LowerCaseRepublican

That article didn't seem to be bipartisan but more right wing. As for what I would have done as a critic of Bush/Clinton and 9/11: I wouldn't have signed into existence executive order W199I like Clinton and Bush did. It effectively stopped FBI investigation into possible terrorist threats. This author doesn't take into account a lot of the different things we already knew: 1) hijacking of airplanes to be used as bombs against the WTC, CIA Headquarters, White House and Pentagon was common knowledge since the early 90s. 2) http://www.prisonplanet.com/911.html Check out the articles of FBI agents complaining about roadblocks to even investigating the bin Laden family and possible terrorist threats in the US due to the FBI blocking them. 3) Ashcroft stopped flying commercial flights during the summer of 2001, citing an acute security risk as the reason. 4) Mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown was set to fly into New York on the morning of September 11. However, he got a call from what he described as his 'airport security' late September 10th advising against flying due to a security threat. Brown awoke on September 11th to scenes of the WTC on fire and obviously his flight was cancelled. Who exactly warned Mayor Willie Brown and why didn't the people on the hijacked planes get the same warning? Brown refuses to comment any further on the subject. There is a lot of stuff related to 9/11 than the shills of the right and left wing are not telling. At best, it was a huge intelligence failure and grand f***up. At worst, it was a calculated plan.

I don't have a site on him yet. I am gonna work on a piece about him. He's a Republican-Libertarian Congressman from Texas. He stands behind a lot of the traditional conservative viewpoints like little federal government, lots of personal freedoms, military isolationism except for provocation, fiscal responsibility etc. His official site is http://www.house.gov/paul/ He writes pretty regularly for a Libertarian run online journal www.antiwar.com and has spoken out quite vocally against the PATRIOT Act, the war in Iraq and George W. Bush's huge government increases because of their intrusions on personal freedom, short sighted foreign policy that did not attack the threat that attacked us and because government should be small...not having a 43% increase in government like Bush has done. I don't agree with him on everything but he is pretty cool and I like a lot of what he has to say especially about personal freedoms where I stand just about 100% with the Libertarian party. He's the neo-conservatives' worst nightmare because he stands up for what the real Republican party is supposed to stand for before it was highjacked by the neo-conservative movement.

Bush is exactly the same. They're all whores. Ron Paul 2004 (one of the few Republicans I actually like)

Nuke, speaking of that body armor...isn't that something people have to buy on their own since the administration is not giving it to them for protection? And Spiff, I'm disappointed at your lack of creativity in putting me down. Not your best work; you could have done much better.

But aren't Al Qaeda still carrying out attacks? (i.e. 3/11) They may be in hiding but they are by no means neutralized. Would his swift and decisiveness be when he was reading the book to kids or staying in the undisclosed location all day long? Or was it not scrambling fighters until a time when they couldn't do anything? Gee, that's some balls. Hell, Bush kept W199 I in place and for that, Nuke, I'd think you'd hate his f***ing guts. He actually gave it teeth and Like I said with the Hassin thread, the ideas of a person don't die just because he gets wasted. Sure, we kill off Al Qaeda members. Their kids get pissed and come to attack the people that killed their dad, brother, etc. Plus add in the people who were everyday civilians who lost a loved one to American bombing campaigns. That's the new Al Qaeda we're gonna have to kill. Then their kids take up the flag. How far are we willing to go and willing to pay for this? As for the economy, all I've seen is that we are losing jobs and that productivity is up. Productivity doesn't really matter when there are no people with income to buy said products. (Machines can be very productive and that doesn't mean people are working). Just recently head economics experts in the Bush administration have decided that fast food jobs should be considered manufacturing (I'm not making this up) and this is masking the loss of manufacturing jobs from America. As SS2K4 has said before, it's America's obsession with cheap goods compared with our want of high wages and benefits. Personally, if we were making more money and got good benefits then there would be the extra discretionary money to pay for more expensive items. And Nuke, having high wages and good benefits in place for companies does lead to people getting off the teat of the nanny state.

