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Messages - BT

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16051
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 08:16:26 PM »
How The Foley Story Broke - I Find This Puzzling
Apparently the Mark Foley story first broke on this new blog, StopSexPredartors.blogspot.com, which started in July and brought down the Congressional leadership with its sixth, seventh and eighth posts.

Color me skeptical.  Maybe the blog author was an unwitting catspaw, but I would want some assurance that this was not simply a successful attempt to promote a story that wasn't quite ready for the Mainstream Media by laundering it through some blogs (and wasn't that Matt Drudge's ecological niche, back in the day?).  And part of my suspicion arises because the blog posted emails about gay Congressmen in repsonse to a post about "skinterns", scantily clad young women.  Where were the emails about Dirty Old Men and Sweet Young Things of the female persuasion?

The River City Mud Bugle has even more backstory:

Two hours later [following the first posting of the former page's emails], someone writing under the name “WHInternNow” published a diary on Daily Kos linking to Stop Sex Predators. The diary was met with skepticism from Daily Kos users, and received only a few largely critical comments. “This diary makes an accusation,” one commenter wrote, “a serious accusation, but provides no evidence to back it up.”

In a previous Daily Kos diary about Foley, “WHInternNow” made an early attempt to draw attention to Foley’s peccadilloes.

The Real Problem With Foley (0 / 0)

It’s not that he’s gay. It’s that he constantly hits on underage interns on The Hill. You guys talk about an “open secret” well Foley’s eye for the young boys in the White House and around the Capitol is what has the Republican bosses scared to death. It’s just wrong that this guy can hit on young boys and still be in the leadership.

by WHInternNow on Tue Sep 05, 2006 at 07:48:09 PM CDT

The story was evidently not quite good enough for the D Kos, but ABC found enough to run with it.

This Editor's Note from the St. Petersburg Times explaining their handling of the story raises more questions:

In November of last year, we were given copies of an email exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana. Other news organizations later got them, too. The conversation in those emails was friendly chit-chat.

Foley asked the boy about how he had come through Hurricane Katrina and about the boy's upcoming birthday. In one of those emails, Foley casually asked the teen to send him a "pic" of himself. Also among those emails was the page's exchange with a congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Alexander, who had been the teen's sponsor in the page program.

The teen shared his exchange he'd had with Foley and asked the staffer if she thought Foley was out of bounds.

There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him.  He told us Foley's request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story.

We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy's family didn't want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.

So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn't go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today's paper, our policy is that we don't make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. After much discussion among top editors at the paper, we concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn't meet our standard for publication. Evidently, other news organizations felt the same way.

Since that time, we revisited the question more than once, but never learned anything that changed our position. The Louisiana boy's emails broke into the open last weekend, when a blogger got copies and posted them online.

Later that week, on Thursday, a news blog at the website of ABC News followed suit, with the addition of one new fact: Foley's Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, was on the record about the Louisiana boy's emails and was calling for an investigation. That's when we wrote our first story, for Friday's papers.

After ABC News broke the story on its website, someone contacted ABC and provided a detailed email exchange between Foley and at least one other page that was far different from what we had seen before. This was overtly sexual, not something Foley could dismiss as misinterpreted friendliness.

That's what drove Foley to resign on Friday.

Fine, but - why was Foley's opponent so sure that he had a solid accusation?  Or was it a lucky shot in the dark?

And how did ABC round up the follow-up emails and IMs so quickly?

And was it the page in Louisiana who sent his Foley emails to an unknown web-site after declining to push this story with the St. Petersburg Times?  Maybe - the St. Petersburg Times would not let him make an anonymous accusation.  OTOH, if the former page was so determined to get Foley, why didn't he try another news organization - ABC, for example, didn't seem to have a problem with anonymously sourcing this.

And if it was *not* the page from Louisiana who sent the emails to StopSexPredators, who did?

Baffling.

KEEPING HOPE ALIVE:  I welcome some help in sorting out the dates of the second wave of lurid emails and IMs.  For example, one of them - "strip down and get relaxed" - was from 2003.  If none of them are from 2006, then one might hope that the leadership intervention was effective.

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/10/i_smell_a_rat.html

16052
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 08:08:51 PM »
Quote
Mikey begs the question:To  put it another way, are you as shocked by CREW's failure to come forward as you are by Hastert's?

There is no evidense that the GOP Leadership was aware of the IM's . Perhaps because CREW held that information close to its vest, for whatever purposes.

They were aware of the emails and handled it. So where exactly was Hastert derelict in his duties?

16053
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 07:49:56 PM »
Quote
Why does this cut more against the Republicans than the Democrats?

