Slashdot Mirror

• "John Ashcroft is not a patriot." -- Howard Dean
• "I don't think it's patriotic to put on a flight suit and prance around on the deck of an aircraft carrier looking for a photo op." -- Wes Clark
• "We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before. And with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again" -- Ted Kennedy
• "The policy that the administration is following in Iraq is ... anti-patriotic at the core..." -- Sen. Graham
• "we deserve a president who stands up for patriotism and its real definition, which is doing what makes our country stronger and safer and more secure." -- John Kerry
• "a group of people around the President whose main allegiance is to each other and their ideology rather than to the United States." -- Howard Dean

And ofcourse according to the Bush administration those people didn't have any freedom and couldn't enjoy the things we had here. Amazing how much of the official stories turn into pure falsified information whenever you're coming into contact with information residing from someone who actually lives in the region itself...

Well said. As many on Slashdot know, there are few things more important, or a greater demonstration of freedom, than playing games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, unless it is playing soccer or other sports. It is difficult to call Iraq during Saddam's rule anything but a "paradise" for everyone, from children to those of privilege, and even to Saddam's own family, like son-in-law Hussein Kamel . I don't know why everyone on Slashdot doesn't understand that. Maybe with a bit more education....

Life under Taliban cuts two ways Consider the following list of edicts issued by Taliban religious scholars in Kabul in December 1996:

"To prevent music.... In shops, hotels, vehicles, and rickshaws, cassettes and music are prohibited."

"To prevent beard shaving and its cutting. After one and a half months, if anyone [is] observed who has shaved and or cut his beard, they should be arrested and imprisoned until their beard is bushy."

"To prevent kite-flying."

"To prevent idolatry. In vehicles, shops, hotels, rooms, and any other place, pictures [and] portraits should be abolished."

"To prevent washing cloth by young ladies along the water streams in the city. Violator ladies should be picked up with respectful Islamic manner, taken to their houses, and their husbands severely punished."

The struggle over sharia Is sharia harsh?
Followed literally, it can be medieval. Sharia divides all human actions into five categories: obligatory, meritorious, permissible, reprehensible, and forbidden. Among the reprehensible and forbidden acts are drinking alcohol, eating pork, theft, slander, highway robbery, murder, adultery, and losing one's faith. Traditional punishments include whipping and the amputation of limbs. For the most severe crimes, the penalty can be decapitation, crucifixion, or death by stoning. In Saudi Arabia, where sharia governs civil society, these harsh penalties are still meted out. Women are shrouded and segregated from men; suggestive Western photographs censored; and criminals punished harshly. In the capital city of Riyadh, beheadings are carried out on a brick-and-marble plaza that some have dubbed "Chop-Chop Square."

And more about Sharia here and here.

Some of us are slaves to fashion.
They want to make us slaves to them, or at the very least, dhimmis.

Our guys and their guys have very different ideas about what to love.

Dealing in Death

Another chapter from early Islamic history -- serving as a lesson for today's Muslims at war against the West -- is the concept of the love of death. This originated at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 636, when the commander of the Muslim forces, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent an emissary with a message from Caliph Abu Bakr to the Persian commander, Khosru. The message stated: "You [Khosru and his people] should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don't, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life." This account is recited in today's Muslim sermon

In the first gulf war we did not plan to occupy iraq so we flew something like 300 sorties a day dropping an ungodly amount of bombs on the place. We targeted and destroyed all kinds of crucial civilian infrastructure such as bridges, electrical generation facilites, water treatment plants, roads, factories etc. Our goal was to make the iraqis suffer so much that they would rise up and overthrow saddam so we worked very hard at hurting as many common iraqis as possible. As a result of these efforts and the sanctions that followed we killed close to two million iraqis including hundreds of thousands of children.


Our goal in the first Gulf War wasn't to make the Iraqi people suffer, but to cripple the Iraqi war machine. Armored vehicles and supply trucks generally need bridges to cross deep water, and wars don't go well without them. Supply trucks and many military units need roads. Roads that have craters from bombs make for slow driving, assuming you can do it at all. Aircraft need landing strips to fly and fight. Airport landing strips are unusable with craters on the runway. Military units that can't move, fly, or fight are going to fail. Factories making ammunition, weapons, spare parts, and other essentials for war don't get work done without electricity. Government workers without electricity for light and computers aren't very producctive. The Coalition forces went out of their way to avoid damaging protected classes of targets. What you've written is false.

It wasn't we who killed Iraqis due to sanctions; it was Saddam. If Saddam hadn't abused the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, far fewer Iraqis would have died. If you have 10 kids and spend all of your paycheck on booze and drugs, whose fault is it if your kids are starving? Is it your fault, or your employer's?

However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711--almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size.

What happens when you don't use enough cluster points in a survey? You get crazy results when compared to a known quantity, or a survey with more cluster points. There was a perfect example of this two years ago. The UNDP's survey, in April and May 2004, estimated between 18,000 and 29,000 Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. This survey was conducted four months prior to another, earlier study by the Johns Hopkins team, which used 33 cluster points and estimated between 69,000 and 155,000 civilian deaths--four to five times as high as the UNDP survey, which used 66 times the cluster points.

