Voted YES on restricting bankruptcy rules. (Jan 2004) Good. In my hometown of 2000 people, almost a third have declared bankruptcy at some point in their lives. Lack of jobs isn't an issue, as this area is one of the fastest-growing in the state, in terms of residential, commercial, and industrial development. People need to take responsibility for their actions, including taking out 30 credit cards.
Of course people need to take responsibility for their spending, but the financial industry also needs to take responsibility for their predatory lending. They send out millions of credit offers for people with high debt to income ratios, people with mediocre to bad credit ratings - and then are shocked, shocked! when they go under and declare bankruptcy. It's like taking your recovering alcoholic sister out to bars and keep putting drinks in front of her face, and then being outraged when she takes you up on it, gets drunk and then crashes your car. The bankruptcy bill was nothing but a big giveaway to the financial industry and a big FU to consumers.
Voted YES on vouchers for private & parochial schools (AKA religious schools)
Vouchers are a red herring. You benefit from kids being educated regardless of whether or not you actually have kids, just as you benefit from having a good interstate highway system through states you don't live in.
Voted YES on eliminating the Estate Tax ("death tax"). (Apr 2001) Maybe you don't have any relatives. Or maybe they're not leaving anything to you in their wills.
The estate tax only kicks in after $2 million dollars, it does not prevent you from setting up your kids and grandkids for a comfortable living. Furthermore, it only affects the richest 2% of the population, or about 12,000 families.
The point is, a person pays taxes their entire life. Why should their heirs have to pay money because the person died? Further, why should the heirs have to pay inheritance tax on things the deceased already paid taxes on for years, when they could give up everything they own as gifts and have it be legally tax-free?
Why should we have a aristocracy of families that are forever exempt from work? And no, a lot of that wealth is *not* taxed in the persons life, either through investments or tax shelters. Furthermore, the people arguing for a repeal of the estate tax also argue for a repeal of the capital gains tax, which would largely make the investor class exempt from federal taxes. Or as John Edwards likes to say, Republicans believe in taxing work, not wealth.
He voted against federal funding for it, not to ban the whole practice.
Which is merely an atrocious as opposed to terrible vote.
On that matter, and on abortion in general, he believes it should be ultimately up to the states.
The first is something the government should do more so than the states. Restrictions on first trimester abortions shouldn't be anyone's business.
What's so bad about banning federal funding for failed social programs anyways
Which "failed social programs", exactly?
and please explain in plain English why it's bad to cut taxes and spending.
Because cutting taxes and spending for the sake of cutting taxes and spending is just as bad (see what "limited government" did for Katrina) as raising taxes and spending for the sake of raising taxes and spending. It's a marketing slogan, not good policy. The two questions that should be asked are A) is this a program Americans should be funding and B) is their money being well spent.
Voted YES on eliminating the Estate Tax ("death tax"). (Apr 2001)
This is a bad thing how?
In just about every way? Without the estate tax, you'll have an aristocracy in this country of families that are forever exempt from work while our great-grandkids have to work their butts off to get by. Combine a repeal of the estate tax with a repeal of the capital gains tax and you'll make the investor class largely exempt from federal taxes. Or as John Edwards puts it, Republicans believe in taxing work, not wealth.
Not for a presidential race, anyway. Back in 2000, I doubt many people predicted that Bush would turn out to be such a fascist. But everyone should have known that he would be a good little right wing Christian corporate toady, and that the election would be close. They should have learned from the wingnuts of the 60's and 70's - try to take over the party most aligned with your interests, rather than consigning yourself to irrelevancy by going alone and changing nothing.
I loved how he absolutely treated Colmes like the idiot he is over the abortion issue. Colmes said something like "Since you seem to support freedom, how do you justify restricting the women's right to choose?" and he said in a totally dismissive voice, "That's absurd. I support the baby's freedom to live." IMHO, that just made him electable.
More like you were against abortion in the first place and he was preaching to the choir. Yawn. No, Colmes was pointing out the rank hypocrisy of Republicans who blather on about freedom while pushing restrictions on things like abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage. Freedom isn't a philosophy for these people, it's a marketing slogan. Like Republicans who claim they are for "small government" and yet back things like the Patriot Act and never met a pork project they didn't vote for.