You seem to think that attending church implies moral perfection.

Which is ludicrous on the face of it. The idea is to seek moral perfection, not have it before you start attending.

Else why have the Sacrament of Confession as they do in the Catholic Church. or Pastoral guidance in many others?

16054
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 07:44:03 PM »
Lanya you are covering old ground. The issue is not the emails it is the IM's and the over-reaching accusation that GOP leadership was involved in a coverup.

Far as i can see the only coverup was done by CREW.


16055
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 07:41:31 PM »
CREW stands for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington .

Of course they should have come forward. To do otherwise goes counter to their purpose.





16056
3DHS / Re: Allen should 'fess up and be done with it.
« on: October 01, 2006, 07:38:59 PM »
B. 1910 Anti-Miscegenation Statutes

Prior to the Civil War, a number of states had statutes prohibiting "intermarriage ... [or] forms of illicit intercourse between the races." Notably, "during the years of Reconstruction in the South ... none of the statutes against miscegenation appear to have been repealed." Even outside the South, only a handful of states repealed their anti- miscegenation statutes in the wake of the Civil War. By 1910, 28 states still had such statutes in effect. Six of these states, all Southern, prohibited racial intermarriage through a constitutional provision.

Although the text of these statutes varied by state, all 28 statutes expressly prohibited intermarriage between whites and blacks. Seven states prohibited marriages between whites and Asians in some form. The universal application to African Americans suggests that these prohibitions primarily sought to prevent white-black intermarriage; legislators may have added Asian Americans by subsequent amendment in a number of cases, rather than including them at the time of original enactment.

Statutes prohibiting white-black intermarriage existed predominantly in the South, where blacks resided in the most significant numbers. Sixteen of the southern states in the belt between Delaware and Texas, with the single exception of the District of Columbia, prohibited black-white miscegenation by statute. This, however, also included states like West Virginia--with a 5.26 percent black population--as well as Oklahoma--with a 8.30 percent black population. Missouri, with its 4.78 percent black population, also imposed such a restriction.

Such statutes were by no means confined to the southern states, where African American numbers were the most significant. Indiana, for example, imposed intermarriage restrictions on its 2.23 percent black population. Nebraska, which contained fewer than 8,000 African Americans amongst its 1.2 million people, merely 0.64 percent maintained an anti-miscegenation provision in 1910. North Dakota, a state that was nearly 99 percent white, imposed a similar restriction. Eight western states with meager African American numbers also enacted prohibitions on intermarriage; the largest black population in the West was in Colorado, whose 11,453 African American residents constituted 1.43 percent of the state's population. The existence of anti-miscegenation statutes in states with such marginal African American populations undermines Stephenson's theory that this phenomenon correlates with multiple races living in "anything like equal numbers." In all, 91.8 percent of the African American population in 1910 resided in states where they were subject to intermarriage restrictions.

The seven states applying their prohibitions to people of Asian descent were Arizona, California, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. The specific language in these statutes referring to Asian people varied from state to state. The statutes of Arizona, California, Mississippi, and Utah all referred to "Mongolians." Nevada and Oregon used the term "Chinese," and Montana specified both "Chinese" and "Japanese" persons. The reasons behind the inconsistent terminology are unclear, although the evidence suggests that the importance of these distinctions should not be exaggerated. First, the history of Asian American jurisprudence suggests a tendency by courts to read inclusive racial categories narrowly, while reading exclusive categories broadly. Secondly, a number of courts refer to dictionary classifications of race, such as "that of Blumenbach, who makes five ... [including] [t]he Mongolian, or yellow race, occupying Tartary, China, Japan, etc. ... and ... the Malay, or brown race, occupying the islands of the Indian Archipelago." Both of these factors suggest that any court interpreting its state's anti-miscegenation statute would be inclined to read the term "Mongolian" broadly.

Although Oregon and Nevada mentioned only "Chinese" in their intermarriage prohibitions, there is no case law from either state to illustrate how broadly the courts interpreted this term. The California case of Roldan v. Los Angeles County, however, offers a helpful analogy. In Roldan, a Filipino litigant successfully utilized Blumenbach's racial terminology to assert that California's prohibition applying to "Mongolians" did not include him, since he was a member of the "Malay" race. The California legislature, however, quickly responded by explicitly adding "member of the Malay race" to the state's anti-miscegenation statute. The holdings in cases like Rice and Hall, and the legislative response to Roldan, emphasize the multiplicity of efforts broadly to prohibit marriage between whites and any group of Asian Americans. Even, however, if such terminology were to be interpreted narrowly as covering only a smaller subset of Asian Americans, it would only further discredit Stephenson's theory that such statutes corresponded to "other race elements exist[ing] in considerable numbers."