I cannot vote for Bush for the following reasons. a. Bush's fiscal irresponsibility (well, a trait of more recent Republicans in general) Racking up record deficits is going to be something that will help the economy because tax increases etc. will be necessary in order to pay off. b. Bush's inability to deal harshly with corporate crime. (Also a major trend with Kerry) It seems we all think it's bad when a guy swipes $60 out of a woman's purse but when Enron swipes millions, Lay gets a slap on the wrist. Kerry also seems to be a corporate shill, so I don't see his administration getting hard against corporate crime. c. Bush's lies regarding the war in Iraq. Blatantly selling lies to the American people that cause the death of over 10,000 Iraqis and almost 600 Americans needs to be stopped. d. Bush's inability to curb the drug war. Arresting non-violent drug offenders for simple personal possession and giving them long prison sentences does not cure the drug problem in America. He has poured more money into the failed drug war. The book "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs" by Judge James P. Gray is a great place to start educating yourself about the drug war. Kerry will continue this bulls*** so it's another strike against him. e. Bush's laxness on national security. He signed W199-I. Hiding 28 pages of documents that might incriminate our "allies" from Saudi Arabia and the numerous items detailed on my webpage regarding 9/11. f. Bush's cuts against veterans and denying them medical coverage. Sure Kerry voted for some stuff but the Bush administration wanted to cut wages of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's also cut veteran's benefits, increased co-payments and increased the amount of time to get a visit in a hospital for troops. He also denied full medical to Reservists and National Guardsmen. g. Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' act which is underfunded and most schools cannot meet the mandates because there are not enough funds to assist them. Kerry voted for it so it's another thing that makes him a moron. h. Free trade. NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO have decimated our trade and allowed for numerous outsourcing of jobs that has had a negative effect on our economy. Kerry voted for NAFTA. i. PATRIOT Act. The anti-Republican platform invasion of our civil liberties. Voted for by Kerry and endorse by the administration. Yet another poor thing on both parts. j. GAY MARRIAGE CONSTITUTIONAL f***ING AMENDMENT. A Constitutional amendment. Is there nothing more important in our nation's focus then whether 2 people who love each other should be allowed to be married? Kerry's also against gay marriage so he can go suck a f***. They're both corporate shills and don't represent what police state hating, non-corporate entity people want. Vote for less government, vote for common sense. Write in Ron Paul in 2004.

Firstly, your point regarding the UN. There are a lot of countries that thumb their noses at UN resolutions and still remain our allies. Take for example, Israel. It is the #1 violator of UN resolutions yet we give it $15 million in aid per day. Also, there's Turkey. After they burned down the 3,000+ villages of Kurdistan within Turkey, the US didn't say a damn thing and exempted them from their UN resolution condemning treatment of the Kurds. We still give Turkey lots of military aid which is used to repress Kurdish people there. Saddam was an assmuppet. But the slippery slope that was created is bad for international relations. Pakistan/India could use it in their border dispute and they've already started that with Indian government officials saying that Musharref's inability to control his military in Kashmir is a justification for India nuking Pakistan. Preemptive and preventive warfare was already dismissed as a justification for war over 50 years ago at the Nuremburg tribunal with the justices saying it was a crime against peace...which entailed war crimes and crimes against humanity, so it was the worst crime to be perpetrated. A lot of their evidence was lies though that did not even go towards Iraq having WMD (or not havng WMD as seems is the case) They asserted that Iraq tried to get nuclear materials from Niger and had to admit the documents were fraudulent and Iraq never tried. They also asserted that Iraq had a nuclear program and in the speech Bush cited a UN Atomic Energy Agency report that didn't exist. They said Iraq was an imminent threat and then just last week Rumsfeld said anybody saying the administration thought "Iraq was an imminent threat" was lying and it was a "figment of their imagination." Then the journalist on 'Face the Nation' threw it right back in his face showing quotes of 2 times where Rumseld himself said Iraq was "an imminent threat". Rummy damn near s*** himself...he was struggling for words after that. This isn't even discussing the plagiarized speech from grad school work done in 1991 that became Powell's speech to the UN on February 5. Hussein Kamal, the head of the Iraqi weapons program and who the US/UK relied on for a lot of their weapons intelligence, in his testimony said that there were no chemical or biological weapons of any consequence after, I believe it was 1995. Scott Ritter and Doug Rokke, two of the head UN inspectors post Gulf War I said that over 95% of the weapons were neutralized and destroyed; they knew what they were looking for and got access to look wherever they wanted. It's a common fallacy to believe that Saddam ordered them out in 1998 when it was actually the UN, at the behest of the Security Council that forced them out. (I actually had an opportunity to meet with Doug Rokke and found that out) The drones we said would spray chemical agent were found and they were not designed to spray chemical or biological agent (I think it was the UK Guardian Unlimited that said the drones were actually like duct taped weed whackers and other materials like that) As for Iraq being better...I was going through local newspapers for headlines for a collage I'm making and found that 100,000 Sunnis are protesting the new Constitution. A lot of people are saying that the Council in place (which is being paid $460,000+ for the "crucial intelligence" that they gave us about WMD, especially from Ahmad Chalabi which ended up being incredibly bad) is just a shill for the US. The occupying power is terming the Iraqi resistance forces as terrorists, but these resistance forces obviously see the American forces as terrorists on their soil. Indeed, in several open interviews by the BBC and CNN, ordinary Iraqis openly asked American forces to leave Iraq immediately. There are a lot of Iraqis in interviews I've seen that said Iraq is turning into a civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites...and they said, as bad as the Saddam regime was, at least there was no chaos. They really have been putting down Bremer and said when he leaves, there is going to be absolute f***ing chaos. They don't really want Saddam in power or US occupying forces there infringing on their rights. They want to be independent. The attached photo is the day that we were told a ton of people were out for the toppling of the Saddam statue. Check out this wide photo of it and see how many people are actually out there. http://www.bushflash.com/lies.html Is a link to Happy Iraqis Courtesy of Photoshop...worth checking out.

