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Tell that to France. They have a GREAT nuclear program, AND lower energy costs. The generate over 75% of their electricity from nuclear power.

1. Did you even read your own link? It says "France has been one of the slowest countries in the EU to open its electricity and natural gas sectors to competition in line with EU regulations." Why? Because they are not competitive. In fact "In France, the nation that made the biggest investment in nuclear energy, the national utility, Electricite de France, is carrying a $30 billion debt, mostly because of its nuclear investments"

"And while French nuclear advocates like to praise the nation's cheap domestic power prices, in reality, when compared to 10 other European Union nations, France ranks fifth in domestic power prices. In fact, since 1985, France's electricity prices have seen the smallest decrease in the EU. And while four new reactors are under construction there, none have been initiated since 1996."

Your link also says: "French government organized a national energy policy debate, which focused on determining France's energy mix for the next 30 years, particularly the status of nuclear power and the future role of renewables...Key of the aspects of the white paper included: increasing the use of renewables..."

Smart engineers are able to solve problems....they leave that to management.

2. You read too much Dilbert. Engineering is finding the best solution to a constellation of problems. Those problems include cost, schedule, profit, economics, safety, nuclear proliferation, waste disposal, operational reliability, etc. etc. etc. If you think you can develop a 100% perfect system (not 6 nines, or 9 nines, or whatever, but perfect) you are naive and potentially dangerous to those who use your products. You have two technological design options, one where the stakes are VERY high no matter how unlikely, but has NO advantages over the other path, which tromps it on almost every measure. Would you pick the first one? Just cause its technologically wizbang geeky?

Nuclear proliferation...Pretty much a non-issue,

3. Don't you even read the news? How did North Korea build their nuclear weapons? With a breeder reactor built for power generation. Many other countries have followed this same formula, A nuclear power plant is the fast track to nuclear weapons. Read, learn. (Try "Nuclear Choices", MIT press for a nonbiased technical but down to earth read).

For example, solar power is definitely NOT cheaper than nuclear power on any meaningful scale.

4. Wrong. On capital costs alone solar is competitive with nuclear, and after you consider operational costs, security cost, waste disposal costs, decommissioning costs, and etc - solar tromps it. Nuclear cost $2/W in capital cost alone. New photovoltaic technologies are being produced for $1/W, and wind hydro and geothermal even less, never mind all the other "hidden" external costs of nuclear. In fact, nuclear After a trillion-dollar taxpayer investment, it delivers little more U.S. energy than wood. Globally, it produces less energy than renewables."

That's a policy issue not a technical one. Let the gov't build the plants then

5. Of course its not a technical issue. Technically Nuclear power works just fine. But outside of science experiments, just because something is cool doesn't mean it should be done. It would be cool to freeze your arm in liquid nitrogen, hit it with a hammer and watch it shatter to

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. Let the Spanish keep it, it's a shithole, we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, It's your money, not the government's money is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That's right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It's too easy, asshole, they're blue states. It's not your money, assholes, it's fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Let's talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It's fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Y

Independent Ralph Nader is also asking for a recount in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. Kerry won NH, Bush won the rest. Polls had Kerry ahead by 10%, but he won only by 1%. I'd like to see a recount too, because we use those optical scan ballots that have been in controversy lately.

A chimp can hack Diebold electronic voting system
More Diebold e-voting vulnerabilities
California AG says he'll sue Diebold because it defrauded the state with false claims about its products

And the best for last:

Diebold voting machine owner commited to give votes to Bush in 2004

The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." -August 28, 2003

link

Dick Cheney has spent the last two years saying exactly that. Feel free to pull your head out of your ass any time you're ready to return to reality.

danheskett wrote:
>
> It was one CEO making a fundrasing pitch in a letter!

When a rabidly Republican CEO of one of the largest voting machine pledges he is " committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year " you don't smell election fraud?

The fact that he made the pledge in a letter asking for money is all the more suspicious.

> And, oh, the company in question makes about 1% of
> its profit from voting machines, is very transparent and publically traded

Being publically traded didn't stop Enron from commiting massive fraud. And what does how little money this company makes from voting machines have to do with its capacity for fraud?

