!!!Osama Bin Laden Had Nothing To Do With Iraq!!!!
Even if you ignore the 1998 State Department Indictment charging an Iraq/Al Qaeda relationship, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who formed the Al Qaeda terrorist group Anasr al-Islam within Iraq, and Abu Wa'el, who is a known Al Qaeda terrorist who was on the Baghdad payroll, and the fact that Mohammed Atta was trained by Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Even if you ignore all of thesefacts, military action in Iraq was still justified, and very necessary.
We declared war on terrorism. Iraq has been on the State Department list of States Sponsoring Terrorism for over 20 years. Saddam supported the following terrorist organizations: Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, Kurdistan Workers' Party, Abu Nidal, Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad. Russia is now telling us that Iraq was planning an attack against the US. I don't how it could be any more clear. We are fighting against terrorism and terrorist threats against us, not just Osama Bin Laden. Iraq clearly displayed a support for terrorism over the past two decades. If we did not eliminate this threat, we would be missing a crucial element in the war on terrorism. I'm glad that the leader of this country can see the threat, and has the balls to act on it without fear of political recourse.
You need to educate yourself about what a recession is. By definition, a recession is a 2 quarter consecutive decline in the GDP. That has only happened once since Bush took office, and only lasted one quarter (Q3 of 2001). We have maintained positive, and sometimes record-breaking growth, ever since then.
Ongoing wars? He started them! Afghanistan was arguably justified, but the biggest economic damage - Iraq - was soley the neocon's doing.
Wrong. Osama Bin Laden started it when he issued his Fatwah in 1998, declaring Jihad against the US.
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, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
Kerry has continually referred to keeping the middle class tax cuts. Unless you're in the top few percent, you won't face a tax hike.
The income floor for the top 5% of wage earners is $74,000. That means a whole lot more people than you think will be paying more taxes if Kerry gets his way.
Republican tax policy is to flatten the brackets - and for the taxes to bring in the same income, that means either increases in taxes for the lower and middle classes, or cutting federal spending (something Republicans haven't done since early this century - check it out).
Wrong. Republican tax policy is to cut taxes to stimulate economic growth. Economic growth and prosperity inevitably brings in more tax revenue.
On the other hand, what you *have* faced since the tax cuts is a *HUGE* increase in the federal deficit, because spending hasn't been decreased correspondingly - it's gone up. There are really three ways to cut federal spending significantly (everything else is pretty trivial): The military, social security, and medicare/medicaid. Concerning cutting those, two words: Good Luck.;)
Spending doesn't have to decrease correspondingly. If your tax policy stimulates economic growth (as tax cuts have proven to do), all you have to do is make sure your spending does not outpace your potential in economic growth and revenue. This is the way it has been since the record setting deficits of LBJ, Carter, Reagan, and many other US presidents in the past century. Every time we have hit "record" deficits, our economy has eventually grown to marginalize those deficits. A prohibitive tax policy, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. The economy cannot grow because people just don't have as much money to spend. Your only way out of the deficit then is to tax more, and the effect compounds.
If it is not fiscally responsible, which is the party of fiscal responsibility?
Stimulating universal economic growth is very fiscally responsible.
Bu$h administration officials were quoted in the Washington Post as stating they thought out sourcing was good for the economy and they had no plans to stop it
Maybe that is because it is good for the economy and there is no reason to stop it. If you disagree, then you disagree with the 200+ years of US history where we have outsourced remedial jobs and our economy and job base grew because of it.
On the other hand, doing "something" about it would create a bigger problem because we would be forcing US companies to not be competitive in the global market. It makes no sense to protect American jobs from moving overseas if it results in American companies eliminating jobs because they are losing market share. You are building a coffin for the very jobs you are trying to protect.
Is that reported as newly filed unemployment claims? Even the nightly news will report that many people have decided that standing in line at the unemployment office isn't worth the effort.
All of the comments about the number of employed people correlates well with the new KFC they're building down the road
No, that is the total number of people that collect unemployment. The BLS also tracks the number of people that drop off unemployment because they are discouraged about the job prospects. Guess what? That number is also decreasing (492,000 from a high of 514,000), and is only nominally higher than the 1996 figures when we had the same unemployment rate.