The 2004 survey by the Johns Hopkins group was itself methodologically suspect--and the one they just published even more so.

Lets trust the military! Because they have never mislead us before.

It is funny the way people think, isn't it? When Saddam was using the money from the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, and ordinary Iraqis suffered, the so-called "Peace movement" blamed the United States for the suffering of the Iraqi people, and not Saddam for misspending the money. There seems to be a lot of that sort of thinking out there, kind of like the claim that Saddam didn't have ties to terrorists, even though he did, lots of them. Maybe they are just well meaning but badly informed, and only occasionally avert their eyes from uncomfortable truths. As to the military, I can't help but wonder if some of the problem comes from the people doing the reporting.

Lets trust the military! Because they have never mislead us before.

It is funny the way people think, isn't it? When Saddam was using the money from the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, and ordinary Iraqis suffered, the so-called "Peace movement" blamed the United States for the suffering of the Iraqi people, and not Saddam for misspending the money. There seems to be a lot of that sort of thinking out there, kind of like the claim that Saddam didn't have ties to terrorists, even though he did, lots of them. Maybe they are just well meaning but badly informed, and only occasionally avert their eyes from uncomfortable truths. As to the military, I can't help but wonder if some of the problem comes from the people doing the reporting.

Lets trust the military! Because they have never mislead us before.

It is funny the way people think, isn't it? When Saddam was using the money from the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, and ordinary Iraqis suffered, the so-called "Peace movement" blamed the United States for the suffering of the Iraqi people, and not Saddam for misspending the money. There seems to be a lot of that sort of thinking out there, kind of like the claim that Saddam didn't have ties to terrorists, even though he did, lots of them. Maybe they are just well meaning but badly informed, and only occasionally avert their eyes from uncomfortable truths. As to the military, I can't help but wonder if some of the problem comes from the people doing the reporting.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, was also a Baghdad resident. He was one of the conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who had fled there after being detained briefly by the FBI. Recent document finds in Tikrit show that Iraq supplied Yasin with both money and sanctuary. The 1993 WTC attack was masterminded by Yasin's associate Ramzi Yousef, who received financial support from al Qaeda through Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key 9/11 planner.

There is also the case of Abu Zubayr, an officer in Saddam's secret police who was also the ringleader of an al Qaeda cell in Morocco. He attended the September 5, 2001 meeting in Spain with other al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, the 9/11 financial chief. Abu Zubayr was apprehended in May, 2002, while putting together a plot to mount suicide attacks on U.S. ships passing through the straits of Gibraltar. He has allegedly since stated that Iraq trained and supplied chemical weapons to al Qaeda. In the fall of 2001 al Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan took refuge in northern Iraq until they were driven out by Coalition forces, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda terrorist active in Europe and North Africa, fled from Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has reportedly been sent back to Iraq to coordinate al Qaeda activities there.

Iraq made direct payments to the Philippine-based al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Sayyaf group. Hamsiraji Sali, an Abu Sayyaf leader on the U.S. most-wanted terrorist list, stated that his gang received about one million pesos (around $20,000) each year from Iraq, for chemicals to make bombs. The link was substantiated immediately after a bombing in Zamboanga City in October 2002 (in which three people were killed including an American Green Beret), when Abu Sayyaf leaders called up the deputy secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Husham Hussain. Six days later, the cell phone used to call Hussain was employed as the timer on a bomb set to go off near the Philippine military's Southern Command headquarters. Fortunately, the bomb failed to detonate, and the phone yielded various contact numbers, including Hussain's and Sali's. This evidence, coupled with other intelligence the Philippine government would not release, led to Hussain's expulsion in February 2003. In March, ten Iraqi nationals, some with direct links to al Qaeda, were rounded up in the Philippines and deported as undesirable aliens. In addition, two more consulate officials were expelled for spying.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, was also a Baghdad resident. He was one of the conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who had fled there after being detained briefly by the FBI. Recent document finds in Tikrit show that Iraq supplied Yasin with both money and sanctuary. The 1993 WTC attack was masterminded by Yasin's associate Ramzi Yousef, who received financial support from al Qaeda through Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key 9/11 planner.

There is also the case of Abu Zubayr, an officer in Saddam's secret police who was also the ringleader of an al Qaeda cell in Morocco. He attended the September 5, 2001 meeting in Spain with other al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, the 9/11 financial chief. Abu Zubayr was apprehended in May, 2002, while putting together a plot to mount suicide attacks on U.S. ships passing through the straits of Gibraltar. He has allegedly since stated that Iraq trained and supplied chemical weapons to al Qaeda. In the fall of 2001 al Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan took refuge in northern Iraq until they were driven out by Coalition forces, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda terrorist active in Europe and North Africa, fled from Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has reportedly been sent back to Iraq to coordinate al Qaeda activities there.

