Yes, the Bush administration has been so successful at bringing peace and democracy to Iraq,
Fleeing Afghanistan for Iraq? I can understand.
and tracking down Bin Laden.
The war against the Islamist extremists is much bigger than just Bin Laden. Al Qaeda has been significantly disrupted and large parts of it destroyed. That has to be done either way, and is arguably more important.
We played right into their hands. Al Qaeda even endorsed Bush for the 2004 elections.
I guess you've never heard of reverse psychology. Whatever you do, don't think of a pickle.
What Al Qaeda said:
Please vote for Bush! He is stupid! He is the one we want!
What they were thinking:
Anyone but Bush! Clinton just lobbed missiles, Bush sent fighters, bombers, gunships, soldiers, marines, aircraft carriers, special forces, missiles, advisors, supplies to the Northern Alliance, and cut off our funding! Even Pakistan, one of three countries in the world to recognize the taliban is backing away! We miss our training camps in Afghanistan! We miss running the country with the Taliban! That bugger had the top 75% or our leaders captured or killed and thousands of our jihadis with them! This is working... not! Osama misses driving around the country in a SUV instead of riding a donkey cart in a burqa. That Kerry called American soldiers war criminals... maybe he will bring them all home, put them in jail, and leave us alone!
I'm sure that four more years of the Bush administration is exactly what they wanted.
Thank goodness there are people like you to save us from "nonsense" of those "quacks" at Scotland Yard, MI5, FBI, NSA, and the rest.
Officials told NBC News that the alleged mastermind of the plot is still in Pakistan and has yet to be captured.
Some plotters had already purchased tickets on a flight to stage a test run planned for this weekend. The test run would have determined how easily the plotters could have gotten their materials past security and on board the planes.
The actual attack would have followed within days, officials told NBC News.
I guess it is "well known" that explosive could in no way be made from a wide range of readily available materials like peroxide as was used last year in the London subway attacks.
The NYPD officials said investigators believe the bombers used a peroxide-based explosive called HMDT, or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. HMDT can be made using ordinary ingredients like hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach), citric acid (a common food preservative) and heat tablets (sometimes used by the military for cooking).
(CBS News) LONDON Police found martyrdom videos and bomb-making components during the investigation of the alleged plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners, prosecutors said Monday in announcing 11 people had been charged with terrorism offenses.
It SHOULD have been a slaughterhouse, according to conventional wisdom. But in reality, the amount of casulties due to agent was tiny; they inflicted more casulties through panic and stampeding than due to agent exposure.
The AUM Shinrikyo cult attack wasn't effective because they had very low grade agent and poor delivery systems for their intended target. It was hardly ideal and yet they still managed to kill people and sicken about a thousand.
Chemical weapons JUST DON'T WORK unless delivered in huge volumes - and the ability to deliver in huge volumes is limited to large, well-equipped state armies. A chemical strike is well down the list of potential threats to the civillian populace.
That is entirely dependet upon the target. The reason you typically need large amounts of chemical agents to have a significant effect on soldiers is that they are typically trained, alert, warned by sensors, dispersed and have protective gear. Civilians are typically unprotected and tend to be more concentrated. Terrorist use of chemical weapons is a genuine threat and Al Qaeda is pursuing it. US forces have found records of their experiemnts in Afghanistan.
A skilled and motivated sniper is far, far more dangerous than a dozen nutballs with a litre of VX.
That depends a great deal on what the nutballs (suicide terrorists?) do with the VX.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous... and while I have a hard time buying into anybodies' tinfoil-hat conspriracy theories (never assume malevolance where stupidity will serve) that sure looks like fear-mongering to me.
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.
Statistically, no. They were never flawed. The polls match the vote results, as statisticians know what they are doing, and history backs me up.
Sorry, no. Polling is a statistical technique subject to variance even when done properly. Once you start introducing the human equasion into statistics, it is even easier for subtle errors,problems, and quirks of human behavior to creep in and not be accounted for in the polls design. Wishful thinking and ideological motivation only make the problem worse.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Exit polls overstated John Kerry's share of the vote on November 2, both nationally and in many states, because more Kerry supporters participated in the survey than Bush voters, according to an internal review of the exit-polling process released Wednesday.