IlliniBob, regarding the Vietnam "spit upon soldier" myth... http://www.mountainx.com/news/2003/0319troops.php snip -- It's become an article of patriotic faith: When our boys came wearily home from America's failed involvement in Vietnam, longhaired protesters in the airports spat on them and called them "baby killers." Today, countless veterans insist they remember this happening to them. But according to Vietnam vet Jerry Lembcke – a sociology professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., and the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York University Press, 1998)– there's no documentary evidence that it actually did. "If you go back and look at the historical record, like I did – newspaper accounts, police records, and also just things historians have written," Lembcke told this reporter, "you don't find any record or any evidence that these things happened – or even that they were being claimed as happening – in the late '60s and early '70s." A number of other scholars cited by Lembcke have also combed contemporary records in vain. Not so much as a letter penned by a GI writing home at the time has turned up that describes being spat on, he says. What the researchers did find, however, were numerous contemporary accounts of anti-war protesters being spat on and labeled "traitors," "cowards" or "commies" by pro-war demonstrators. Civilian peace groups and veterans' groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War worked together closely, Lembcke documents, and vets initiated such dramatic protest actions as burning draft cards and throwing their medals back at the Pentagon. "Most actual hostility toward Vietnam vets emanated from other, older vets who despised their long hair, love beads and peace symbols," Lembcke writes. The myth, he maintains, began circulating in the 1970s in oral form; it was most commonly set in the San Francisco Airport. By the 1980s, movies such as Rambo: First Blood were helping cement the story in the public's consciousness. And in the early '90s, the tale gained prominence along with yellow ribbons, as promoters made "supporting the troops" an emotional justification for another controversial conflict.

This game is terrible with neither team executing that well. With as bad as Illinois is playing, staying this close with Duke is inspiring.

I'm surprised we're down 1 with the incredibly sloppy way we were playing against Duke. 37% shooting from the floor and only down 1 to a 1 seed seems pretty promising...provided Illinois starts hitting some f***ing shots.

Alex Jones! Then again he's all about both Clinton and Bush letting it happen.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida argued last April that wounded soldiers were a certainty in the new Iraq war. He asked for $375 million for their health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Appropriators bargained that down to $100 million in a 2003 war-spending bill and allowed the VA to use the money for other things. Now thousands of Iraq veterans are using VA hospitals and clinics, but none of that $100 million will go toward their health care. The VA plans to spend it on processing benefit claims instead. "Particularly with the large casualties that we've suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm stunned that they're not going to use it for that purpose," said Graham, the ranking Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee. -- Herald Tribune Catie Shinn figures she made two "mistakes" that could end up costing her money: She served her country as a captain in the Army, and she earned a master's degree in college. Either one, she says, could keep her from getting overtime pay under regulations the government is preparing to issue next month. Veterans and labor groups say 8 million other workers could lose their overtime. A handful of veterans and members of the St. Louis Labor Council and Jobs for Justice gathered Thursday inside the museum at Soldiers Memorial downtown. With Navy torpedoes and Civil War-era pistols as background, they protested the Labor Department's new overtime rules and an appearance in St. Louis planned on Saturday by Vice President Dick Cheney. "It's unthinkable that those people who have served their country so diligently in the armed forces now would be denied benefits," said Bob Soutier, secretary-treasurer of the Labor Council. -- St. Louis Post Dispatch Mr. Bush proposed last year to double co-payments on prescription drugs for many veterans, primarily those with higher incomes and no service-connected disabilities. The White House reaffirmed its support for that proposal in November. In the last week, the Pentagon has been considering a new proposal to increase pharmacy co-payments for retirees with at least 20 years of military service. Under the proposal, the charge for a generic drug would rise to $10, from $3, while the charge for a brand-name medicine would rise to $20, from $9. The Military Officers Association of America criticized this as "a grossly insensitive and wrong-headed proposal." In e-mail messages to the White House, members of the association asked Mr. Bush, "Why do your budget officials persist in trying to cut military benefits?" -- NY Times http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/11/ana03304.html is a few more links to articles that are a pretty interesting read. The Bush administration, most specifically, Rumsfeld, for a time wanted to cut military hazard pay for troops in the front. It was not done because so many people found out and were outraged about it. They have denied government health care coverage to Reservists and National Guardsmen yet sent them to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also increased the waiting time for troops to get medical care (It's already a little bit over a 3 month wait) He increased co-payments for troops to get medication by approximately 30%. The idea that Bush supports the troops is a pretty big fallacy. It doesn't vindicate Kerry's vote but it puts a new light on both of the candidates.