Iraq made direct payments to the Philippine-based al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Sayyaf group. Hamsiraji Sali, an Abu Sayyaf leader on the U.S. most-wanted terrorist list, stated that his gang received about one million pesos (around $20,000) each year from Iraq, for chemicals to make bombs. The link was substantiated immediately after a bombing in Zamboanga City in October 2002 (in which three people were killed including an American Green Beret), when Abu Sayyaf leaders called up the deputy secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Husham Hussain. Six days later, the cell phone used to call Hussain was employed as the timer on a bomb set to go off near the Philippine military's Southern Command headquarters. Fortunately, the bomb failed to detonate, and the phone yielded various contact numbers, including Hussain's and Sali's. This evidence, coupled with other intelligence the Philippine government would not release, led to Hussain's expulsion in February 2003. In March, ten Iraqi nationals, some with direct links to al Qaeda, were rounded up in the Philippines and deported as undesirable aliens. In addition, two more consulate officials were expelled for spying.

Put down your Heinleins and spend a little time trying to make the planet we will all live and die on a better place.

The world is much better off due to all of the technologies that were developed for the early space programs and the unexpected uses that have been found for them. I would expect that trend to continue with the new space effort.

Plenty of people already are donating time and money to make the world a better place, of course it would be even better if more were involved.

Some problems won't really get better unless we are persistent. The US occupied Japan for 7 years (and still has a presence there, not to mention Germany and Italy) and people want the US to withdraw from Iraq after only 3 years. They call for this despite the problems that would cause, and just when Iraq's internal security forces are reaching full strength, completing their training, and can start having a real effect on the situation. That makes as much sense as removing a cast from a broken limb when it is only half healed.

Richard Perle
Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.

I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country.

I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government. As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real, would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from Iraq.

I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan before 9/11.

I believed we should not repeat that mistake with Saddam Hussein, that we could not responsibly ignore the threat that he might make weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists who would use them to kill Americans. I favored removing his regime. And despite the current difficulties, I believed, and told Mr. Rose, that "if we had left Saddam in place, and he had shared nerve gas with al Qaeda, or some other terrorist organization, how would we compare what we're experiencing now with that?"

I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path.

-- Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as chairman of the Defense Department's Defense Policy Board during this administration.

Social Security numbers were introduced by the Social Security Act of 1935. They were originally intended to be used only by the social security program. In 1943 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9397 which required federal agencies to use the number when creating new record-keeping systems. In 1961 the IRS began to use it as a taxpayer ID number.

Here I was, thinking that we simply lived in a modern, bureaucratic state with social welfare benefits, and it turns out that it is all a secret plan established and repeatedly expanded by Democrats to number, track, and control us all! Insidious! Ingenious! And they just took control of Congress with promises to further expand social welfare programs! I thought that they were just beneficail social welfare programs, but your case that they are the road to totalitarianism is worth study.

Yes, we do need to be protected from Al Qaida and other terrorists, but not at the expense of the constitution.

Yes, that is a worry. President Roosevelt did directly threaten to pack the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices to get them to stop rulling all of the social programs he was pushing as unconstitutional. That should have been a key tip off, don't you think? Clearly, President Bush is in the junior leagues when it comes to influencing the Supreme Court even if you assume the more lurid fantasies about his designs on the court are true.

Things are not bad yet, but they could go bad. Pieces are being moved into place that would give a dictator all of the tools that he would need to exercise incredible power. We are already seeing the media bullied, silenced, and propagandized. I guess the next sign of things getting worse would probably be disappearances and prominent people flee^H^H^H^Hleaving the country.

It is hard to get good information from the media about the war against the Islamist extremist terrorists, especially when the media uses imposters as "news sources".

Where do you think people will go? Eurabia? It looks like France is in worse trouble than the United States:

Since appeasement alone is not a strategy. French authorities are keeping a force of some 50,000 riot police in permanent stand-by. A ministry spokesman said it is important to find "the good balance: not overreact to the situation, but at the same time, not underestimate it either."

A local prefect (a provincial governor) added: "In case of trouble, we will have to

Indeed. Read this story for some amazing details on how the faulty visum system gave them a visum even against all laws and regulations that existed before 9/11.

Me: "Without planting these seeds, the cancer of fanatical Islam will inevitably spread unchecked and take over the entire world by numbers and by force."

You: "Oh, put a plug in it, you racist idiot. The same can and has been said about the Jews. I don't see any sizable numbers of Islamic fanatics on the verge of taking over the world, but if I did , then I would blame dickheads like you first."

That's a powerful argument you muster there by calling me a racist idiot. For that, I salute you. Let me respond, you ignorant motherfucker (and I say that with the utmost respect).

You don't "see any sizable number of Islamic fanatics on the verge of taking over the world"? Maybe you should open your eyes. Large portions of the Islamic world are being educated from birth to hate Jews, hate Israel, and hate the West. [1]

And it doesn't even take an army any more to subdue or destroy an entire country. All it takes is a corrupt regime to build nasty weapons ("we need power for our desalinization plants"), people with the will to do terrible things, greed, and an appreciation of martyrdom over life.