The report said it is difficult to pinpoint precisely why, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit poll than were Bush voters. "There were certainly motivational factors that are impossible to quantify," the report said.
Problems with the numbers first surfaced on Election Day, when exit polls showed Kerry with a 3-point lead nationally and an edge in some key battleground states. Those exit poll results were leaked and became widely known through the Internet.
CNN did not air those inaccurate results or post them on its Web site, and CNN's projections of winners on election night were accurate.
Nationwide, Bush got about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry.
The discrepancies stemmed from problems in interviewing voters at the 1,480 randomly chosen precincts where exit pollsters were stationed, not from how those precincts were selected or the way the data were processed, according to the 75-page report.
.... Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. Our analysis of the difference between the vote count and the exit poll at each polling location in our sample has found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment," the report found.
The new report shows that exit polls overstated Kerry's support in 26 states, while estimates overstated Bush's support in four states. The problem is not new -- in every presidential election since 1988, exit polls have overstated support for Democrats nationally -- but the discrepancy in 2004 was more pronounced than in previous years.
The report identified several factors that may have contributed to the discrepancy, including:
# Distance restrictions from polling places imposed upon the interviewers by election officials at the state and local level.
# Weather conditions, which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations.
# Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in the exit poll sample.
# Interviewer characteristics, such as age, which were more often related to the errors last year than in past elections.
...in every presidential election since 1988, exit polls have overstated support for Democrats nationally -- but the discrepancy in 2004 was more pronounced than in previous years.
President Bush has as much chance of staying in power after the next presidential election as Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton had: none. Two terms, and that's it. The tiny fringe of people that actually believe that some sort of anti-Constitutional coup like this is about to be sprung dwarfs the practically non-existent fringe of people that support it.
Your post does leave me a little curious though, what is your thinking here? If the government prepares for displaced persons / disasters, it is evidence of incipient fascism, if they don't, it is incompetence? That sort of gets them coming and going, eh?
Transmeta's original claim to fame was low power consumption. Sadly they haven't done that well in the market.
Sun is currently making big claims for its new multicore servers, dubbing it CoolThreads technology. Their blurb is 5x the performance for 1/5 the power and 1/4 the space.
The group was "planning to commit a series of terrorist attacks against solely Canadian targets in southern Ontario,"
"This group took steps to acquire three tons of ammonium nitrate and other components necessary to create explosive devices," he said.
"To put this in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people took one ton of ammonium nitrate."
.... "This group posed a real and serious threat," McDonell said. "It had the capacity and intent to carry out these attacks."
They just had it planned, and were buying the three tons of bomb making material to add to their radio controlled detonator, firearms, etc. And, of course, they had international links leading to at least 18 other arrests around the world at the same time.
The Canadians expect more incidents and actual attacks.
This happened only 3 months ago, and already people have forgotten?
You seem to have fallen for the "magic words" fallacy regarding declarations of war, that a bill bearing that title or using those words has to pass Congress for there to be a state of war, but that is false, besides which it generally isn't done anymore, as noted by Robert F. Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law:
For constitutional purposes, the joint resolution passed with but a single dissenting vote by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, was the equivalent of a formal declaration of war. The Supreme Court held in 1800 (Bas v. Tingy), and again in 1801 (Talbot v. Seamen), that Congress could formally authorize war by joint resolution without passing a formal declaration of war; and in the post-U.N. Charter era no state has issued a formal declaration of war. Such declarations, in fact, have become as much an anachronism as the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal (outlawed by treaty in 1856). Formal declarations were historically only required when a state was initiating an aggressive war, which today is unlawful.
The Framers, however, distinguished between the power to "declare" war, which they indeed granted to Congress, and the power to "make" war, which was vested in the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Based on this power alone, presidents throughout our history have initiated military action to protect vital American interests overseas. Given Saddam Hussein's past record, President Bush could clearly take the position that this power is sufficient to support action to end the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
It doesn't matter if the US viewed Iraq's government as legitimate or not, it could make war on it either way.