> [Black box voting] is a very old problem for our country

But it just got about a billion times easier and virtually untraceable since the introduction of electronic voting machines, and electronic vote tabulating machines.

> I urge you to find me one article or study that
> can prove that electronic voting machines -
> flawed as they are - are anything short of the
> most accurate and secure voting system we have.

Here's Johns Hopkins Computer Science professor Avi Rubin's study where he states:

"We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software"

And read about Diebold while you're at it:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00081 .htm

Analyze this and this and this

Unbiased and public oversight of the election and the voting machines is also important.

Notice how they talked about using a single PC-like system to tabulate the votes. The votes from various locations were added up by this machine. Hopefully there was no tampering or other faults...

1. Common Dreams report: Nice. Common Dreams. An extremely "progressive" (in their own words) news source with rave reviews from Bill Moyers and (go figure) Ralph Nader, which Don Imus (of MSNBC) calls "a must read from the left". Hmmm....
2. optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly: From UsTogether.org, a web site dedicated to "peace, democracy, and well-being". The list of local resources display a myriad of internet sites dedicated to the Democratic and Green parties, and ONLY to those parties. Hardly an unbiased news source.
3. 88,000 more votes than there were voters: While I couldn't find a clear agenda on their site, the article referenced in the posting has already been updated with the fact that Palm Beach County had no such discrepancy. If you look at the page that the Washington Dispatch quotes, the actual numbers from Palm Beach County are quite different. In fact, there were 544,378 votes cast for President from 547,340 voters that turned out, showing 2,962 voters that never cast a vote for President, as opposed to the 88,000 votes over voter turnout that the article claims. Interesting...
4. discounted 50,000 voters: CmdrTaco claims this took place in LaPorte, Michigan ... when it actually took place in LaPorte, Indiana. This shows a complete lack of effort to verify this data. LaPorte was, in fact, a problem. They believe it was due to a power surge of some sort. They are still working on sorting through the mess there and are still counting ballots and working to certify the election there. At any rate, to state they "discounted 50,000 voters" is not only misleading, it's flat out wrong. In fact, the current data from LaPorte, INDIANA states that they had 43,278 voters voting (with 42,582 votes being cast for President) with just over 79,309 voters registered. That's a 55% turnout for that county, which is just about on par with the rest of the state. Whie I have yet to see viable precinct-by-precinct data for that county, it's clear that "discounting 50,000 voters" is not what happened at all. Incidentally, for all you Kerry fans out there, Kerry actually had more votes in this county.
5. gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes: Oh. My. $DIETY. The county in which this took place, still shows more votes for KERRY than for Bush. However, this is actually a problem if you look at the (still unofficial) data from Franklin County. The key here is that the document here referenced is UNOFFICIAL, and even CNN (left as they are) admits to that. The offical tally for Bush in that precinct is 365 votes. Perhaps the headline should read "Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio According to an Unofficial Document That is Only Used by the Media".
6. counting backwards: Again, a valid probl

If you watch the film on Votergate, about halfway through the film, you can watch the clip from "Topic A" where Howard Dean uses Access to easily change the database file.

Now, let's be brutally honest: How many people think that non-federal government offices (and maybe even federal offices) have IT support properly maintaining and securing the computers on the network?

How many of those machines are behind any type of firewall?

This doesn't have to be a "vast right-wing conspiracy." This could be as simple as a few kids fooling around, WarGames-style.

Now, I readily admit that I voted for Kerry. I am not saying Kerry was robbed of the election and readily accept a Bush victory if there was a fair fight.

However, was this a fair fight? Even if Karl Rove wasn't masterminding a subversion of the e-voting machines, and it was just kids (or just programming bugs) causing these errors, I would still not consider this a fair fight.

Also remember: Diebold's CEO promised to deliver Ohio to George Bush. Again, it's not a smoking gun, but it does make you start to wonder.