Averages are the most easily massaged numbers of all. Every statistician knows that. On a scale as large as the entire population of the US, an average number is marginally useless. An interesting number which would prove my point would be the number of people employed as "production workers" from September 2003 to current.
In other words, you refuse to believe the statistics because you simply disagree wtih them. All of the data you could possibly want is availble on the BLS website. The average weekly earnings for all private sector employees (which is plainly listed on the April report) is also at an all time high of $525.38. You can also see that the average work week for all private sector employees is steady at 33.7 hours/week, and the manufacturing work week has dropped to 40.3 hours/week. In other words, we are getting paid more for the same or less work now.
But this is pointless to show you any facts because you seem to be easily blinded by your hatred for the current administration.
Damn those slaves can pull hard when they're whipped heavily enough
So, having the most people working for the highest wages in history suddenly qualifies as slave labor?
Yeah, there are Wal-Marts and McDonald's are going up everywhere. I'm still suspicious of how those numbers are generated. If my company trims 5000 people and then hires 250 new people, is that 250 jobs added?
This isn't mystery science. The statistics are freely available to the public. For example, here are the statistics for the month of April:
The number of employed people went up by 278,000 to 138,576,000
The number of unemployed people went down by 188,000 to 8,164,000
The number of people in the workforce went up by 91,000, and the number of people not in the workforce also went up by 116,000
Compare this with the employment data from September 2003 and you can see that the number of employed people went up from 137,573,000 to 138,576,000, and the number of unemployed people went down from 8,973,000 to 8,164,000.
The average hourly earnings for production workers is at an all-time high of $15.59 per hour. Unless Wal-Mart and McDonalds have tripled their wages, this increase certainly isn't attributed to them.
3: Our economy is going to shit and we're going farther and farther into that hole.
Really? We have had 4 straight quarters of record breaking growth, and have added 1.2 Million jobs in the past 6 months. If that is the "hole" we are going to, I say keep digging!
In addition, the presence of a single armed shell is not indicative of the presence of an entire stockpile.
The presence of a single armed shell alone may not be indicative of the presence of a stockpile. But when you have a dictator who has been known to stockpile these weapons in the past, has used these weapons in the past, and has claimed that he destroyed all of them but refused to provide proof that he did, the discovery of a single armed shell means a hell of a lot more.
On top of that, it's well known that there numerous unexploded munitions, many of which are likely to contain gas or germs, due to duds from live fire ranges.
Coalition troops have been scouring the nation for well over a year now. Why is it they have not found any such "unexploded munitions" containing gas or germs yet?
I've got some news for you. When people spend billions of dollars and risk international sanctions and military retaliation just to develop weaponized chemicals, they don't just make 4 liters of it and call it good.
Nobody said that they were supposed to just sit there and accept the overwhelming force. But if they hide behind a bunch of little old ladies, they can't complain if some of those old ladies get hurt.
This isn't just any birthday cake. It's a birthday cake that, when in the hands of the wrong people, has the capability to kill millions of people and create global pandemonium. This is special birthday cake.
Not only that, but I have been under international order for well over a decade to provide proof that my birthday cake, as well as the ability to produce more birthday cake, has been destroyed. I claim that I destroyed this birthday cake, but offer no proof that I actually did. Inspectors from the UN Birthday Cake Monitoring team have been visiting my house, but I keep denying them access to my secret birthday cake kitchens and ovens, saying that these inspectors are spies that will share secrets to other houses on the block. I bug the inspectors hotel rooms so I can get advance warning of which room they are inspecting, and there are even satellite photos of me unloading boxes outside my back door just as the birthday cake inspectors are arriving.
And when the inspectors do finally find evidence that my claims are untrue with the discovery of a special birthday cake ingredient called Vx in 1998, I kick them out of my house for 4 years. I still claim that I do not have any birthday cakes, even though no intelligence agency in the world believes me.