As to making war on a country "half way around the world" only for oil.... maybe you need a globe, most of the world is half way around the world for the US. The US isn't in Europe, or Asia. Besides, it wasn't oil that was at issue, but Iraq's behavior. I also doubt that what oil Iraq sells to the US is really any cheaper than it is on the world markets. Furthermore, the Iraqi government controls its oil these days, not the US.
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done.
You are confusing two separate incidents, the Iranian hostage crisis that started under President Carter and lasted 444 days, and the hostages that were part of the Iran-Contra scandal. They are different.
The conspiracy theory that you describe:
After being elected in November, he opened back channel negotiations with the Ayatollah. The gist is Reagan offered to supply Iran with arms on the condition that Iran held our hostages until he took the oath. That's two months those innocent people had to live in captivity so Reagan could score political points.
... the so called Octaber Surprise theory, which by the way you mangle, has been thoroughly discredited. It is wrong.
You are perpetuating "information" that is not only false, but probably a lie.
Gore Sr.'s shares made him a part owner of Occidental Petroleum just as much as Dick Cheny's shares made him a part owner of $34 Billion Halliburton. It may have been a tiny fraction in both cases, but a fraction of ownership none the less.
The purchase of Elk Hills tripled Occidental Petroleum's domestic oil reserves overnight. It also enriched Occidental's stockholders, including Gore's father, Al Gore Sr. The elder Gore owned more than $500,000 worth of Occidental stock at the time of the Elk Hills purchase in 1997. When he died the following year, his son became the executor of his estate and, according to the vice president's federal income disclosure forms, the estate continued, as of May 1999, to hold the Occidental stock.
.... "The Buying of the President 2000" reports that Occidental gave $50,000 after one of Gore's fund-raising calls from his White House office. "Indeed," according to the book, "since Gore became part of the Democratic ticket in the summer of 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes." And Gore himself has received $35,550 in Occidental campaign contributions during that same period, the center estimates.
.... And there's much, much more: Lewis' fascinating dissection of the more than 50-year relationship between Gore's family and Occidental Petroleum begins when the elder Gore was serving in the House of Representatives. Occidental was then run by Armand Hammer, once described as "the godfather of American corporate corruption" and a master of double-dealing who laundered funds and placed spies in the United States for Moscow to protect his vast oil and gas holdings in the Soviet Union. Hammer buddied up to Gore Sr. by putting him on the payroll of his New Jersey cattle ranch in the 1940s.
.... When Gore Sr. left the Senate in 1970, "Hammer gave him a $500,000-a-year job as the chairman of Island Coal Creek Company, an Occidental subsidiary, and a seat on Occidental's board of directors," according to the book. Meanwhile, Al Jr. and his wife, Tipper, hosted Hammer at Ronald Reagan's 1984 inauguration and again at President Bush's in 1988. "In return," according to the book, "Hammer and members of his family bent over backwards to get money into Gore's campaigns," and the largesse continued after Hammer died, in 1990, and Gore became Clinton's vice president.
From 1996 to 2000, the Nasdaq went from 600 to 5,000! Dot-com companies run by people who were barely in their 30's, were going public and raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital. These companies didn't even have much of a business plan, and certainly didn't have any earnings, either! For example, Pets.com had no earnings yet came public and raised billions of dollars. Dot-coms wasted millions of dollars per night on frivolous parties. Hard work was never part of the picture for dot-commers. There are many stories of dot-com employees walking around barefoot in the office and playing foosball all day. At one point, a new millionaire was created every 60 seconds! Many of these instant millionaires thought that they were so brilliant, that all they had to do was play to make money. Never mistake a bull market for brains.
.... By early 2000, reality started to sink in. Investors soon realized that the dot-com dream was really a bubble. Within months, the Nasdaq crashed from 5,000 to 2,000. Hundreds of stocks such as Pet.com, which were each worth billions, were off the map as quickly as they appeared. Panic selling ensued as investors lost trillions of dollars. The stock market kept crashing down to 800 in 2002. One high flier, Microstrategy, slid from $3500 per share to $4! Numerous accounting scandals came to light, showing how many companies artificially inflated earnings. Shareholders were crippled. In 2001, the economy entered a recession as the Fed repeatedly cut rates, trying to stop the bleeding. Millions of workers were now jobless and had lost their life savings.