IlliniBob, it wasn't the greatest comment to make but then again Bush isn't the coldest beer in the fridge. With everything the WMDPRA caused it probably wasn't the best idea for the guy who initiated the Iraq invasion to make light of their major claim for war. Also, ChiSox...it's not that the anti-war activists wanted Saddam in power. It's how the case for war was built. The Bush administration *could* have built a case on humanitarian reasons and took that to the UN and had, in my eyes, a much easier time getting support from countries. Instead, they built their claims on WMDPRA and got caught in a lot of lies. That's the reason so many, including myself, were against the military action in Iraq. Osama bin Laden was the one who attacked us and the one we should have focused the billions of dollars and troops on capturing and neutralizing the terrorist threat of Al Qaeda...not invading Iraq who had not done anything to us or in the region since the end of Gulf War I. The numerous lies and problems with their case for war did not show to me an impending reason (with the claims they made) for military intervention in Iraq, especially when our focus should have been on Al Qaeda.

The Republicans pride themselves on fiscal responsibility. Why then have they been so fiscally irresponsible with massive deficits during their terms in office? Many right wingers will label Democrats as "tax and spend"...My question is how is that any different than spending, spending, spending and having to pay a massive deficit later? Yes, the argument can be made that there are those that milk the nanny state for all they can but our biggest fiscal spending goes to defense (vastly disproportionately in the FY 04 budget with 399 billion compared to about 60 billion for the next item). We spend .01% of the budget on foreign aid yet most people think that is the #1 spending measure. In a recent poll, it was found that was true followed up by welfare being the #2 spending when it's totally not. Unnecessary defense spending (citing cases like Congress offering to buy the Air Force new refueling planes and other items...Air Force said they didn't need them and had enough; Congress purchased the items anyway etc.) occurs a lot and there is a lot of bloat that could be cut out. The vast majority of your money in taxes doesn't go to welfare queens but rather to military largesse at the expense of education etc. Taking 15% of the Pentagon budget could adequately fund all education, Head Start etc. That doesn't compromise, using the buzzword "national security" and creates a nation of educated people. It's quite feasible if we held Congress accountable.

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YEEEAARGH! /had to be done

This sort of hate reminds me of the KKK "mentoring" the children in the group to be hateful of others. I've also heard many Jews say things that made my f***ing blood freeze in regards to what they want to see happen to the Palestinians (mainly their complete annhilation). Peoples' minds are easily manipulated when they've seen somebody they love get wasted be it Palestinian civilians or Israeli civilians. Then insert whacked out Zionist and messages of HAMAS to manipulate their genuine feelings of outrage at the death of their loved one...::drum roll:: instant 1984 like endless warfare. You think they'd figure out that after the 2000th time you tried something like a missile attack from a helicopter or a suicide bomb and it didn't work for all those times at fixing anything, that you'd FIND A NEW WAY TO FIGURE s*** OUT. This whole thing almost reminds me of the ideology of the Shining Path "We'll get to socialism through a river of blood." When they weren't moving towards socialism in Peru, they simply stated that they hadn't killed enough people yet.

Clinton is being forced to testify. So is Gore. They were lambasting Bush because originally he said he would only testify for 1 hour and not swear under oath. That's why. With all the time he spends on vacation, you'd expect him to be able to spend more than 1 hour. I can only hope that they ask Bush and Clinton about W199I. They should both be condemned as terrorist enablers for both endorsing that.