When a substantial portion of the US Navy pacific fleet, as well as 150,000 US troops, park outside my front gate, I reluctantly agree to let the birthday cake inspectors back into my house. These inspectors still find that I have not provided enough proof that my birthday cake is destroyed. The US attacks my house, and they find me in a rat hole in the basement.
Despite claming all along that I did not have any more birthday cake, insurgents loyal to me try to use birthday cake in an attempted attack against US solders on patrol in my house, proving that I did in fact still have birthday cake somewhere in my house.
Lefty Americans, who oppose the US president and the war on my house, refuse to accept this as evidence, and even resort to foolish analogies where the destructive power of my birthday cake is compared to harmless sweets, when they are proven wrong.
It's a real stretch of the imagination to conclude that billions of dollars needed to be spent and thousands and thousands of people needed to be killed to neutralize the "threat" of a couple of sarin-loaded shells, likely left over from the 1980s.
You are missing the point that Hussein told us for 13 years that he didn't have any of more WMD. He told us that he destroyed his entire stockpile of Sarin, Anthrax, and Vx. The collective intelligence from the rest of the world said he was lying, and this proves that he was.
I guess you don't remember Saddam Hussein telling us over and over for 13 years that he didn't have any of that stuff any more. What do you know? He did still have some.
It really doesn't matter, though. We could find the worlds largest stockpile of WMD in Iraq and people like you would still refuse to admit that this war was justified and necessary.
Funny back in 2000 I remember Bush critizing Gore for not releasing the oil in our energy reserves
What? Back in 2000, Clinton/Gore did release the oil in our reserves, and that is what Bush criticized them for. Bush has said all along that the nations oil reserves should not be used to control prices.
Rumor has it Bush and Saudi Arabia made an agreement to artificially raise the price and then lower it right before Novemember.
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has publically stated that every US president for the past 30 years has requested that oil production rise and oil prices drop on election year. This is nothing new.
If you start bending over and giving terrorists what they want just so they won't try to blow you up, guess what happens? Suddenly every country/political group/religious sect that wants something from us realizes that all they need to do is blow some of us up and the US government will cave.
It's the same thing as the randsom syndrome. If you pay the randsom, what you are doing is showing the world that all they have to do to get what they want is kidnap your kid.
When Clinton was president and Orrin Hatch was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dozens of nominees were held up by blue slip vetoes, by which a nomination wouldn't make it out of committee unless both of the candidates home state senators approved him. In fact, a Clinton appointee has the record of waiting the longest for a hearing, 4 years, because the Republican senator from her state did not return his slip
A blue slip has never had veto power over a judicial nomination. What Senator Hatch did say was that the home state Senators should play a factor in the committee approval. This isn't anything different than what the Democrats have been saying.
The Bush nominations are different because they did make it out of committee and were just waiting for a Senate vote, which the Democrats refused to do because they knew they would lose.
nevermind that they blocked 10 times as many Clinton appointees using the same means
The Republicans approved 377, or 51%, of Clinton appointees, which is just 5 short of a record.
Just because the Democrats only hold 49% of the Senate does not mean they should not have a strong voice in it.
If the Democrats hold 49% of the Senate, they should control 49% of the Senate. Their vote should not count more just because they are the minority party.
If a Senate action, such as rejecting a judicial nomination, requires 51 votes and you only have 49, your only option is to try to get 2 more votes so when the vote happens you can win. You can't refuse to allow the vote to occur simply because you know you will lose.
I thought the right was granted to congress to approve or disapprove judges nominated by the president.
The legislature is required to approve or disapprove judges nominated by the President. If a vote were held today, all of these nominates would be approved because the opposition does not have enough votes to block them. So, instead of holding a vote, they are using senate rules to avoid voting altogether. That is not constitutional.
No, the republicans did NOT do the same thing under Clinton. All of the Clinton nominations were brought before a Senate vote, and some were blocked because they didn't have enough votes to be confirmed. This is how it supposed to work.
On the other hand, the Bush nominations have enough votes to be confirmed, but the democrats are simply refusing to allow the vote to be held because they know they will lose.