Needless to say, the New Economy was a farce, and traditional economic principles still hold. What is sadly interesting is how bubbles will continue to occur in the future. When they do occur, foolish investors will say, "This time is different!"
Unless the US converts to a proportional representation system it's highly unlikely that more nuanced politics will develop.
Representational multiparty systems are much more prone to political extremism, and give minor extremist parties disproportionate power since they are often needed to form coalition governments. The effect is easy to see in most parliamentary democracies with representational systems, especially those that don't place a minimal percentage for representation.
Any two party system is just barely one party away from a dictatorship.
Appealing rhetoric, but nonsense. The US isn't a two party system, but it is set up in such a way that there is a strong pull toward there being two main parties. As such, it tends to pull the parties toward the political center, not toward extremism.
And it shows.
The US, close to a dictatorship? LOL. No. Not even close.
By the way, you don't seem to consider the effect of primaries where there are often multiple candidates. Much of the "nuance" in positions starts and is pruned there.
That particular innovation started under the Clinton Administration (does that make it good now?) although protestors have been kept away from main events for far longer than that.
I think you've just demonstrated the typical depth behind many of the outlandish charges and "parades of horribles" against the Bush administration.
and did not have control over the estate with which to sell them.
I doubt it. That is what being an executor means.... Of course, if you are correct, that leaves some mighty big questions, such as: how did the shares get sold, and who did it, and if it wasn't Al Gore, then why were they in his tax filings?
The elder Gore owned more than $500,000 worth of Occidental stock at the time of the Elk Hills purchase in 1997. When he died the following year, his son became the executor of his estate and, according to the vice president's federal income disclosure forms, the estate continued, as of May 1999, to hold the Occidental stock.
The close relationship Gore and his father have enjoyed with Occidental Petroleum is detailed in "The Buying of the President 2000," a new book by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis is the founder and executive director of the center, a nonpartisan watchdog group of journalists in Washington whose scoops include the Lincoln Bedroom fund-raising scandal. A former investigative reporter with "60 Minutes" and ABC News, Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1990.
"The Buying of the President 2000" reports that Occidental gave $50,000 after one of Gore's fund-raising calls from his White House office. "Indeed," according to the book, "since Gore became part of the Democratic ticket in the summer of 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes." And Gore himself has received $35,550 in Occidental campaign contributions during that same period, the center estimates.
The article even offers some juicy tidbits about Bush.
Stop being mislead by misleaders, and don't believe everything you read.
I would offer you the same advice, and add that you should read more widely, like this item from the 6/29/2000 Wall Street Journal:
CARTHAGE, Tenn. -- On his most recent tax return, as he has the past 25 years, Vice President Al Gore lists a $20,000 mining royalty for the extraction of zinc from beneath his farm here in the bucolic hills of the Cumberland River Valley. In total, Mr. Gore has earned $500,000 from zinc royalties. His late father, the senator, introduced him not only to the double-bladed ax but also to Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., which sold the zinc-rich land to the Gore family in 1973.
So Al Gore took the payments for 28 years, and didn't stop, according to your quote, until forced to when the mine actually closed. That's Green.... or at least politically expedient. Actually I guess it wasn't even expedient since he took political heat for it, but still kept taking the money until it ran out.
I found the Gore relationship to Occidental even more interesting than the shares that they owned:
The elder Gore owned more than $500,000 worth of Occidental stock at the time of the Elk Hills purchase in 1997. When he died the following year, his son became the executor of his estate and, according to the vice president's federal income disclosure forms, the estate continued, as of May 1999, to hold the Occidental stock.
The close relationship Gore and his father have enjoyed with Occidental Petroleum is detailed in "The Buying of the President 2000," a new book by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis is the founder and executive director of the center, a nonpartisan watchdog group of journalists in Washington whose scoops include the Lincoln Bedroom fund-raising scandal. A former investigative reporter with "60 Minutes" and ABC News, Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1990.