Democrats of course are the same way - they spend spend money on the things they like and try to restrict the things they don't. But at least they aren't two-faced hypocrites about it.
Ya know, this is the kinda stuff that makes me doubt that the muslims are a religion of peace...just look at the facts: Denying the holocaust What happens every time someone ruffles their feathers?
Yawn. Do take what the western media says about Muslim leaders and the leaders of predominantly Muslim countries with a large grain of salt. Like when they willfully mistranslated Ahmadinejad as saying that Iran had the right to nuclear weapons when what he said was that Iran had the right to nuclear *energy*.
Yes, Ahmadinejad had a conference on the Holocaust, and yes, the first topic of discussion was whether or not the Holocaust happened. But the media completely ignored the second topic, which was: ok, if the Holocaust did happen, why does it entitle Israel to run roughshod over the Palestinians? The Nazis slaughtered the Gypsies just as enthusiastically as they did the Jews, but they didn't get a homeland of their own.
Show me a list of people who have been wrongly labeled sex offender.
You have this backwards. Show me why Myspace should hand this over without a subpoena given the debacles with Florida's lists of "felons" denied the right to vote and the TSA's no fly list.
The mere existence of this broadcast flag threatens your ability to record the present and document the past. It drives a nail through some of the more basic requirements for a democracy, which is the right and need to be and stay well informed.
A coupleexamples why having a record of events is a good thing.
In my opinion that is a double-standard in regards strictly to the human reaction in offense to certain things.
There is no double standard, it's about what you expect in certain environments. If go see a stand up comic where the minimum age for an attendee is 21, you can expect to be in for some coarse language. If you take your kids to a Disney movie rated G, you'd be surprised to find a porn star getting her brains fucked out. If you're listening to a major media broadcast on public (i.e. censored) airwaves, you can expect a modicum of decency.
Its not a right wing talking point because the right wing does the same bullshit.
Sure it is. It makes much of out of their conflict of interest (arms dealing) while making little of their legitimate opposition to the invasion (the bullshit WMD claims), all the while getting in a little gratuitous French bashing. It's a win-win-win scenario.
I'm not even going to complain about you using that whole "neocon" buzzword, as the Republican party has been highjacked big time by a new breed of paranoid old men, except that they are ANYTHING but conservative, they are big spenders and very demanding with their "morality laws" crap.
It's worse than that. Nixon resigned when Republicans on the hill told him that they had lost their support and they would get enough GOP votes for impeachment to remove him from office. Bushco has made the worst of Nixon's transactions look like Sunday school pranks, and Republicans today are 100% opposed to any kind of real accountability. They make a show of opposition for appearances, but then cave when it counts. Like Arlen Specter and NSA wiretapping. Or McCain, Warner, and Graham on the Military Commissions Act.
What they should have done was demanded Bush's resignation after he elected to read My Pet Goat for 20 minutes after he was told the nation was under attack, instead of picking up the phone to call Rumsfeld (a two time Secretary of Defense), Cheney (a former Secretary of Defense) or NORAD (which he had to have heard of when he was in the Air Guard). Or when it turned out that he was warned point-blank that Al Queda was determined to attack the U.S., maybe using planes, and did nothing. And they should have impeached his ass when the NSA wiretapping program was revealed, for the "signing statements", for torture, for lying us into the war in Iraq, for holding American citizens in jail without a hearing or attorney. Instead, we'll be lucky if Gonzales is impeached if he doesn't resign.
However, this whole "no WMD" shit is such an insane load of crap. They are there, we know they are there
Then where the fuck are they then? Four years after the invasion of Iraq and we have yet to find a single WMD. Bushco's claims were complete bullshit, as anyone who did half a days worth of research knew. If you mean the "500 WMD's" talking point floated around by a few Republican politicians and talk radio, chemical stocks degrade over time. A few drops of sarin gas that could have killed you in 1980 might give you a bad rash in 2003. It's not a weapon of mass destruction if it's incapable of causing mass destruction. In any case, almost all of the chemical weapons were either found by weapons inspectors or destroyed by the Iraqis themselves.