It is not unconstitutional to vote against judicial nominees that you do not agree with. This is all the Republicans did to the Clinton nominees that they didn't like. If this is all the Democrats in the current legislature were doing, I would have no problem with it.
But this isn't what they are doing, is it? The constitution states that a majority (51%) is required to confirm judicial nominations. We currently have the majority as required by the constitution to confirm these nominees, but the Democrats are using obscure senate rules (not constitutional rules) to change that requirement to be a super majority (66%). That is not constitutional. If you don't like them, vote no. Don't try to weasle out of it just because you know you are going to lose.
No, they blocked the 4 most objectionable nominees
They also had no constitutional right to block those nominees. But why would they let a little thing like the Constitution get in the way of their partisan bickering?
Let's take the pre-war (pre-revisionist history) version of this argument at its face for a moment, though, because you're willing to. You're saying there's a lot of anthrax left around. Hmm.
So, now we've got a radically destabilized nation in which, unlike pre-invasion Iraq, all manner of Al Quaeda activities can mix with the amorphous ranks of "insurgents" without our being able to tell the difference any better than we can apparently tell Iraqi cops from the bad guys. Assuming that what you say is true, there are also stockpiles of WMDs around that we can't find. Presumably these would have been hidden somewhere. Perhaps by people with ties to the insurgency. You think?
So how, exactly, did this invasion help prevent terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction? What's to keep these terrorists from getting hold of the WMDs you say are still there? Hellooooo? Is anyone home? I'm hearing an echo -- is that the cognitive dissonance?
Or did the weapons run across the border into Iran or Syria? Is that how the invasion helped secure us against attack? Because I'm not finding it all that reassuring...
When faced with a rouge nation that repeatedly defies international law, you basically have two options. First, you can sit back and let diplomacy handle it. Involve the UN, implement sanctions, send in weapons inspectors, and hope for the best. Guess what? We tried that -- for 12 years. It didn't work. In fact, for 4 of those 12 years, Saddam completely refused to cooperate with anybody, and would not allow any inspections to take place. We (the UN) gave Saddam a list of things that he was required to do, and for 12 years and 17 UN resolutions, he refused to do them. We knew nothing more about his unaccounted WMD at the end of those 12 years than we did at the beginning.
That brings us to the second option, which is to use the military to force him to comply. Certainly a last resort -- we waited 12 years before we actually did it. But 9/11 showed us that we could no longer sit back and hope that our enemies wouldn't try to kill us. We suddenly were forced to address every possible threat. Nobody has ever said that this would be easy, and nobody has said that Iraq was the last and final threat that needed to be addressed. It is entirely possible that those weapons are still in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, and I'm sure we will use our intelligence and military to deal with those people if that is the case. But one thing is for certain, we don't have to worry about Saddam Hussein any more.
If Bush and company believed their "He might give them to the terrorists" argument, they wouldn't have invaded the way they did to start with. Ansar Al-Islam scooted out of Iraq before the fighting even got to them -- they were in the Kurdish-controlled area, up north. Powell specifically talked about the danger of Ansar Al-Islam getting weapons from Saddam, but we didn't even fight the war like that was our reason for being there. We ran for the capital.
I guess you were not paying attention. All of our initial plans involved a northern front coming in from Turkey, but if you will recall, Turkey changed their mind at the last second and wouldn't allow us to launch from their country. A run for the capital was the only option left.
And now that things are over, Bush and his supporters have largely slipped from their original rationale for the war -- though they'll refer to 9/11 as a sort of ghost of the idea, without being able to connect their phantom dots any more. I don't blame them; accepting the original arguments would only make them look more reckless.
I have not seen any such change in rationale. Bush told us in Jan. 2002 that Iraq posed a threat, and that we could no longer assume that the oceans would protect us against that threat. He said the exact same thing 2 weeks ago in his nationally televised press conference. Nothing has changed.
This war didn't do what it claimed to want to do.
This war (i.e. the "War on Terror") is far from over.
Slashdot Mirror
!!!Osama Bin Laden Had Nothing To Do With Iraq!!!!