"The Buying of the President 2000" reports that Occidental gave $50,000 after one of Gore's fund-raising calls from his White House office. "Indeed," according to the book, "since Gore became part of the Democratic ticket in the summer of 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes." And Gore himself has received $35,550 in Occidental campaign contributions during that same period, the center estimates.
.... And there's much, much more: Lewis' fascinating dissection of the more than 50-year relationship between Gore's family and Occidental Petroleum begins when the elder Gore was serving in the House of Representatives. Occidental was then run by Armand Hammer, once described as "the godfather of American corporate corruption" and a master of double-dealing who laundered funds and placed spies in the United States for Moscow to protect his vast oil and gas holdings in the Soviet Union. Hammer buddied up to Gore Sr. by putting him on the payroll of his New Jersey cattle ranch in the 1940s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to prosecute Hammer, but backed off for fear of Hammer's friends in Congress, including Gore, who ascended to the Senate in 1952. Before long, charges "The Buying of the President 2000," the advantages of being friends with Hammer were inevitably passed on to Gore Jr.
..... Meanwhile, Al Jr. and his wife, Tipper, hosted Hammer at Ronald Reagan's 1984 inauguration and again at President Bush's in 1988. "In return," according to the book, "Hammer and members of his family bent over backwards to get money into Gore's campaigns," and the largesse continued after Hammer died, in 1990, and Gore became Clinton's vice president.
Al Gore never owned any share in Occidental Petroleum, even I as a european know that.
Lets add a little more detail to clear things up a bit:
. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.
Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.
Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.
The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life?
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Yes, the Bush administration has been so successful at bringing peace and democracy to Iraq,
Fleeing Afghanistan for Iraq? I can understand.
and tracking down Bin Laden.
The war against the Islamist extremists is much bigger than just Bin Laden. Al Qaeda has been significantly disrupted and large parts of it destroyed. That has to be done either way, and is arguably more important.
I suggest some supplemental reading. A little fresh air never hurts.
I guess you've never heard of reverse psychology. Whatever you do, don't think of a pickle.
What Al Qaeda said:
What they were thinking:
I'm sure that four more years of the Bush administration is exactly what they wanted.
I guess it is "well known" that explosive could in no way be made from a wide range of readily available materials like peroxide as was used last year in the London subway attacks.
Yep, no evidence at all.
It SHOULD have been a slaughterhouse, according to conventional wisdom. But in reality, the amount of casulties due to agent was tiny; they inflicted more casulties through panic and stampeding than due to agent exposure.
The AUM Shinrikyo cult attack wasn't effective because they had very low grade agent and poor delivery systems for their intended target. It was hardly ideal and yet they still managed to kill people and sicken about a thousand.
Chemical weapons JUST DON'T WORK unless delivered in huge volumes - and the ability to deliver in huge volumes is limited to large, well-equipped state armies. A chemical strike is well down the list of potential threats to the civillian populace.
That is entirely dependet upon the target. The reason you typically need large amounts of chemical agents to have a significant effect on soldiers is that they are typically trained, alert, warned by sensors, dispersed and have protective gear. Civilians are typically unprotected and tend to be more concentrated. Terrorist use of chemical weapons is a genuine threat and Al Qaeda is pursuing it. US forces have found records of their experiemnts in Afghanistan.
A skilled and motivated sniper is far, far more dangerous than a dozen nutballs with a litre of VX.
That depends a great deal on what the nutballs (suicide terrorists?) do with the VX.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous... and while I have a hard time buying into anybodies' tinfoil-hat conspriracy theories (never assume malevolance where stupidity will serve) that sure looks like fear-mongering to me.
Instead of guessing, try reading.
That's down right sinister.
No, it was BS.
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.
Sorry, no. Polling is a statistical technique subject to variance even when done properly. Once you start introducing the human equasion into statistics, it is even easier for subtle errors,problems, and quirks of human behavior to creep in and not be accounted for in the polls design. Wishful thinking and ideological motivation only make the problem worse.
Eating with the crazy aunt in the basement?
If you believe that this contingency contract for responding to emergencies is, as the author of the piece at your link puts it, another step down the Bush administration's road toward martial law, you can go here.