Electronic voting, while a neat idea to speed up the vote counting process, seems to have run into a number of glitches (over 1100 nationwide) this November 2nd. In addition to seemingly random problems in Florida [1, 2], Ohio [1], and North Carolina [1], there are allegations of systematic fraud based on statistical comparison of exit polls to final results in precincts with audit trails and those without. It is also interesting that in Florida, the voting patterns do not match the voter registration patterns as they do nationwide. This has attracted the attention of numerous civil rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation that has filed at least two lawsuits since election day, and BlackboxVoting.org that has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain computer logs and documents from 3000 counties and districts across the US. Equally disturbing is the fact that CNN has (since Nov 2) changed its exit polling results to reflect the actual results. This has attracted the attention of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida who have jointly requested that the GAO immediately investigate the efficacy of e-voting machines.

In case you are thinking that this is just sour grapes from Democrats who lost the election, think again. BlackboxVoting.org has been investigating e-voting fraud for years. Likewise, the CEO of Diebold, one of the e-voting machine manufacturers has been quoted as saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." And if that's not conflict of interest enough for you, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (now resigned) is an owner of the largest e-voting machine company ES&S.

Other numerous problems have been found with the machines from nearly every company in the past [1, 2, 3]. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been investigating such machines on his own and has found a number of security issues. Swarthmore students stood up to Diebold in November of 2003 after discovering

Thom Hartmann, host of a nationally syndicated progressive daily radio talk show, claims that evidence is mounting that the 2004 U.S. election results were hacked. 'When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how.' Hartmann offers more details in this article, saying '...I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.'

No need, the US is doing a good enough job as it is. Who needs climate regulating ice when you have jobs?

Oh, and here's an interesting piece of information, people do live near the North pole, or rather, in the arctic circle.You may know them as Inuits, or Eskimos, and they're very pissed off with the industrialised world's disregard towards their very existence.

This article describes some of the hardships currently being indured by these people, and the Bush administration "acknowledging for the first time that climate change is real and unavoidable". Here's another story from Boing Boing.

Have you guys seen this Thom Hartmann article yet?

There are certainly some funny stats that need to be looked at in THIS election...

Here's yet another person who is an expert in political polling and exit polls, talking about why the polls were wrong (hint: it's not because electronic voting machines were rigged):

http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=4027

Notable quote:

I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.

The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.

If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit polls are always weighted for demographics and for the actual votes.

Don't you think that a person like this, and all the other veteran people who have devoted their lives to politics and elections, even SUSPECTED that there might be fraud on a scale that "handed" someone an election, that they have access to all sorts of connections, resources, and tools far beyond the lame (sometimes fabricated) charts (with no attribution whatsoever) that are being emailed around supposedly "proving" that exit polls only didn't match in states that use e-voting?

The reason why the mainstream press isn't talking about it isn't because they "don't want to touch it", or that they haven't picked up on it. It's just not true.

Stop focusing on really, really stupid comments that Diebold's CEO made in the capacity of a GOP campaigner (as if he can magically have a 13,000 person company rig elections in 88 counties and thousands of polling places around the states, on machines over which they have no control), and instead focus on what's important, which is ensuring that as the Help America Vote Act moves forward, and more and more electronic machines get installed everywhere in an effort to make voting fair and consistent for every American citizen, that we have a permanent voter-verified paper trail associated with every individial vote in every election. The e-voting manufacturers already have this capability. All we have to do is make it an umbrella federal law that ALL municipalities implement such technology, whether they want to or not.

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they'll respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they'll respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
http://www.cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

stolenelection2004.com
votergate.tv
Outrage in Ohio Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?
Kerry Won
Shoplifting the Presidency?
Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
votes for party president versus voters registered
exit_poll(gif)
Florida2004chart

openvotingconsortium.org
verifiedvoting.org/eirs
electionprotection2004.org
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
http://www.cpsr.net

Presume once congress & the administration are aware to the purported problems they respond rapidly with "Help America Vote Act - II".

IBC takes its data from major news networks, read their methodology page. The major new networks get their data from the military largely. The military is not obligated to report civilian death and under Colin Powel they have obscured the true count.

By the way, IBC also has stated that "the spreading violence in Iraq, which has made it all but impossible for journalists to move around safely, has undermined its method." source

"He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned." I can. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.ht m

Have you ever seen a crack baby?

Have you? According to researchers, the "crack baby" is a myth. Which isn't to say crack is not harmful, but the effects of having addicts for parents might be far worse than in utereo exposure itself.