Assuming that intermarriage prohibitions applied to the entire Asian American population within the states in which they existed, no state enforcing such a restriction contained an Asian American population even close to the "anything like equal numbers" standard posited by Stephenson. Although Mississippi contained a majority black population, its total Asian American population--to whom it also extended its intermarriage prohibition--amounted to only 259 people, or 0.01 percent of the statewide population. Even in the West, three of the states in which Asian Americans were prohibited from intermarrying with whites--Montana, Arizona, and Utah--contained fewer than one percent Asian Americans. Of the three remaining states, California had the largest Asian American population, over 77,000, but this figure amounted to only 3.26 percent of the total population of California. Thus, while over two-thirds of the national Asian American population were restricted by anti-miscegenation statutes in their home states, in no such state did Asian Americans amount to even 1/30th of the population. Such statistics strongly undermine the assertion that growing Asian American numbers, threatening to disrupt the continuing dominance of the white population, provided the primary motivation for these statutes.

C. 1950 Anti-Miscegenation Statutes

By 1950, whites had secured a majority of the population in each of the forty-eight states and the District of Columbia. The African American population had grown at a rate slightly below the national average, and the Asian American population had grown at a slightly above-average rate. In both cases, however, this growth was accompanied by increasing dissemination throughout the country. African Americans had moved west and now surpassed Asian Americans in every state except Idaho and Utah. Asian American numbers also grew significantly in eastern states with large metropolitan areas, like Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. With both groups moving away from their centers of density, the largest concentrations of population were getting smaller. African Americans constituted less than a quarter of the population in most of the southern states, and Asian Americans comprised less than one percent of the population in every state except California, where they now formed only 1.35 percent.

Despite this diffusion of both the black and Asian American populations all 28 existing anti-miscegenation statutes remained in effect, with two additional states adopting such statutes and eight states adding Asian Americans to their prohibitions for the first time. The states that adopted new anti-miscegenation statues after 1910 were Wyoming, in 1913, and South Dakota, around 1919. The Wyoming statute applied to "Negroes, Mulattoes, Mongolians, or Malays," forbidding the marriage of any of these races with "white persons." The new South Dakota statute forbade the marriage of "any person belonging to the African, [K]orean, Malayan, or Mongolian race with any person of the opposite sex belonging to the Caucasian or white race." Both statutes specifically included both African Americans and Asian Americans within their prohibitions, supporting the thesis that such prohibitions never independently targeted Asian Americans.

Examination of the population patterns of these two states during this time directly contradicts Stephenson's population-driven theory. In 1920, the first census year following the adoption of these two statutes, Wyoming's African American population had shrunk by about a thousand people from the previous census, down to only 0.71 percent of the state population. The Asian American population had similarly decreased by nearly 400, down to 0.74 percent of the total. In South Dakota, the numbers had essentially remained stagnant, amounting to combined Asian American and African American numbers of slightly over 1,000 people in a state of well over 600,000, just 0.15 percent of the population. With the addition of these two statutes, a total of thirty states prohibited intermarriage between whites and African Americans in 1950. With the dispersion of the black population, however, the total proportion of African Americans covered by such statutes had decreased--from nearly 92 percent in 1910 to 72.9 percent by 1950.

The six other states adding Asian Americans to their prohibitions for the first time between 1910 and 1950 were: Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, and Virginia. Four of these states--Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, and Nebraska--specifically added a reference to Asian Americans in some form in their anti-miscegenation statutes. Nebraska added the categories "Japanese or Chinese" in 1911. However, these two groups combined in the 1910 Census constituted only 702 people in a state of about 1.2 million, amounting to just 0.06 percent. Similarly, Missouri added the term "Mongolians" in 1919, and Idaho did the same in 1921. However, the 1920 Census shows that Missouri's Asian American population actually decreased slightly from the previous census, while the total state population had slightly grown. Asian Americans still totaled less than 0.02 percent. The same Census shows that Idaho's Asian American population had also slightly shrunk since 1910, while the overall state population had grown by almost a third. In 1920, Asian Americans in Idaho comprised less than 0.5 percent of the total population. Maryland, for the first time in 1935, added "member of the Malay race" to its prohibitions. Asian American numbers in Maryland, however, hovered around 500 between 1930 and 1940, constituting about 0.03 percent of the state's population. For reference, Filipinos--a group commonly associated by the courts with the term "Malay"--totaled only 272 in Maryland in 1940. Thus, in none of these states did Asian American numbers approach those of the white population in the period immediately preceding the inclusion of Asian Americans within anti-miscegenation statutes. Contrary to Stephenson's thesis, these numbers remained low and, in some cases, even decreased.