Every day prominent Muslims speak out without hesitation about punishing and destroying the Western world. [2]
- "You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations."
- "We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology."
- "Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants."
- "What you have you seen, O Americans, in New York and Washington and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes."
- "The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews -- even the stones and trees which were harmed by them...The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."
- "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it"

If you really want to find a dickhead to blame for this hatred, you'd be better off looking on another continent and in the another millenium, because it's been around since before any of us were here, and it's excessively amplified now by the threat of nuclear weapons. Keep your head up your stank liberal ass if you like, but the facts (and the people involved) speak for themselves. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you want to open your eyes to reality, there's plenty more information out there. [3]

[1] http://www.science.co.il/Arab-Israeli-conflict/Art icles/Education.asp -- oh no, it's a link to a site in Israel... I guess you can totally ignore the contents, right?
[2] http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson2005081 20813.asp -- all of these quotes were from a single article... It took me 5 seconds to find them on Google. There are hundreds more out there.
[3] http://www.jihadwatch.org/ -- one of many resources... feel free to find your own.

WASHINGTON -- A group of former Clinton administration lawyers are urging the American Bar Association to reject its panel's call for presidents to stop issuing ``signing statements" that reserve the right to bypass laws, saying the problem is with President Bush's use of such statements, not the mechanism itself.

On Thursday, for example, the Boston Globe published an opinion article defending signing statements by law professors Eric Posner of the University of Chicago and Curtis Bradley of Duke University.

Posner worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under former President George H. W. Bush from 1992 to 1993, and Bradley worked for the current Bush administration as a State Department attorney in 2004.

Posner and Bradley agreed with the Clinton-era lawyers that presidents have a right to issue signing statements, calling them ``a useful device through which the president can announce his views . . . rather than conceal them." They also argued that Bush's signing statements are no different than Clinton's -- a claim that the Clinton-era lawyers, who say Bush has abused the mechanism, dispute.

The copyright advocates lose a lot of respect, in my eyes, when they pushed to have copyrights extended to a ridiculous 75 (+20) years. Somehow they feel they should have a lock on culture for generations. Disney of course pushed for this just around the time they're copyrights were going to end. Nothing sleazy about that! Everything created has a piece of something someone did before them in it. Nothing is 100% original yet companies like Disney feel they can use the ideas of others and then deny use of their result in turn. Too bad the Brothers Grimm couldn't copyright their work for a few hundred years, Disney would never have gotten started.

A little variety reading for you...

One, Two, Three, Four

Cheers

'What [the research] showed is that Saddam's procurement network is alive and well and has been working steadily despite the sanctions,' said Milhollin. 'There are a lot of companies out there willing to break the embargo.'

Motz said: 'We are seeing everything from just some basic negotiations that probably didn't go anywhere once the firms figured out what was trying to be purchased to contracts that were actually implemented and goods that were found in Iraq by the inspectors. We have contracts for missile engine components, for guidance components for missiles. We actually found some high-end machine tools that are useful for making nuclear weapons, military goods such as [conventional] helicopters and aircraft which were clearly embargoed.'

Was Iraq a potential threat to the United States and the world? Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers. The sanctions and the lucrative oil-for-food program had served as powerful deterrents, but world events - like Iran's current efforts to step up its nuclear ambitions - might well have changed the situation.

Iraqi scientists had the knowledge and the designs needed to jumpstart the program if necessary. And there is no question that we could have done so very quickly. In the late 1980's, we put together the most efficient covert nuclear program the world has ever seen. In about three years, we gained the ability to enrich uranium and nearly become a nuclear threat; we built an effective centrifuge from scratch, even though we started with no knowledge of centrifuge technology. Had Saddam Hussein ordered it and the world looked the other way, we might have shaved months if not years off our previous efforts. Saddam, the Bomb and Me

Moreover, Iraq put itself in a state of war with the United States by violating the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqi forces shot at American and British warplanes assigned to enforce the U.N.-imposed "no-fly zones" over Iraq on a daily basis long before the 2003 war. Kofi Annan's Iraq Blunder

That "M" word... according to the Wikipedia article (which, given current events, may well be full of shit) says this:

Macaca[1] is a dismissive epithet used by francophone colonials in Central Africa's Belgian Congo for the native population.

and further:

Allen's mother, born Henrietta Lumbroso, is of French Tunisian descent and some have suggested that she may have learned the pejorative during her childhood and introduced it to her son.

Uh, sure... That's one family dedicated to preserving their rich heritage of obscure racists terms!

Still, it sure looks like he meant it in the derogatory, rather than just trying to remember the guys name. But if you're against Allen to begin with, it doesn't take much to view his actions in the most negative light.

Now it's coming around that Webb, Allen's opponent, may be a plagiarist.

Here is a tiny research project for your consideration if you really are anti-fascist, which so few on the left are these days.

He had no connection to 9/11 but he had connections to terrorists and to al Qaeda.

Here is an older article that covers some of this: http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200 406170840.asp

Who specifically are we at war with? That is to say, other than "the terrorists." Who do we have to kill or who has to surrender to end this war, bin Laden, the Taliban?

Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and the Taliban at present. Hezbollah is operating in the US, and has threatened the US, so its time may come. Hamas, also operating in the US might get there too.

The fact is, we are not at war in any meaningful sense of the word. We are at war only in the same sense that we are at war with drugs and poverty.