Even if you ignore the 1998 State Department Indictment charging an Iraq/Al Qaeda relationship, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who formed the Al Qaeda terrorist group Anasr al-Islam within Iraq, and Abu Wa'el, who is a known Al Qaeda terrorist who was on the Baghdad payroll, and the fact that Mohammed Atta was trained by Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Even if you ignore all of these facts, military action in Iraq was still justified, and very necessary.
We declared war on terrorism. Iraq has been on the State Department list of States Sponsoring Terrorism for over 20 years. Saddam supported the following terrorist organizations: Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, Kurdistan Workers' Party, Abu Nidal, Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad. Russia is now telling us that Iraq was planning an attack against the US. I don't how it could be any more clear. We are fighting against terrorism and terrorist threats against us, not just Osama Bin Laden. Iraq clearly displayed a support for terrorism over the past two decades. If we did not eliminate this threat, we would be missing a crucial element in the war on terrorism. I'm glad that the leader of this country can see the threat, and has the balls to act on it without fear of political recourse.
You need to educate yourself about what a recession is. By definition, a recession is a 2 quarter consecutive decline in the GDP. That has only happened once since Bush took office, and only lasted one quarter (Q3 of 2001). We have maintained positive, and sometimes record-breaking growth, ever since then.
Ongoing wars? He started them! Afghanistan was arguably justified, but the biggest economic damage - Iraq - was soley the neocon's doing.
Wrong. Osama Bin Laden started it when he issued his Fatwah in 1998, declaring Jihad against the US.
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, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
Kerry has continually referred to keeping the middle class tax cuts. Unless you're in the top few percent, you won't face a tax hike.
;)
The income floor for the top 5% of wage earners is $74,000. That means a whole lot more people than you think will be paying more taxes if Kerry gets his way.
Republican tax policy is to flatten the brackets - and for the taxes to bring in the same income, that means either increases in taxes for the lower and middle classes, or cutting federal spending (something Republicans haven't done since early this century - check it out).
Wrong. Republican tax policy is to cut taxes to stimulate economic growth. Economic growth and prosperity inevitably brings in more tax revenue.
On the other hand, what you *have* faced since the tax cuts is a *HUGE* increase in the federal deficit, because spending hasn't been decreased correspondingly - it's gone up. There are really three ways to cut federal spending significantly (everything else is pretty trivial): The military, social security, and medicare/medicaid. Concerning cutting those, two words: Good Luck.
Spending doesn't have to decrease correspondingly. If your tax policy stimulates economic growth (as tax cuts have proven to do), all you have to do is make sure your spending does not outpace your potential in economic growth and revenue. This is the way it has been since the record setting deficits of LBJ, Carter, Reagan, and many other US presidents in the past century. Every time we have hit "record" deficits, our economy has eventually grown to marginalize those deficits. A prohibitive tax policy, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. The economy cannot grow because people just don't have as much money to spend. Your only way out of the deficit then is to tax more, and the effect compounds.
If it is not fiscally responsible, which is the party of fiscal responsibility?
Stimulating universal economic growth is very fiscally responsible.
Bu$h administration officials were quoted in the Washington Post as stating they thought out sourcing was good for the economy and they had no plans to stop it
Maybe that is because it is good for the economy and there is no reason to stop it. If you disagree, then you disagree with the 200+ years of US history where we have outsourced remedial jobs and our economy and job base grew because of it.
On the other hand, doing "something" about it would create a bigger problem because we would be forcing US companies to not be competitive in the global market. It makes no sense to protect American jobs from moving overseas if it results in American companies eliminating jobs because they are losing market share. You are building a coffin for the very jobs you are trying to protect.
Is that reported as newly filed unemployment claims? Even the nightly news will report that many people have decided that standing in line at the unemployment office isn't worth the effort. All of the comments about the number of employed people correlates well with the new KFC they're building down the road
No, that is the total number of people that collect unemployment. The BLS also tracks the number of people that drop off unemployment because they are discouraged about the job prospects. Guess what? That number is also decreasing (492,000 from a high of 514,000), and is only nominally higher than the 1996 figures when we had the same unemployment rate.