This isn't just some plant god gave us to smoke.

No, it was meant to be chewed. This use of the coca leaf was practised for hundreds of years without the nasty side effects we see with crack.

It flat out kills people and ruins whole country's.

While it certainly has killed people (as has alcohol and other drugs), the ruin of countries tends to come not from the use of the plant, but by the war between the people growing and those who want to stop it. Some of the latter have motives just as dubious as those making money from the drugs.

Oi. There were a couple things I just have trouble ignoring...

I don't consider myself ignorant, and while most ignorant people don't consider themselves ignorant, I have had a fairly solid education with extra history and politics classes thrown in. I wasn't born rich and had to work up to and through college so I'm either the dumbest clod on the planet or I actually learned something about working hard to put food on the table. So that covers political, historical, and financial ignorance.

Almost by definition, you can't know you are not ignorant or naive. If there's something you don't know, well, you don't know, do you? Political awareness and a well-informed view of the candidates is not something they teach you in school. If a couple of politics classes are your basis for claiming non-ignorance, you may have just disproved your own point. The first step to reducing ignorance is to realize you have it, and will always have it. And to avoid the problems it causes, you've got to spend your life questioning, searching for unfamiliar ideas, and thinking the unthinkable.

I know I'm terribly ignorant. And though I try constantly to change that, my search has not led me to many answers. However, I've found something more valuable than answers -- good questions. The best I can ever hope for is to find progressively better questions.

On a sidenote: I'd like to thank everyone from moveon.org that went out of their way to skew the exit polls.

I'd like to thank the folks at Diebold for giving the world some idea just how broken and corrupt some of our voting systems are. The CEO of Diebold, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. And then, curiously, the results were significantly different than the exit polls. For some background, the leaked Diebold internal memos reveal a great deal of error and corruption in their company and products. Hell, someone even taught a chimpanzee how to falsify voting records on Diebold machines. Doesn't that bring up some good questions?

You might want to head over to Common Dreams and read Sarah Anderson's Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada, as well as Bryant Urstadt's Readers Guide to Expatriating on November 3rd.

Lefty Canadians like myself would love to have you, but it's important to think about whether jumping ship is a better alternative than staying on board and continuing to fight for what you believe in. And, for what it's worth, not all of us outside the US believe that everyone within supports the policies of the Administration. We might think little of your Government, but we still love you, even if a lot of your countrymen don't.

You might want to head over to Common Dreams and read Sarah Anderson's Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada, as well as Bryant Urstadt's Readers Guide to Expatriating on November 3rd.

Lefty Canadians like myself would love to have you, but it's important to think about whether jumping ship is a better alternative than staying on board and continuing to fight for what you believe in. And, for what it's worth, not all of us outside the US believe that everyone within supports the policies of the Administration. We might think little of your Government, but we still love you, even if a lot of your countrymen don't.

You might want to head over to Common Dreams and read Sarah Anderson's Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada, as well as Bryant Urstadt's Readers Guide to Expatriating on November 3rd.

Lefty Canadians like myself would love to have you, but it's important to think about whether jumping ship is a better alternative than staying on board and continuing to fight for what you believe in. And, for what it's worth, not all of us outside the US believe that everyone within supports the policies of the Administration. We might think little of your Government, but we still love you, even if a lot of your countrymen don't.

• Electing to Leave
• Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada

• Electing to Leave
• Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada

I also find it surprising that Florida was so clearly for Bush given how tight it was last time. (Maybe retirees care more about terrorism and Iraq than I thought?)

Much of Ohio uses Diebold voting machines, which leave no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. :(

Question: If someone committed fraud, would it be better to make it a decisive victory in order to avoid scrutiny?

These guys should start with the big counties in states such as Florida and Ohio that seemed to turn out contrary to prediction.

So was Walden O'Dell, the diebold CEO, successful in his boast of carrying Ohio for bush?

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.ht m /conspiracy mode off

Steven V>

"Diebold"

What does this have to do with the right?