Here is a useful guide to figure out when you are in a literal versus figurative war: When you are expending M1 tank main gun rounds, 500 lb or larger bombs, and artillery, to kill people, it is very likely to be a real war.

Al Qaeda in Iraq admits that the US has killed at least 4,000 foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight in what Bin Laden refers to as, "...the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era".

Now, if you are killing thousands of enemy fighters with tank main gun rounds, big bombs, and artillery, and your enemy says that they are in, "the greatest battle of Islam in this era," and trying to kill you in large numbers, take the hint: you are in a war.

The metaphorical "war on drugs" generally only uses pistols or shotguns, education, and prison cells. The metaphorical "war on poverty" generally only uses government aid checks and programs.

The Cold War lasted about 45 years, don't be surprised if the war against the Islamist extremists lasts as long. Right after 9/11, President Bush referred to the War a ... a long struggle.

It isn't so hard to figure out if you try just a little.

To someone of such limited background and experience, the outside world is an unknown quantity. Ahmadinejad's religious beliefs are no doubt as sincere as they are narrow, and they prompt regular pronouncements in a messianic style: "The wave of the Islamist revolution will soon reach the entire world." Or again, "Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi." In the middle of the 10th century, this imam went into hiding, supposedly in a well in Jamkaran, south of Tehran, but it is an article of Shiite faith that he will return and herald the End of Days. Ahmadinejad and his cabinet signed a petition to the hidden imam, proceeded to Jamkaran, and threw it down the well for his attention. Similarly unself-conscious, he claimed that while speaking at the United Nations "I became surrounded by a green light," so that for 27 to 28 minutes all the attentive listeners did not blink -- the chronological exactitude is a touch a thriller writer might envy. And he closed that speech by urging God to "hasten the emergence of Your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one who will fill the world with justice and peace."

In October 2003, Indian Air Chief S. Krishnaswamy stated that India had started development of an operations command station for an eventual space platform for nuclear weapons.[10] However, he retracted the statement within days, under pressure from India's civilian leaders.[11] India: Military Programs

According to a senior U.S. Air Force official, Brazil is one of a group of countries "seriously involved in using space assets for military purposes."[1] Indeed, when Brazil became a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in 1995, it was allowed to keep its space launch program, despite the potential for military applications.[2] Brazil: Military Programs

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party has drafted a bill to allow Japan's into space. The calls for the military to venture into space within the parameters of self-defense rights. That would be a drastic change from the current civilian-based limitations that Japan has placed on space ventures. Japanese Military Going Into Space

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. ....

The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.

If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.

It was more than a brief display of anger it was a calculated strategic display of anger. The conservatives gain a lot of political ground by accusing the "old media" (established media outlets like ABC and CBS, CNN included also) of being liberal baised and not credible. That outburst was a calculated opening offensive in the counteroffensive that would label the "new media" (newer more flashy news outlets like Fox News) as right biased and non credible in it's reporting.

Currently the only media viewed as "credible" by the majority of the population is the "new media". If the dems can alter this perception the Repubs will have lost a "credible" mouthpiece they have used to their advantage in the past.

Clinton's outburst was a calculated move in a larger strategy.

While I was looking for info on this I ran across Mark Levins site. I had never heard of the guy but apparently he is on the radio. In his blog entry he was saying Clinton rails against "Neo-Cons" using that phrase as a codeword for Jews. I just laughed and though WTF does that even mean? THe Neo-con movement is the evangelical wing of the republican party.

http://levin.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWMwMjUxNz lmYjJiZTg4MGE0ZWE1Y2NkMDkwYjBkZGE=

What's wrong is that the premises make it a waste of money.

"software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a 'sentiment analysis' is intended to identify potential threats to the nation"

Intelligence gathering is wasted if the audience doesn't know the difference between negative opinions and threats.

It's also creepy if the people running it have been known to drop bombs on news outlet offices, allegedly plan to bomb a TV station's headquarteres, launch an air strike on their office and kill their bureau chief, and shell a Reuters office with a tank.

The book just had it's 75th anniversary a few weeks back. John Derbyshire over at National Review commented on it:

"When I was an earnest sixth-former (=highschool senior), a standard classroom discussion was: Which of the two books Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a more probable view of our future? The question looks pretty absurd now, unless you live in North Korea, I suppose."
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDYxOTc5M 2E3Y2VkMWYxOGM1YTQzNTYyMWUwMzcyMDA=

This might be worth reading too.

What happened to Aldous Huxley
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/huxle y.htm

When asked about U.S. accusations of his "collusion" in the attacks in New York and Washington, bin Laden responded, "America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world. Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is unwarranted."

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all.

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.....

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: "Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

Dissent gets stifled using anti-terror legislation

BS. Where exactly is this happening? The web, TV, and radio are dripping with dissent and nonsense. There are regular demonstrations.

government fuck-ups get buried beneath terror headlines...

Instead of other headlines? Whoop.

people are given an enemy,and a reason to be obedient.

Obedient? HOW! Did all crime stop? Did everybody start paying their taxes? Is the government handing out careers? More vague generalities and nonsense.