Averages are the most easily massaged numbers of all. Every statistician knows that. On a scale as large as the entire population of the US, an average number is marginally useless. An interesting number which would prove my point would be the number of people employed as "production workers" from September 2003 to current.
In other words, you refuse to believe the statistics because you simply disagree wtih them. All of the data you could possibly want is availble on the BLS website. The average weekly earnings for all private sector employees (which is plainly listed on the April report) is also at an all time high of $525.38. You can also see that the average work week for all private sector employees is steady at 33.7 hours/week, and the manufacturing work week has dropped to 40.3 hours/week. In other words, we are getting paid more for the same or less work now.
But this is pointless to show you any facts because you seem to be easily blinded by your hatred for the current administration.
So, having the most people working for the highest wages in history suddenly qualifies as slave labor?
Yeah, there are Wal-Marts and McDonald's are going up everywhere. I'm still suspicious of how those numbers are generated. If my company trims 5000 people and then hires 250 new people, is that 250 jobs added?
This isn't mystery science. The statistics are freely available to the public. For example, here are the statistics for the month of April:
The number of employed people went up by 278,000 to 138,576,000
The number of unemployed people went down by 188,000 to 8,164,000
The number of people in the workforce went up by 91,000, and the number of people not in the workforce also went up by 116,000
Compare this with the employment data from September 2003 and you can see that the number of employed people went up from 137,573,000 to 138,576,000, and the number of unemployed people went down from 8,973,000 to 8,164,000.
The average hourly earnings for production workers is at an all-time high of $15.59 per hour. Unless Wal-Mart and McDonalds have tripled their wages, this increase certainly isn't attributed to them.
3: Our economy is going to shit and we're going farther and farther into that hole.
Really? We have had 4 straight quarters of record breaking growth, and have added 1.2 Million jobs in the past 6 months. If that is the "hole" we are going to, I say keep digging!
In addition, the presence of a single armed shell is not indicative of the presence of an entire stockpile.
The presence of a single armed shell alone may not be indicative of the presence of a stockpile. But when you have a dictator who has been known to stockpile these weapons in the past, has used these weapons in the past, and has claimed that he destroyed all of them but refused to provide proof that he did, the discovery of a single armed shell means a hell of a lot more.
On top of that, it's well known that there numerous unexploded munitions, many of which are likely to contain gas or germs, due to duds from live fire ranges.
Coalition troops have been scouring the nation for well over a year now. Why is it they have not found any such "unexploded munitions" containing gas or germs yet?
I've got some news for you. When people spend billions of dollars and risk international sanctions and military retaliation just to develop weaponized chemicals, they don't just make 4 liters of it and call it good.
You mean like this?
The proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden
Iraq-al Qaeda link comes in focus
Terrorist behind September 11 strike was trained by Saddam
The Clinton View of Iraq-al Qaeda Ties
Has Iraq sponsored terrorism?
Ansar al-Islam: Back in Iraq
Nobody said that they were supposed to just sit there and accept the overwhelming force. But if they hide behind a bunch of little old ladies, they can't complain if some of those old ladies get hurt.
To be fair, lets continue this analogy:
This isn't just any birthday cake. It's a birthday cake that, when in the hands of the wrong people, has the capability to kill millions of people and create global pandemonium. This is special birthday cake.
Not only that, but I have been under international order for well over a decade to provide proof that my birthday cake, as well as the ability to produce more birthday cake, has been destroyed. I claim that I destroyed this birthday cake, but offer no proof that I actually did. Inspectors from the UN Birthday Cake Monitoring team have been visiting my house, but I keep denying them access to my secret birthday cake kitchens and ovens, saying that these inspectors are spies that will share secrets to other houses on the block. I bug the inspectors hotel rooms so I can get advance warning of which room they are inspecting, and there are even satellite photos of me unloading boxes outside my back door just as the birthday cake inspectors are arriving.
And when the inspectors do finally find evidence that my claims are untrue with the discovery of a special birthday cake ingredient called Vx in 1998, I kick them out of my house for 4 years. I still claim that I do not have any birthday cakes, even though no intelligence agency in the world believes me.