Large parts of Powell's presentation to the U.N. were plagiarized from student essays and magazines. They presented a photo showing a large roof that the Iraqi government built over a sight, as proof that they were hiding something. The problem with this is that weapon inspectors had no problems going underneath that roof and found...nothing. Yes, Saddam kicked out the inspectors for a time, but inspections resumed, and it's not like we lost control of our spy satellites at the time. Enriching uranium takes a large facility to hold all the centrifuges that refine the ore, and takes a lot of power. There was no evidence that such a facility, or a power source sufficient to run one, existed.
we had Iraqis defecting over to the US telling us where they were
Yes, ex-pats looking to run the country after we kicked out Saddam. No conflict of interest there, no siree. The problem wasn't listening to the ex-pats, the problem was only listening to ex-pats, and any other source that agreed with what they wanted to hear. The simple fact is that the evidence was not there to support the Administrations claims that Iraq had WMD's, WMD programs, or was an imminent threat that we had to stop immediately, no time for diplomacy.
How does being on the receiving end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression justify making statements which affirm the hateful, misguided views of those behind that oppression?
Who ever said anything about justifying it? Just pointing out that there is a world of difference between Strom Thurmond using the word "nigger", when he was pro-Jim Crow and his family owned slaves a couple generations ago, and Al Sharpton using the word "nigger", when his great-grandfather was owned by Thurmond's cousin.
Is that so? In that case, why don't you start rattling off liberal equivalents to waterboarding, indefinite detentions w/o trial, warrantless spying, calling for the "fragging" of Rep. Murtha, calling for jailing journalists who dare to report your criminal actions, etc, etc, etc. I wont hold my breath.
MoveOn.org, George Soros, Al Frankin just to name a few.
Nope, nope, and nope. Not are they not remotely in the same crazy ballpark, they aren't even on the same crazy planet as Coulter, Savage and Cheney. Your false-equivalency bullshit wont wash here, buddy.
There seems to be one of you whiny, racial-apologetic freaks under every rock.
Pot. Kettle. Black. There is nothing more pathetic than ignorant bigots whining every time historical facts get pointed out to them.
Name a single, living black in the U.S. that is or was a slave.
Red herring. There are millions of black that have had to live with the aftereffects of slavery: the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Plessy vs Fergeson, job discrimination.
What about all the non-blacks who were slaves throughout history? If I trace my ancestry back to some poor Helot from Greece, will I have a right to bitch about being on the other end of slavery?
Completely fucking irrelevant to the subject at hand, because a) your example happened thousands of years ago, compared the examples I just mentioned, and b) didn't happen in this country. I'm Irish. In a discussion on the potato famine, I might bitch about the role the British government played at the time. But that is completely bat-shit irrelevant to anything that happened in this country.
I, for one, am ready to treat people for what they are. I don't care diddly about your damned ancestors.
And a large part of what people are is their history. For example, something in your history has made you into a whiny bitch. What was it?
Bullshit. There is nothing more American than stating your opinion. And what's this nonsense about having to have it be solicited? On the flip side, there are few things more unAmerican than putting your party before your country, but that the 28 percenters did then, and still do on a daily basis.
Then why did their ticket sales drop drastically forcing most venues to have to cancel concerts because no one wanted to go?
That and concerts canceled because of death threats. But as I said:
The backlash to the Dixie Chicks was led by the owners of country radio stations
I didn't say there wasn't a backlash. I was pointing out that it was manufactured by wingnut owners of country music stations as opposed to a grassroots backlash led by wingnut country music fans. Much like Bill O'Reilly's crusade against the war on Christmas that he imagines in this country: just because he's full of shit, doesn't mean that nobody listens to him.
The backlash to the Dixie Chicks was led by the owners of country radio stations, not by fans. It was no more of a "public" reaction than the grammy was.
BZZZT Wrong answer. The French and Russians threatened to veto the war because they were violating international law by selling weaponry to Iraq.
Bzzzt bullshit right wing talking point. They opposed the war because it was obvious that the neocons were full of crap on their claims of WMD. As for complaining about arms dealing, you really should stop bitching at France and Russia since the USA is the largest arms dealer in the world. In fact, the US outsells the next 14 countries combined.
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Voted YES on restricting bankruptcy rules. (Jan 2004)
Good. In my hometown of 2000 people, almost a third have declared bankruptcy at some point in their lives. Lack of jobs isn't an issue, as this area is one of the fastest-growing in the state, in terms of residential, commercial, and industrial development. People need to take responsibility for their actions, including taking out 30 credit cards.