Considering the mind-bogglingly small impact of terrorism, why wouldn't they want to encourage it?

9/11 did $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy and killed 3,000 people. Chump change? If it happened every year? Every month? Al Qaeda has a goal of killing 4,000,000 Americans. Do you think it is better to prevent that, or to clean up the mess?

The impact in the US is only small because we are protecting ourselves, or have been lucky. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are killing people by the hundreds in other places.

Ironically, John Hurt plays Supreme Chancellor Sutler in V for Vendetta.

That's not ironic, that's a cinematic Easter Egg for those paying attention.

And yes, one can have quite a career after giving in completely to the system and loving Big Brother. It certainly gets you a job at the National Review.

References? Evidence? Figures picked out of your arse?

Somebody needs to learn how to use google. Even my 7 year old nephew can do that.

The poll results are from NOP Research, broadcast by Channel 4-TV on August 7.

By the looks of it, probably refering to this: NOP Research for Channel4 TV in the UK: HERE Thats quite scary really...

The majority of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and 74% of those HAD insurance. So FOAD with the blaming of people for not having insurance. Between co-pays, non-covered items, incidental expenses, no coverage for pre-existing conditions (which can be used to deny everything except a fresh gunshot wound if they really want to stretch it) ... they haven't got a hope in hell.

Think of it. 74 % are being told to FOAD. So stop with the "its their fault because they didn't buy insurance" bullshit, and get behind a public insurance plan that covers everyone.

These stories had circulated for years but resurfaced on May 13, 2003, in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma, headlined, "Bush Family Funded Adolf Hitler." As the Associated Press reports, Prescott had been on the board of Union Banking Corp., whose majority owner, the Thyssen family of Germany, indeed had funded the Nazis against a feared communist takeover of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Family leader Fritz Thyssen broke with Hitler over the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews, was stripped of his citizenship and fortune, and was in a Nazi prison at the time the elder Bush sat on that board. There is no evidence that Prescott Bush, who owned just one share of Union Banking, had anything to do with the Thyssen political work in Germany.

. .... Discussing this controversy, columnist Joe Conason of the New York Observer writes, "Henry Ford was a Nazi collaborator. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a Nazi sympathizer. Unless additional information emerges to indict him, Prescott Bush Sr. was neither. To misuse such terms for political advantage against his grandson is to trivialize very grave offenses."

One of Phillips's most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved in the rise of Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment-banking firm employing Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W.'s great-grandfather), invested in Nazi-era German companies, Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR's ambassador to Moscow and Truman's commerce secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm. Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in managing the firm's domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and, accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders.

Phillips also makes much of the fact that Prescott Bush was involved with the Union Banking Corporation, which was seized by federal authorities in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, a story frequently cited on left-wing websites. But what Phillips fails to mention is that Bush had only a token role in the bank: Of the more than four thousand shares, Prescott Bush owned only one -- urged on him by Harriman. Moreover, despite the conspiratorial argument that members of the WASP elite always work together hand in glove, Bush and Harriman were never as close as Phillips leads one to believe: Harriman actually campaigned aggressively against Bush in his 1952 senate race.

You grossly oversimplify; actually, the situation was a lot more complex than that. Saddam was selling oil way too cheap, in euros, to the French. So we didn't like him.

Right.... and the reason that Enron's executives are liable for repaying $183 million, and probably jail time, is that their stock "under-performed" the market.

Saddam used the wholly corrupt "Oil for Food" program to bribe all manner of foreign officials, buy influence in the Security Council, undermine UN sanctions, buy weapons, and fund terrorists, all the while skimming billions of dollars off the top. Even UN Secretary General Koffi Annan's son took bribes, and the Deputy Secretary General was eye deep as well. So, it was that, his refusal to fully and voluntarily comply with the weapons inspections, his record of genocide, aggression against pretty much every country around him, the abysmal human rights record, his military regularly fired on US aircraft (act of war), his support for international terrorists, well.... you get the picture, .... that is why we "didn't like him".

Personally, I think you want to let President Saddam "I grind my opponents alive, and my sons are worse" Hussein off the hook a little too easily.

You: Suffice to say the "crusaders" were the ones committing atrocities against the local population, not Moslems.

You might be interested in reading this on the Crusades.

"The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world."

"The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact."

"the crusade's real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy."

And from Wikipedia Crusades entry:

"In 1009, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah had sacked the pilgrimage hospice in Jerusalem and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was later rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor, but this event may have been remembered in Europe and may have helped spark the crusade."


You: the "crusaders" were the ones committing atrocities

Although war can hardly be looked at without it being an atrocity, I'd argue that it's less of an atrocity compared to what it has been in history. Given the scope of war can generally be limited to military units and the general population can be spared, todays wars, while still an atrocity, have got to be less compared to history.

Jim

I've provided a link in two of my other posts (just search page on my name) that goes into great detail on the issue. Here's another from Accuracy In Meda, an article from The National Review (yes, I know, but they cite many sources), and here's a site that acknowledges the Clinton administration's use of VNRs but claims that they were "legal" (as opposed to the Bush versions).