When a substantial portion of the US Navy pacific fleet, as well as 150,000 US troops, park outside my front gate, I reluctantly agree to let the birthday cake inspectors back into my house. These inspectors still find that I have not provided enough proof that my birthday cake is destroyed. The US attacks my house, and they find me in a rat hole in the basement.
Despite claming all along that I did not have any more birthday cake, insurgents loyal to me try to use birthday cake in an attempted attack against US solders on patrol in my house, proving that I did in fact still have birthday cake somewhere in my house.
Lefty Americans, who oppose the US president and the war on my house, refuse to accept this as evidence, and even resort to foolish analogies where the destructive power of my birthday cake is compared to harmless sweets, when they are proven wrong.
It's a real stretch of the imagination to conclude that billions of dollars needed to be spent and thousands and thousands of people needed to be killed to neutralize the "threat" of a couple of sarin-loaded shells, likely left over from the 1980s.
You are missing the point that Hussein told us for 13 years that he didn't have any of more WMD. He told us that he destroyed his entire stockpile of Sarin, Anthrax, and Vx. The collective intelligence from the rest of the world said he was lying, and this proves that he was.
I guess you don't remember Saddam Hussein telling us over and over for 13 years that he didn't have any of that stuff any more. What do you know? He did still have some.
It really doesn't matter, though. We could find the worlds largest stockpile of WMD in Iraq and people like you would still refuse to admit that this war was justified and necessary.
Funny back in 2000 I remember Bush critizing Gore for not releasing the oil in our energy reserves
What? Back in 2000, Clinton/Gore did release the oil in our reserves, and that is what Bush criticized them for. Bush has said all along that the nations oil reserves should not be used to control prices.
Rumor has it Bush and Saudi Arabia made an agreement to artificially raise the price and then lower it right before Novemember.
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has publically stated that every US president for the past 30 years has requested that oil production rise and oil prices drop on election year. This is nothing new.
If you start bending over and giving terrorists what they want just so they won't try to blow you up, guess what happens? Suddenly every country/political group/religious sect that wants something from us realizes that all they need to do is blow some of us up and the US government will cave.
It's the same thing as the randsom syndrome. If you pay the randsom, what you are doing is showing the world that all they have to do to get what they want is kidnap your kid.
When Clinton was president and Orrin Hatch was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dozens of nominees were held up by blue slip vetoes, by which a nomination wouldn't make it out of committee unless both of the candidates home state senators approved him. In fact, a Clinton appointee has the record of waiting the longest for a hearing, 4 years, because the Republican senator from her state did not return his slip
A blue slip has never had veto power over a judicial nomination. What Senator Hatch did say was that the home state Senators should play a factor in the committee approval. This isn't anything different than what the Democrats have been saying.
The Bush nominations are different because they did make it out of committee and were just waiting for a Senate vote, which the Democrats refused to do because they knew they would lose.
nevermind that they blocked 10 times as many Clinton appointees using the same means
The Republicans approved 377, or 51%, of Clinton appointees, which is just 5 short of a record.
Just because the Democrats only hold 49% of the Senate does not mean they should not have a strong voice in it.
If the Democrats hold 49% of the Senate, they should control 49% of the Senate. Their vote should not count more just because they are the minority party.
If a Senate action, such as rejecting a judicial nomination, requires 51 votes and you only have 49, your only option is to try to get 2 more votes so when the vote happens you can win. You can't refuse to allow the vote to occur simply because you know you will lose.
I thought the right was granted to congress to approve or disapprove judges nominated by the president.
The legislature is required to approve or disapprove judges nominated by the President. If a vote were held today, all of these nominates would be approved because the opposition does not have enough votes to block them. So, instead of holding a vote, they are using senate rules to avoid voting altogether. That is not constitutional.
No, the republicans did NOT do the same thing under Clinton. All of the Clinton nominations were brought before a Senate vote, and some were blocked because they didn't have enough votes to be confirmed. This is how it supposed to work.
On the other hand, the Bush nominations have enough votes to be confirmed, but the democrats are simply refusing to allow the vote to be held because they know they will lose.