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

Closely; several stories have quotes from Zogby to answer that. As a one-point sample:

"The results of this text-message poll mirror what we're seeing in our more conventional polls," said John Zogby, CEO and president of Utica, N.Y.-based Zogby International. "Among 18-29 year-olds, Kerry leads the President by 14 points-55% to 41% in our current daily tracking poll-virtually identical to these results. Our text-message poll seems to have been validated by this experiment. All in all, I think we've broken some new ground in polling."

We shall see.

It worked for the Bush family... And it may work again.

It worked for the Bush family... And it may work again.

The results of this election might as well be determined based on the outcome of this football game considering the questionable integrity of the electronic voting technology involved. I mean really, the CEO of Diebold publically stating that he's committed to helping deliver electoral votes to the president should be a good sign that Bush is going to win, one way or the other. Is it really that much of a surprise that there isn't a paper trail at all? Who needs to deal with those pesky recounts? Four more wars!

All these emotions are yours, sayeth the LORD, except Vengance; attempt no landings there. (Apologies to A. C. Clarke)

Unamerican Tshirt

I got the quote a bit wrong, and in this case they were threatened with a charge of disorderly conduct, but in other cases trespass has actually been formally charged.

KFG

For what it's worth, the Sun is American owned (Rupert Murdoch) and Pravda is Russian only. It's hard to specify "European" newspapers, because there are no international European newspapers, only national ones.

What is most disturbing is that in this day and age that there still exists repression of thought in some countries.

Not at all, we in the western world haven't had complete freedom of press and speech for a long time, but if it were up to Bush, this freedom would be taken away again ("There ought to be limits to freedom."):

http://kookaburra.typepad.com/weblog/2004/09/biker _against_b.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1015-06.ht m
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/28/rnc.bike .protest/
http://wcbs880.com/rnc/rnc_story_244091236.html

Freedom of press and speech don't evolve gradually. People have fought and died so we can write the truth and speak our minds. This battle is still continuing in Asia where people are killed for releasing the wrong thoughts or turning against the government. Before freedom finds a home there, a lot of battles will be fought and a lot of people will still suffer. To say the realization of this is eye-opening is naive.

It is not to say that the freedom we now have is permanent. Our governments constantly test us to see how far they can go. We still have to fight to keep our freedom. It will never be a given as long as people are led by greed for money and hunger for power.

there's also the fact that the only way to get some long-term stability in the region is to institute some regime change, and Saddam Hussein's was one regime we could legally and easily change.

American University Professor Allan J. Lichtman, author of Keys to the White House uses a 13 key system to predict the Presidential winner (popular vote), and right now, the keys system favors Bush (9 to 4). Gore won his analysis in 2000 and the popular vote, but not the Presidency. It's possible something similar could happen again.

American University Professor Allan J. Lichtman, author of Keys to the White House uses a 13 key system to predict the Presidential winner (popular vote), and right now, the keys system favors Bush (9 to 4). Gore won his analysis in 2000 and the popular vote, but not the Presidency. It's possible something similar could happen again.

This "Silly left view" is the general world concensus on the reason for war. So it's not soo little or lefty as you might think it is.

The points I brought up are all fairly well documented points of fact. That oil is a key element in the middle east and a key part of Iraq's strategic importance goes without saying. That we invaded Iraq _because of_ oil is a difficult argument to make when the evidence we do have about the decision making process doesn't seem to show that as a source of primary motivation - there were plenty of conversations about "getting Saddam", papers written by neocon thinkers about democratizing the middle east, and so on. Since I'm assuming I'm arguing to a hostile audience, I'd prefer to stick to arguments that I can point to evidence on. If you can point me to evidence that shows that this was Bush's primary motivation, I'll gladly refer to that evidence in my future arguments.

As for your sources of statistics, I think they are wrong - the Persian Gulf as a whole supplies about 30% of the world's oil (and the amount of that coming from Iraq has varied greatly over the last few years, but a large portion of that is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. so Iraq can't be more than 5-10% - according to the DOD, it was around 3% shortly before we invaded). The most wildly optimistic estimates from a few years ago said about 11% of world oil reserves were believed to be in Iraq (as expressed by left wing sources - see here for example). And according to a conservative think tank a year ago, the number based on best current estimates is similar - between 10 and 12%, including estimated unexplored and untapped oil fields in Iraq. The people who threw around numbers like 25-30% of world oil reserves were apparently off their rocker, and no credible sources I have found claim that Iraq was pumping out 1/3 of the crude oil supply.