My personal feeling is that they're all at least unethical in that they present themselves in a format which we're supposed to believe is unbiased, and they're too often presented without the disclaimers that are supposedly at the beginning and end of each segment. I think they're meant from jump to make people think that there is actual journalism happening when in fact they're more like press releases presented in a news format. Disgusting no matter who's doing it...

Everything about the memos was contested.

Please site your source for this. Mine is easy; for example at the time, MSNBC reported:

Yet, it was the White House -- not Kerry's campaign -- that distributed four memos from 1972 and 1973 from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, now deceased, who was the commander of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in Houston where Bush served. The White House obtained the memos from CBS News, which said it was convinced of their authenticity, and the White House did not question their accuracy.

and

Records released this year when Bush's military service re-emerged as a campaign issue contain no evidence that he showed up for duty at all for five months in mid-1972 and document only a few occasions later that year.

I find it pretty entertaining that you would ask for sources after making the bizarre and baseless statements about the role you think Karl Rove played in the forgeries without even attempting to back them up. But anyway, here we go.

You are confusing some things here. It is customary in the White House press room that when a news organization is going to report on something, they inform the White House about it in advance, and the White House then makes the information available to all of the reporters in the pool. This is not an endorsement of the information- it is a courtesy to the reporters in the pool. The White House said multiple times that they made no attempt to authenticate the documents before passing them along to the other reporters, so it is ridiculous to assert that this means the White House agreed with the contents. When asked a few weeks later what the President thought about the "essence of the accusations" made in the memos, the Press Secretary responded that what had been asserted "simply was not the case".

So, to put this in perspective, here is a list of the facts that are known about the President's National Guard service:

• He joined the National Guard in 1968, signing a 6 year commitment
• By all accounts, he served aggressively for the first four years of his commitment, earning great reviews from his superiors and racking up an impressive number of hours and retirement points
• In his 5th year of service, his activity suddenly dropped. He missed a physical and stopped flying. He transferred from Texas to Alabama for a non-flying role, and his records of service that year are spotty.
• In 1973, he applied for and was granted an early release so he could attend Harvard Business School. He was given an honorable discharge from the National Guard.

Are you still with me?
The President has claimed that he stopped flying because his airplane (the F-102) was being phased out, and he was busy working on the Senatorial campaign in Alabama. The decision was apparently mutual, according to Col. Campenni who flew with Bush in the Guard (see this), because the Vietnam War was winding down and they had a huge glut of pilots. Because he wasn't flying anymore, there was no need to take the flight physical. He finished his time in the Guard by doing just enough to pass, often in bursts of activity surrounded by months of inactivity, until he was granted his early release.

Up until the release of these memos, there was no evidence to contradict this version of events. Nobody was disputing that his service was sporadic in 1972-73, or that he missed a physical and stopped flying, but there was no evidence that he had disobeyed any orders or had failed to meet all of his commitments in the Guard, and nobody could ask his commanding officers because they were all dead. These memos purported to prove exactly tha

If you go back in American history and read period documents, you will find people who always thought that the world was ending and the USA was being taken over by a dictator. If it weren't for these people ranting about everything, the general population would be much more receptive to actual threats. TFA does not describe us becoming a totalitarian state, although most /. posts in the Politics section seem to hint that we are. Like the other response to your post says, this is just a case of police following their SOP (standard operating proceedure) because they have to. When detectives are on a case they carefully look for anything that is out of place or odd. From the actions of one overzealous manager in Vegas to "a CNN summary of a [biased] Time cover story", /. is not the right place for political news. For biased politics, give me National Review Townhall.com or the aforementioned The Nation.

Excellent choice guy! I did pretty much the same, undergrad (Software Engineering), Masters in Economics & MBA in Information Technology Management.

I've been head hunted three years in a row now. Last company I worked for tried to stiff me at raise time due to problems beyond my control (poor growth in other areas) so goodbye cheap asses.

I have to thank my dad - I was dead set on a Phd, but he talked me out of that single expenditure of time for one degree (argued that it might not be precisely relevant to my field, and the time spent I could diversify my education money / time)

As other posters have mentioned, a BA is the new "entry level" degree. A Masters helps, especially if is multidisplinary. And my MBA pushed me over the top.

This article points out how valueless a BA is now, and why advanced degrees are necessary.

Hannity is in the commentary side of the business. Rather was allegedly in the hard news side of the business.

Dan rather is nowhere near as biased as anybody on fox news.

No doubt it was his dispassionate search for the truth that blinded him to the pathetic forgeries in the Memogate/Rathergate scandal. A pity they didn't have a little more ideological and intellectual diversity there to speak truth to power and hopefully avoid that train wreck. They weren't so much unbiased as unhinged.

THE ARGUMENT over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over. Since 1962, there have been 11 surveys of the media that sought the political views of hundreds of journalists. In 1971, they were 53 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In a 1976 survey of the Washington press corps, it was 59 percent liberal, 18 percent conservative. A 1985 poll of 3,200 reporters found them to be self-identified as 55 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In 1996, another survey of Washington journalists pegged the breakdown as 61 percent liberal, 9 percent conservative. Now, the new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the national media to be 34 percent liberal and 7 percent conservative.