It is not unconstitutional to vote against judicial nominees that you do not agree with. This is all the Republicans did to the Clinton nominees that they didn't like. If this is all the Democrats in the current legislature were doing, I would have no problem with it.
But this isn't what they are doing, is it? The constitution states that a majority (51%) is required to confirm judicial nominations. We currently have the majority as required by the constitution to confirm these nominees, but the Democrats are using obscure senate rules (not constitutional rules) to change that requirement to be a super majority (66%). That is not constitutional. If you don't like them, vote no. Don't try to weasle out of it just because you know you are going to lose.
Ok, go find where a filibuster is allowed in the constitution.
No, they blocked the 4 most objectionable nominees
They also had no constitutional right to block those nominees. But why would they let a little thing like the Constitution get in the way of their partisan bickering?
Let's take the pre-war (pre-revisionist history) version of this argument at its face for a moment, though, because you're willing to. You're saying there's a lot of anthrax left around. Hmm. So, now we've got a radically destabilized nation in which, unlike pre-invasion Iraq, all manner of Al Quaeda activities can mix with the amorphous ranks of "insurgents" without our being able to tell the difference any better than we can apparently tell Iraqi cops from the bad guys. Assuming that what you say is true, there are also stockpiles of WMDs around that we can't find. Presumably these would have been hidden somewhere. Perhaps by people with ties to the insurgency. You think? So how, exactly, did this invasion help prevent terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction? What's to keep these terrorists from getting hold of the WMDs you say are still there? Hellooooo? Is anyone home? I'm hearing an echo -- is that the cognitive dissonance? Or did the weapons run across the border into Iran or Syria? Is that how the invasion helped secure us against attack? Because I'm not finding it all that reassuring...
When faced with a rouge nation that repeatedly defies international law, you basically have two options. First, you can sit back and let diplomacy handle it. Involve the UN, implement sanctions, send in weapons inspectors, and hope for the best. Guess what? We tried that -- for 12 years. It didn't work. In fact, for 4 of those 12 years, Saddam completely refused to cooperate with anybody, and would not allow any inspections to take place. We (the UN) gave Saddam a list of things that he was required to do, and for 12 years and 17 UN resolutions, he refused to do them. We knew nothing more about his unaccounted WMD at the end of those 12 years than we did at the beginning.
That brings us to the second option, which is to use the military to force him to comply. Certainly a last resort -- we waited 12 years before we actually did it. But 9/11 showed us that we could no longer sit back and hope that our enemies wouldn't try to kill us. We suddenly were forced to address every possible threat. Nobody has ever said that this would be easy, and nobody has said that Iraq was the last and final threat that needed to be addressed. It is entirely possible that those weapons are still in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, and I'm sure we will use our intelligence and military to deal with those people if that is the case. But one thing is for certain, we don't have to worry about Saddam Hussein any more.
If Bush and company believed their "He might give them to the terrorists" argument, they wouldn't have invaded the way they did to start with. Ansar Al-Islam scooted out of Iraq before the fighting even got to them -- they were in the Kurdish-controlled area, up north. Powell specifically talked about the danger of Ansar Al-Islam getting weapons from Saddam, but we didn't even fight the war like that was our reason for being there. We ran for the capital.
I guess you were not paying attention. All of our initial plans involved a northern front coming in from Turkey, but if you will recall, Turkey changed their mind at the last second and wouldn't allow us to launch from their country. A run for the capital was the only option left.
And now that things are over, Bush and his supporters have largely slipped from their original rationale for the war -- though they'll refer to 9/11 as a sort of ghost of the idea, without being able to connect their phantom dots any more. I don't blame them; accepting the original arguments would only make them look more reckless.
I have not seen any such change in rationale. Bush told us in Jan. 2002 that Iraq posed a threat, and that we could no longer assume that the oceans would protect us against that threat. He said the exact same thing 2 weeks ago in his nationally televised press conference. Nothing has changed.
This war didn't do what it claimed to want to do.
This war (i.e. the "War on Terror") is far from over.