President Bush has as much chance of staying in power after the next presidential election as Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton had: none. Two terms, and that's it. The tiny fringe of people that actually believe that some sort of anti-Constitutional coup like this is about to be sprung dwarfs the practically non-existent fringe of people that support it.
Your post does leave me a little curious though, what is your thinking here? If the government prepares for displaced persons / disasters, it is evidence of incipient fascism, if they don't, it is incompetence? That sort of gets them coming and going, eh?
Transmeta's original claim to fame was low power consumption. Sadly they haven't done that well in the market.
Sun is currently making big claims for its new multicore servers, dubbing it CoolThreads technology. Their blurb is 5x the performance for 1/5 the power and 1/4 the space.
Somebody set up us the bombe!
Well.... technically it was still just a plot, not yet an attack, since the 17 were arrested by RCMP before they could carry it out.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell:
They just had it planned, and were buying the three tons of bomb making material to add to their radio controlled detonator, firearms, etc. And, of course, they had international links leading to at least 18 other arrests around the world at the same time.
The Canadians expect more incidents and actual attacks.
This happened only 3 months ago, and already people have forgotten?
And...
It doesn't matter if the US viewed Iraq's government as legitimate or not, it could make war on it either way.
As to making war on a country "half way around the world" only for oil.... maybe you need a globe, most of the world is half way around the world for the US. The US isn't in Europe, or Asia. Besides, it wasn't oil that was at issue, but Iraq's behavior. I also doubt that what oil Iraq sells to the US is really any cheaper than it is on the world markets. Furthermore, the Iraqi government controls its oil these days, not the US.
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done.
Sweeping nonsense.
The conspiracy theory that you describe:
You are perpetuating "information" that is not only false, but probably a lie.
Gore Sr.'s shares made him a part owner of Occidental Petroleum just as much as Dick Cheny's shares made him a part owner of $34 Billion Halliburton. It may have been a tiny fraction in both cases, but a fraction of ownership none the less.
But, there is far more to the Gore-Occidental story than you let on...
So I think that the economy tanked as a result of his impending presidency. At least, that's how it looked and felt to me.
As an experiment, try correlating your feelings about the economy tanking with the Stock Market Bubble. Your feelings are misleading you.
Right.... the Stock Market Bubble had no effect.
Keep trying.
How quickly some people forget, even if it wasn't that long ago.
I guess that whole Stock Market Bubble never happened?
I guess your BS detector was in self-test mode.
Unless the US converts to a proportional representation system it's highly unlikely that more nuanced politics will develop.
Representational multiparty systems are much more prone to political extremism, and give minor extremist parties disproportionate power since they are often needed to form coalition governments. The effect is easy to see in most parliamentary democracies with representational systems, especially those that don't place a minimal percentage for representation.
Any two party system is just barely one party away from a dictatorship.
Appealing rhetoric, but nonsense. The US isn't a two party system, but it is set up in such a way that there is a strong pull toward there being two main parties. As such, it tends to pull the parties toward the political center, not toward extremism.
And it shows.
The US, close to a dictatorship? LOL. No. Not even close.
By the way, you don't seem to consider the effect of primaries where there are often multiple candidates. Much of the "nuance" in positions starts and is pruned there.
That particular innovation started under the Clinton Administration (does that make it good now?) although protestors have been kept away from main events for far longer than that.
I think you've just demonstrated the typical depth behind many of the outlandish charges and "parades of horribles" against the Bush administration.
True
and did not have control over the estate with which to sell them.
I doubt it. That is what being an executor means.... Of course, if you are correct, that leaves some mighty big questions, such as: how did the shares get sold, and who did it, and if it wasn't Al Gore, then why were they in his tax filings?
But there are even more interesting details:
The article even offers some juicy tidbits about Bush.
I would offer you the same advice, and add that you should read more widely, like this item from the 6/29/2000 Wall Street Journal: So Al Gore took the payments for 28 years, and didn't stop, according to your quote, until forced to when the mine actually closed. That's Green.... or at least politically expedient. Actually I guess it wasn't even expedient since he took political heat for it, but still kept taking the money until it ran out.
I found the Gore relationship to Occidental even more interesting than the shares that they owned:
Lets add a little more detail to clear things up a bit: