrows. As you know, Sen. Santorum has a large family: a wife and six children. It's a hard fact to miss given the senator mentions his family at every opportunity and they often travel together around the state. Now, as someone from a large family myself, I can assure you that a two-bedroom home is too small a space to properly raise six children. (I'm one of 10 children; the house in which I spent most of my childhood had eight bedrooms. A few more rooms, while not necessary, would have been nice.) The question some in Penn Hills have raised is not whether Sen. Santorum is adequately caring for his progeny, but rather whether he's sticking his neighbors with the hefty tab associated with the kids' private, home- and road-based education. You see, since 1997 the Penn Hills school district has paid $100,000 for the senator's children to "attend" the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, an internet-based educational outfit. The crux of the matter is that it's doubtful the Santorums ever -- or ever planned -- to live in the town whose taxpayers are paying his tuition bills. According to the A.P., "Santorum's spokeswoman, Christine Shott, said she did not know whether the senator and his wife, who have six children, had ever stayed in the two-bedroom house they own in Penn Hills." In the same article Shott says she doesn't know and can't comment on whether the family ever stayed at the home or rented it out. More likely, of course, the Santorum family lives in another house entirely: a home in Leesburg, Va., assessed at $757,000 this year. The Santorums pay taxes in both locales, but Pennsylvania law requires the school district in which a student lives to pay the tuition charged by cyber charter schools. Virginia makes no such requirement. So Sen. Santorum has himself a pretty good deal here: Pay the property taxes on a modest, forgotten little Pennsylvania house and let others worry about the cost of the "free-market" choice he's made for his children's education. Penn Hills school board member Erin Vecchio has asked school superintendent Patricia Gennari to conduct a formal review this week.

If we end disproportionate tax-payer funded foreign aid to the nations then the problem of them getting tons of weapons would be greatly reduced. As Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) recently stated: "We conveniently forget, however, that American tax dollars militarized the entire region in the first place. We give Israel about $3 billion each year, but we also give Egypt $2 billion. Most other Middle East countries get money too, some of which ends up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Both sides have far more military weapons as a result. Talk about adding fuel to the fire! Our foolish and unconstitutional foreign aid has produced more violence, not less...This illustrates perfectly the inherent problem with foreign aid: once we give money to one country, we have to give it to all the rest or risk making enemies. This is especially true in the Middle East and other strife-torn regions, where our financial support for one side is seen as an act of aggression by the other. Just as our money never makes Israel secure, it doesn't buy us any true friends elsewhere in the region. On the contrary, many Muslims hate the United States despite the billions we give to their governments. It is time to challenge the notion that it is our job to broker peace in the Middle East and every other troubled region across the globe. America can and should use every diplomatic means at our disposal to end the violence in the West Bank, but we should draw the line at any further entanglement." http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3705 is a really good article about why we are losing the war on terror with a testimonial from who used to be the head of the CIA department on bin Laden (he "resigned" in this most recent purge of the CIA) Michael Scheuer, the agent being quoted said: "As I complete this book, U.S., British, and other coalition forces are trying to govern apparently ungovernable postwar states in Afghanistan and Iraq, while simultaneously fighting growing Islamist insurgencies in each – a state of affairs our leaders call victory. In conducting these activities, and the conventional military campaigns preceding them, U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally." You can say that bin Laden is a sadistic sonofab**** for what he does -- but he does have a game plan and the entire notion being put forth by certain sectors of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative/conservative debate that OBL did all this because "he hates freedom" isn't necessarily true. I'm not saying cut diplomatic ties with Israel but the 100% unconditional support is something that is a definite fuel for what goes on in the Middle East. If we remove ourselves from the situation, it makes it much harder for terrorists to recruit and in that way, their movement is strangled because it can never get off the ground. Plus, nations that are just as free as us but have not wrought violence have not been attacked -- a point Scheuer makes in his book "Imperial Hubris". I'd elaborate more but this is already too damn long and I wanna go eat a snack.

http://www.flexyourrights.org/scenario/trafficstop.html Flex Your Rights is a great resource -- had them on campus a few times discussing stuff about liberties you have with the police. Should give you lots of information there. And you can always get more info about your state's laws from the ACLU: http://www.acluhawaii.org/ They have no legal right to search you unless they see something incriminating in plain view, if you have been part of a crime that they suspect or if they have probable cause. If they don't have that, you are purely within your rights of the 4th amendment to deny them consent of a search.

Correct -- much of the venom from people that know their ass from a hole in the ground like the anti-war right and some leftists has been that the buildup to this war was so poor and proved that it was not in our interests to do. That's why there is most of the opposition to the war -- not because anti-war people didn't want to alleviate what was going on Iraq but because the groundwork for the war was based on so much BS and was quite antithetical to Bush in 2000 saying that he would not use soldiers for nation building, etc.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20...-fallujah_x.htm

The Biggest Loser -- If you haven't seen it, it's essentially where diet, exercise and eating right has been turned into a game show with overweight people on two teams trying to work out so hard and eat right so their team can lose more weight than the other. Losing team has to eliminate a team member. Last person in game wins $250,000. Goddamn I hate that show.

It's official. The resignation was accepted and Ashcroft is out. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6446686/ -- The resignation letter It's a good day for civil liberties.

Technically,with the Cabinet they're all supposed to resign as a courtesy just in case Bush wants any of them out of office so they don't get fired.

PA, I love the "How dare you be intolerant!" followed by a bunch of intolerant drivel.

There is growing data in the scientific community showing that homosexuality is genetic. Take for instance the difference in certain brain structures -- parts of the brain related to the promotion of testosterone are smaller in homosexual men compared to that of heterosexual men. Scientists at UCLA have discovered 54 genes in mice which suggest that homosexuality may not be a choice as sexual identity is hard-wired into the brain before birth. There is growing evidence that proves this claim. So it is very possible that it is hardwired like a woman will be born a woman.

PA, I didn't call you a bigot. I said certain sectors of the Christian Right are bigots and they bastardize an otherwise very worthwhile religion by pruning out certain parts that they want to believe. I don't see Bush and his cohorts going around promoting the part of the Bible that says it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man getting into Heaven, do you?

So using the logic of the "They'll get equal rights and that will be a slippery slope for other things" then we shouldn't have given blacks the civil rights movement and we shouldn't have given women the right to vote etc. I'm just taking this logic to it's full extension.