Of course people need to take responsibility for their spending, but the financial industry also needs to take responsibility for their predatory lending. They send out millions of credit offers for people with high debt to income ratios, people with mediocre to bad credit ratings - and then are shocked, shocked! when they go under and declare bankruptcy. It's like taking your recovering alcoholic sister out to bars and keep putting drinks in front of her face, and then being outraged when she takes you up on it, gets drunk and then crashes your car. The bankruptcy bill was nothing but a big giveaway to the financial industry and a big FU to consumers.
Voted YES on vouchers for private & parochial schools (AKA religious schools)
Vouchers are a red herring. You benefit from kids being educated regardless of whether or not you actually have kids, just as you benefit from having a good interstate highway system through states you don't live in.
Voted YES on eliminating the Estate Tax ("death tax"). (Apr 2001)
Maybe you don't have any relatives. Or maybe they're not leaving anything to you in their wills.
The estate tax only kicks in after $2 million dollars, it does not prevent you from setting up your kids and grandkids for a comfortable living. Furthermore, it only affects the richest 2% of the population, or about 12,000 families.
The point is, a person pays taxes their entire life. Why should their heirs have to pay money because the person died? Further, why should the heirs have to pay inheritance tax on things the deceased already paid taxes on for years, when they could give up everything they own as gifts and have it be legally tax-free?
Why should we have a aristocracy of families that are forever exempt from work? And no, a lot of that wealth is *not* taxed in the persons life, either through investments or tax shelters. Furthermore, the people arguing for a repeal of the estate tax also argue for a repeal of the capital gains tax, which would largely make the investor class exempt from federal taxes. Or as John Edwards likes to say, Republicans believe in taxing work, not wealth.
He voted against federal funding for it, not to ban the whole practice.
Which is merely an atrocious as opposed to terrible vote.
On that matter, and on abortion in general, he believes it should be ultimately up to the states.
The first is something the government should do more so than the states. Restrictions on first trimester abortions shouldn't be anyone's business.
What's so bad about banning federal funding for failed social programs anyways
Which "failed social programs", exactly?
and please explain in plain English why it's bad to cut taxes and spending.
Because cutting taxes and spending for the sake of cutting taxes and spending is just as bad (see what "limited government" did for Katrina) as raising taxes and spending for the sake of raising taxes and spending. It's a marketing slogan, not good policy. The two questions that should be asked are A) is this a program Americans should be funding and B) is their money being well spent.
This is a bad thing how?
In just about every way? Without the estate tax, you'll have an aristocracy in this country of families that are forever exempt from work while our great-grandkids have to work their butts off to get by. Combine a repeal of the estate tax with a repeal of the capital gains tax and you'll make the investor class largely exempt from federal taxes. Or as John Edwards puts it, Republicans believe in taxing work, not wealth.
Not for a presidential race, anyway. Back in 2000, I doubt many people predicted that Bush would turn out to be such a fascist. But everyone should have known that he would be a good little right wing Christian corporate toady, and that the election would be close. They should have learned from the wingnuts of the 60's and 70's - try to take over the party most aligned with your interests, rather than consigning yourself to irrelevancy by going alone and changing nothing.
I loved how he absolutely treated Colmes like the idiot he is over the abortion issue. Colmes said something like "Since you seem to support freedom, how do you justify restricting the women's right to choose?" and he said in a totally dismissive voice, "That's absurd. I support the baby's freedom to live." IMHO, that just made him electable.
More like you were against abortion in the first place and he was preaching to the choir. Yawn. No, Colmes was pointing out the rank hypocrisy of Republicans who blather on about freedom while pushing restrictions on things like abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage. Freedom isn't a philosophy for these people, it's a marketing slogan. Like Republicans who claim they are for "small government" and yet back things like the Patriot Act and never met a pork project they didn't vote for.
Democrats of course are the same way - they spend spend money on the things they like and try to restrict the things they don't. But at least they aren't two-faced hypocrites about it.
Yes. What a radical, crazy idea, to tie US money to the value of something real.
Yawn. It already is. Oil. Oil is traded in dollars, and there's a lot more oil than gold.
they just made up the bulk of it and as such get the most attention (understandably)
Generally, they get ALL the attention. The Nazis killed Gypsies and Jews with equal enthusiasm, yet the Gypsies weren't given a homeland of their own.