Over 40-plus years, the only thing that's changed in the media's politics is that many national journalists have now cleverly decided to call themselves moderates. But their actual views haven't changed, the Pew survey showed. Their political beliefs are close to those of self-identified liberals and nowhere near those of conservatives. And the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, has stayed the same. That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.

In fact, it was Robert Rubin - who had been Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury who tried to intervene in November 2001 (on behalf of CitiGroup) to keep the Enron scheme from unraveling.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_arc hive/2003/12/08/355123/index.htm
http://www.nationalreview.com/levin/levin010303.as p

(Rubin was not charged with any criminal act - which I'm sure Martha Stuart must have some thoughts about)

The Enron criminal conspiracy was built up during the Clinton years - it unraveled after the Clintons left office. To blame Enron on George Bush is like blaming the policemen when your brother-in-law gets caught robbing a bank.

If you were a teacher and someone was spreading around animations of you being shot, would you want to teach the kid?

Yeah. I would.

Because it's totally normal behavior.

It's just kids.

In the olden days, I'd bet they just drew the teacher they didn't like, being hung, or something like that.

Kids just want to be free. This is a no-brainer.

Y'all are just getting so damn paranoid, and feeling like you have to have a universal system to attach to every damn situation, that you're choking the life out of everybody.

I fear that y'all will have nanotechnology in your hands. What'll you do with it? You'll force people to not think thoughts.

Today we're talking about stoping what people can write or draw. With nanotech, we're going to do the whole cybernetic hookup; I just know it. And then, it's clear: We're going to limit what people can imagine or think.

It'll start with monitoring people, to make sure that they aren't scanning buildings for security holes: "Looking at them funny." Or maybe it'll be monitoring mens eyes, to make sure that they don't look at a 17 year old for too wrong, or in the wrong way.

And then it'll move into our heads. There will be known patterns of imagining that have led to innocent deaths before: The man who's angry with his boss. (Or will the term change to "Zerg OverMind?") He plays the murder of his boss, over and over, in his mind.

In a healthy man in the present era, he will realize, "No, that's nonsense, but I must break out of this relationship," and seek another employer, or start a business, or something.

In this future we are eagerly looking forwards, too, though; In this future, such an imagination is criminal.

And what will be the result?

Men won't imagine such things. Indeed, it will eventually be rendered impossible to do so.

Scary road, folks. Scary road. Not one I'm willing to go down.

I'll take a statistically regular (increasing population) Columbine every 5 years, and a continuously decreasing percentage of violence every year, over the world without crime, but also without imagination.

I don't want to be your cyborg.

Every couple months, a small group of "scientists" rushes out, states that the Earth is the warmest ever, ignoring any facts, then go back to hide for another couple months. For those that care to look for themselves, the hottest year on record was 1998, and temperature has held stable since 2001. So yeah, you've been lied to, again, by the enviro-alarmists, but that's how they get funding. A little set of facts to start off with can be found at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhM GIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc=. There is no excuse for the blatant stupidity and carping that passes itself off as science simply to scare people into giving them money. You need to go somewhere else, stop making flamewars about junk science, and go back to empirical observation and the scientific method.

Because they're much more usable than adult stem cells. Get over it.

Sorry, but a citation please? Because I've found a few to the contrary for you:

1) http://www.stemcellresearch.org/facts/treatments.h tm
      (with it's own reference list a mile long)

2) http://www.i-sis.org.uk/stemcells2.php
A snippet:
"These latest results show that the ES cells need to be genetically modified and extensive manipulation in vitro before they can be transplanted safely. Direct transplant of ES cells are known to give rise to teratomas and uncontrollable cell proliferation. There is already evidence that ES cells are genetically unstable in long term culture, and are especially prone to chromosomal abnormalities."

3) http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interr ogatory022601a.shtml
(An interview with the same scientist (for those lefties among you who love to hate the conservative rags):

4) http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2003/nov/03112001.html (If you like canadian docs' opinions...)

Contrary to how I'm sure it sounds, I'm not yet categorically opposed to using embryonic stem cells for research. I'm for science- and this mice story is absolutely incredible.

But cut the unsupported, non-cited one liners. They bring nothing to the table.

This sort of dissent has existed for years, ignored by 'all right thinking people', but out there. Looks like Gore's movie has goaded a few of the dissenters to go on the record and risk destroying their careers. Gotta salute the poor brave but doomed bastards.

But what I'm amazed at is Slashdot actually accepting a dissenting opinion as an actual article submission instead of this being posted as a reply to a glowing review of the film.

For another whack at Gore's credibility try this one:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDE3ZTkyOWYxY TEzYmUwZmQ0ZjNmOTViM2Q1ZWM5ODA=

George Washington thought so, in his Farewell Address he said:

Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

(As an aside, here is something very interesting - as I was looking for the exact quote to cut-n-paste into this message, I ran across an article by Michael Novak slamming the ACLU and attempting to justify it with the above quotation from George Washington. Except, Novak misquoted Washington in a fashion that hides Washington's clearly judgemental opinion of the type of people who 'need' religion.)