They're just saying it would be a LOT easier for them to recruit. There are other ways of fighting terrorism other than carpet bombing people.

Firstly, if you do a Google search for Tom Cole Hitler, you get about 18,800 hits with the article linked on there. So I have no idea how you didn't find the article on the internet since it's all over the place. http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/03/04/hitler/ is a link to the AP article about the topic so you can read it. I concur. There's no equation of Bush to Hitler. After all, Hitler was elected to his position and served in the front lines of WW I. So clearly, there is no comparison. You know, it just irks me when 2 out of hundreds of MoveOn.org commericals compared Bush to Hitler, the GOP leadership was up in arms. Now one of their Representatives makes a comment equating a vote against Bush as a vote for Hitler and they fall silent. I think some of the policies (outside of the killing of 11 million in concentration camps) have been advocated by the current administration but they are by no means specific only to the Bush administration. But fascism is not just Hitler's regime. You can bring in Mussolini, Franco, Suharto etc. http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm 14 Defining Aspects of a Fascist government that goes through the common points of all the major fascist regimes. As for the guy's comments on the site re: Palestine...a lot of the photos had people with no Palestinian activism items (buttons, shirts, etc) on so he was just making fun of the movement and the people. If they had anything on identifying their affiliation then it *could* be accurate. I mean, asserting that they ALL believe in Palestine just because they're in the park is like saying "All conservatives vote Bush" when there are plenty of conservatives who are against Bush because of his fiscal irresponsibility and many conservatives who want to be isolationist. (a few of the tenets of the old conservative movement) In fact, you should read www.conservativesagainstbush.com Actually, if we get the technical term of "Semite", it means all people in the Middle Eastern region...so that makes Palestinians "Semites". So they're Semite loving anti-Semites? I don't agree with this guy's speech but I will defend his right to say whatever goddamn thing that wants to fall out of his brain. Like the quote on the back of my favorite hoodie that I wear all the time says "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to say things you don't want to hear."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...dc&e=2&ncid=721 An Al Qaeda offshoot group released a recent statement. The statement said it supported President Bush (news - web sites) in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites), as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom." In comments addressed to Bush, the group said: "Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization." "Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected." AL QAEDA FOR BUSH 2004! Now that's a campaign ad I wanna see!

Tex, I defend the actions of normal Palestinians. The ones not allowed to go to work because their farm is beyond the checkpoint and the IDF won't let them through or the people who get shot in the face like Tom Hurndall for no reason (he was unarmed and had no bomb...and had a bright orange jacket on too) The Likud party, like HAMAS etc. don't want peace they wanna blow the f*** out of each other. But it's good that we know that ideas die when the person who created them is killed, right? As for Israel being righteous? I guess I missed the memo that running over people with bulldozers, shooting unarmed human rights workers in the head, building a wall around a people (dripping with irony) and being thugs that murder people in places like Sabra and Shatila is righteous. And you'd think that targeted assassination and Israel aren't friends especially when they screwed up murdering that innocent guy in Operation Wrath of God. Remember the egg they got on their face for that one, I4E? (I'm talking about the guy the Mossad thought was the leader of Black September, they wasted him and it ended up a case of mistaken identity and the guy was just a random schmoe)

A couple of weeks ago when this story broke. After a local Oklahoma paper claimed that U.S. Republican Congressman Tom Cole told a group of GOP faithful that a vote against George W. Bush in 2004 was like voting for Hitler, Cole denied that he ever had said such a thing. No, Cole indignantly declared through a spokesperson, he didn't compare a vote for Kerry to a vote for Hitler. Cole wanted to set the record straight. What he really had said was that "if George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election."

I said it's either photoshopped or a member of the fringe Spartacus League, Maoists or WWP. There's a few possibilities that I threw out there. My personal inclination is that it was photoshopped (a sentiment shared with some people on Fark.com where I first saw the photo last night and that was their diagnosis...and they are pretty damn efficient at recognizing photoshops) Here's what I said: I threw a few different ideas out there. Either it's photoshopped as as Farkers said or if it is real, it came from the Spartacus League, Maoists or WWP.

An Al Qaeda offshoot group just recently came out with an endorsement for Bush saying they wanted him to be elected. I saw it on the Toronto Star and Associated Press. They said that it would be much easier for them to recruit if Bush was in office because, in so many words, Bush is a softheaded tit and his bombing campaigns would make it much easier for recruitment efforts. CrimsonWeltall hit it right on the button.