Ya know, this is the kinda stuff that makes me doubt that the muslims are a religion of peace...just look at the facts: Denying the holocaust What happens every time someone ruffles their feathers?
Yawn. Do take what the western media says about Muslim leaders and the leaders of predominantly Muslim countries with a large grain of salt. Like when they willfully mistranslated Ahmadinejad as saying that Iran had the right to nuclear weapons when what he said was that Iran had the right to nuclear *energy*.
Yes, Ahmadinejad had a conference on the Holocaust, and yes, the first topic of discussion was whether or not the Holocaust happened. But the media completely ignored the second topic, which was: ok, if the Holocaust did happen, why does it entitle Israel to run roughshod over the Palestinians? The Nazis slaughtered the Gypsies just as enthusiastically as they did the Jews, but they didn't get a homeland of their own.
2. efforts against the very existence of police, which is stupid (rich retards, gangbanging assholes in poor neighborhoods)
Which is so rare that you're heading in straw man territory...
Show me a list of people who have been wrongly labeled sex offender.
You have this backwards. Show me why Myspace should hand this over without a subpoena given the debacles with Florida's lists of "felons" denied the right to vote and the TSA's no fly list.
The mere existence of this broadcast flag threatens your ability to record the present and document the past. It drives a nail through some of the more basic requirements for a democracy, which is the right and need to be and stay well informed.
A couple examples why having a record of events is a good thing.
In my opinion that is a double-standard in regards strictly to the human reaction in offense to certain things.
There is no double standard, it's about what you expect in certain environments. If go see a stand up comic where the minimum age for an attendee is 21, you can expect to be in for some coarse language. If you take your kids to a Disney movie rated G, you'd be surprised to find a porn star getting her brains fucked out. If you're listening to a major media broadcast on public (i.e. censored) airwaves, you can expect a modicum of decency.
Its not a right wing talking point because the right wing does the same bullshit.
Sure it is. It makes much of out of their conflict of interest (arms dealing) while making little of their legitimate opposition to the invasion (the bullshit WMD claims), all the while getting in a little gratuitous French bashing. It's a win-win-win scenario.
I'm not even going to complain about you using that whole "neocon" buzzword, as the Republican party has been highjacked big time by a new breed of paranoid old men, except that they are ANYTHING but conservative, they are big spenders and very demanding with their "morality laws" crap.
It's worse than that. Nixon resigned when Republicans on the hill told him that they had lost their support and they would get enough GOP votes for impeachment to remove him from office. Bushco has made the worst of Nixon's transactions look like Sunday school pranks, and Republicans today are 100% opposed to any kind of real accountability. They make a show of opposition for appearances, but then cave when it counts. Like Arlen Specter and NSA wiretapping. Or McCain, Warner, and Graham on the Military Commissions Act.
What they should have done was demanded Bush's resignation after he elected to read My Pet Goat for 20 minutes after he was told the nation was under attack, instead of picking up the phone to call Rumsfeld (a two time Secretary of Defense), Cheney (a former Secretary of Defense) or NORAD (which he had to have heard of when he was in the Air Guard). Or when it turned out that he was warned point-blank that Al Queda was determined to attack the U.S., maybe using planes, and did nothing. And they should have impeached his ass when the NSA wiretapping program was revealed, for the "signing statements", for torture, for lying us into the war in Iraq, for holding American citizens in jail without a hearing or attorney. Instead, we'll be lucky if Gonzales is impeached if he doesn't resign.
However, this whole "no WMD" shit is such an insane load of crap. They are there, we know they are there
Then where the fuck are they then? Four years after the invasion of Iraq and we have yet to find a single WMD. Bushco's claims were complete bullshit, as anyone who did half a days worth of research knew. If you mean the "500 WMD's" talking point floated around by a few Republican politicians and talk radio, chemical stocks degrade over time. A few drops of sarin gas that could have killed you in 1980 might give you a bad rash in 2003. It's not a weapon of mass destruction if it's incapable of causing mass destruction. In any case, almost all of the chemical weapons were either found by weapons inspectors or destroyed by the Iraqis themselves.