Undoubtedly problems with the oil supply in Iraq, though it's a much smaller total amount than you suggest, are in part responsible for oil prices. I never said otherwise. But the point still stands - invading Iraq was a terrible failure as a way to lower oil prices, and it increased the general feeling of instability in other Arab OPEC countries and of fear on oil markets. As for the invading Iraq _for_ the oil argument, we don't _have_ the oil, and we'll be incredibly lucky if the US government sees enough oil money to make up for the incredible cost of this war and ongoing troop presence. Halliburton and friends may see plenty of money, but at this point most of that money is coming from the US government and taxpayers. The Halliburton et. al. angle is certainly interesting to me, since the associations between the Bush administration and these businesses are very well documented, but I don't think it's a very effective argument with American conservatives, who see it as anti-business to attack Halliburton. And again, it's not provably causative.

Admirable act?, How is it any American's right to decide that your neo-conservative democracy(totalitarian?,Police state?) is the right way for the world? what made you god? Are you some supreme race? You know there was some other people in history who thought exactly the same way and their actions are remembered as anything but "Admirable".

I never used the words "admirable act", so this is a straw man argument. Work on your reading comprehension skills and come back later. As for the idea that democracy is superior to totalitarianism, you will pretty much not find a single American outside of the Chomskyites in academia who doesn't agree with this in some way. Thus making such arguments is entirely counterproductive, and brands you as part of the looney left (as you have probably just unknowingly done for yourself). I'm trying to win votes for Kerry from moderat

A human non-american knows.

Are you not aware, for example, that Bush completely blew Clinton's surplus and his balanced budget, the first time the budget was balanced for thirty years, and your supposedly conservative president just threw it away for a cheap political stunt, that tax cut you're so enamored of?

Or that No Child Left Behind is mind-boggingly underfunded and ineffective?

Or that Bush lies? Like, never tells the truth? Ever? Like, not once?

Do you choose not to believe this information, or have you just not heard about it?

And I'm just touching on a few of the more minor issues with Bush and his administration. Let's not even mention the total fuckup in Iraq, which surely you can't be as ignorant about as you claim. You'll excuse me if I don't believe you when you say you're not voting for Bush. You have no idea why you shouldn't vote for Bush. You're either not interested enough to educate yourself properly on the issues, or you're a dyed-in-the-wool Republican pretending to be independent to convince others that Dubya is truly god, as he himself believes. If you're the former, get a clue and turn off CNN (the Convservative News Network) and Faux News. If you're the latter, then just fuck off.

Skeptical of the list's accuracy, elections supervisors in 20 counties (including Palm Beach) ignored it altogether, thereby allowing thousands of felons to vote.

Quick! Get those nice Cuban democracy educators over to oversee the Florida elections, as they offered in 2000!

Or maybe the Zimbabwe guys. I think they offered to help too.

I think what motivates people's unease is a gut sense of the numbers - since Dick Cheney gutted the military, we don't have the numbers required for an indefinite occupation of two countries. We're only where we are now thanks to an unprecedented callup of the National Guard and Reserves - if we need more troops, where are they going to come from?

I'll grant you that by itself, re-appointing people to draft boards is no big deal. However, it is the height of foolishness to take this administration's word that everything is rosy - particularly given their track record with WMD and the economy. We're in a situation now where the US is delaying ground action in Fallujah until after the US election, for domestic political reasons.

Are you familiar with a "special skills draft"? I think it's even shown up on Slashdot. Take a look at the slightly contorted statements Bush is making - he's not ruling out a special skills draft, or even mandatory national service (military service optional).

Did you know that the chairman of the RNC threatened legal action against Rock the Vote for trying to use a threat of a draft to motivate college students? Do you feel comfortable with political parties deciding what is or isn't acceptible speech?

Of course, the mainstream media wasn't bothered by the chairman of a party that controls all branches of government threatening legal action for stating an Unfact. I think that proves my point, which was that you can't be educated paying attention to the mainstream media.

The trick is taking something like CO2 and turning it into graphite or something else more readily useful for industry.

Maybe some links to news articles