Large parts of Powell's presentation to the U.N. were plagiarized from student essays and magazines. They presented a photo showing a large roof that the Iraqi government built over a sight, as proof that they were hiding something. The problem with this is that weapon inspectors had no problems going underneath that roof and found...nothing. Yes, Saddam kicked out the inspectors for a time, but inspections resumed, and it's not like we lost control of our spy satellites at the time. Enriching uranium takes a large facility to hold all the centrifuges that refine the ore, and takes a lot of power. There was no evidence that such a facility, or a power source sufficient to run one, existed.
we had Iraqis defecting over to the US telling us where they were
Yes, ex-pats looking to run the country after we kicked out Saddam. No conflict of interest there, no siree. The problem wasn't listening to the ex-pats, the problem was only listening to ex-pats, and any other source that agreed with what they wanted to hear. The simple fact is that the evidence was not there to support the Administrations claims that Iraq had WMD's, WMD programs, or was an imminent threat that we had to stop immediately, no time for diplomacy.
The big lie is that they were
How does being on the receiving end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression justify making statements which affirm the hateful, misguided views of those behind that oppression?
Who ever said anything about justifying it? Just pointing out that there is a world of difference between Strom Thurmond using the word "nigger", when he was pro-Jim Crow and his family owned slaves a couple generations ago, and Al Sharpton using the word "nigger", when his great-grandfather was owned by Thurmond's cousin.
Name one black person living today who is/was a slave in the U.S.
Already answered that. Now fuck off.
Is that so? In that case, why don't you start rattling off liberal equivalents to waterboarding, indefinite detentions w/o trial, warrantless spying, calling for the "fragging" of Rep. Murtha, calling for jailing journalists who dare to report your criminal actions, etc, etc, etc. I wont hold my breath.
MoveOn.org, George Soros, Al Frankin just to name a few.
Nope, nope, and nope. Not are they not remotely in the same crazy ballpark, they aren't even on the same crazy planet as Coulter, Savage and Cheney. Your false-equivalency bullshit wont wash here, buddy.
There seems to be one of you whiny, racial-apologetic freaks under every rock.
Pot. Kettle. Black. There is nothing more pathetic than ignorant bigots whining every time historical facts get pointed out to them.
Name a single, living black in the U.S. that is or was a slave.
Red herring. There are millions of black that have had to live with the aftereffects of slavery: the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Plessy vs Fergeson, job discrimination.
What about all the non-blacks who were slaves throughout history? If I trace my ancestry back to some poor Helot from Greece, will I have a right to bitch about being on the other end of slavery?
Completely fucking irrelevant to the subject at hand, because a) your example happened thousands of years ago, compared the examples I just mentioned, and b) didn't happen in this country. I'm Irish. In a discussion on the potato famine, I might bitch about the role the British government played at the time. But that is completely bat-shit irrelevant to anything that happened in this country.
I, for one, am ready to treat people for what they are. I don't care diddly about your damned ancestors.
And a large part of what people are is their history. For example, something in your history has made you into a whiny bitch. What was it?
Bullshit. There is nothing more American than stating your opinion. And what's this nonsense about having to have it be solicited? On the flip side, there are few things more unAmerican than putting your party before your country, but that the 28 percenters did then, and still do on a daily basis.
That and concerts canceled because of death threats. But as I said:I didn't say there wasn't a backlash. I was pointing out that it was manufactured by wingnut owners of country music stations as opposed to a grassroots backlash led by wingnut country music fans. Much like Bill O'Reilly's crusade against the war on Christmas that he imagines in this country: just because he's full of shit, doesn't mean that nobody listens to him.
The backlash to the Dixie Chicks was led by the owners of country radio stations, not by fans. It was no more of a "public" reaction than the grammy was.
But, had he been black, his comments would've been viewed as amusing.
Because, if he had been black, he would have been on the other end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression.
Extremists exists on all sides
Not in the USA. You'd have to go to N Korea to find crazy leftist extremists to match the many crazy right wing extremists we have here.
"Wow, we sure fucked that one up by picking Kerry, didn't we?"
I prefer the foreign headline "How could 59054087 people be so DUMB?"
BZZZT Wrong answer. The French and Russians threatened to veto the war because they were violating international law by selling weaponry to Iraq.
Bzzzt bullshit right wing talking point. They opposed the war because it was obvious that the neocons were full of crap on their claims of WMD. As for complaining about arms dealing, you really should stop bitching at France and Russia since the USA is the largest arms dealer in the world. In fact, the US outsells the next 14 countries combined.