Georgia and Virginia did not include Asian Americans specifically within their anti-miscegenation statutes, but instead declared it illegal for a white person to marry anyone "save" a white person--Georgia in 1927 and Virginia in 1924. In the same session, however, the Georgia legislature defined "white person" as "only persons of the white or Caucasian race, who have no ascertainable trace of either Negro, African, West Indian, Asiatic Indian, Mongolian, Japanese, or Chinese blood in their veins." Therefore, the specific contemplation of Asian Americans in the adoption of the statute is unquestionable. Likewise, the Virginia legislature in the same session adopted legislation authorizing the State Registrar of VitalStatistics to certify the "racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains," thereby establishing the specific intent of the legislature that Asian Americans be included with all other "non- Caucasic" groups for legal purposes. Again, the Census numbers depict an unusual background for these legislative actions. Virginia contained only about 335 Asian Americans throughout the 1920s, constituting only 0.01 percent of the state's nearly 2.5 million people. Georgia's Asian American population remained at around 250, not even reaching 0.01 percent of the state's population.

In all, the proliferation of anti-miscegenation statutes targeting Asian Americans kept pace with the diffusion of this group throughout the country so that, by 1950, the 15 effective statutes covered 64 percent of the Asian American population nationwide--as compared with 7 statutes reaching 67.3 percent in 1910. However, as Asian Americans became decreasingly concentrated on the West Coast, they existed in smaller niches and communities in states across the country. While Asian American numbers may have substantially increased in areas of previous scarcity by the middle of the twentieth century, in no territory did they constitute even 1/74th of the residential population. Stephenson's model--contending that statutory "distinctions" arose when other races resembled "equal numbers" to whites--therefore fails adequately to explain the gradual proliferation over this period of intermarriage restrictions targeting Asian Americans.

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/aspi02.htm

16057
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 07:29:20 PM »
And yet the only coverup we see so far is at the hands of CREW, who conveniently decided to release the smoking gun IM's 45 days before the election.

Meanwhile house pages were advised to be cautious with Foley in 2001, by GOP leadership.

Foley was told to can the emails by GOP leadership.

And Foley was asked to resign by GOP Leadership when the IM's came out.

I still don't see a coverup on the GOP's part.

Can't say the same for CREW, with their smoking gun information that they just held onto until an opportune time.

Certainly they were not highly motivated to protect the children.


16058
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 03:08:46 PM »
Quote
Lanya speaks out: Right.  "Hey, no kids got fucked. [That we know of, anyway.] What's the big deal?"  Great Republican values

Speaking of Values.

When did CREW get a copy of the IM's and why did they hold onto them for so long without forwarding to the appropriate authorities?

We know CREW is the progressive counterpart to Judicial Watch.
We know they are funded by George Soros.
We know they are the ones suing Cheney et al on the behalf of Valerie Plame.

We don't know if they are the ones who gave the story a little push to the AP, but who would be surprised if they did.

We don't know if Hastert, Reynolds or Shimkus were aware of the IM's.
We don't know if the IM's have been authenticated. We do know the exchange was edited.

We do know that the dems are trying to portray this as a coverup.
And we do know that CREW, by some means unknown, had critical evidence that they are just now releasing.

So if there was a cover-up, would not CREW be responsible.

And  does that mean Democrat values are more about partisan bloodsport than protecting adolescents?

16059
3DHS / Smart Democrats? Heh
« on: October 01, 2006, 10:57:55 AM »
FAQ - Torture!
Posted by Dean Barnett  | 3:37 PM
1) Let’s get right to it. Do you support torture?

Let me say what I do support: When it comes to high value targets in the war on terror, wannabe evil-doers who possess or might possess important information, I support any measures necessary to extract that information.


2) So you support torture! I am gobsmacked and filled with heartache.


There you go again, making erroneous conclusions without really knowing what you’re talking about. What is commonly considered torture – the rack, breaking kneecaps, bamboo under the finger-nails - is useless for extracting actionable information. Such techniques can get the victim to confess to anything under the sun but if it’s intelligence you seek, they’re not very helpful. And if you read a book like “Confessions of an Innocent Man” which details the hell a North American went through in a Saudi Arabian prison, you know these techniques spring from deeply sadistic souls, not committed professionals.


3) But I watch Jack Bauer on “24” and see him getting everything he needs by brandishing a pistol and with a judiciously placed blow. What gives?

It may have escaped you, but “24” is not a documentary, nor is it a scholarly inquiry on effective interrogation techniques.


4) So what does the actual scholarship say?


The key to gathering information is to disorient the subject. If you disorient the subject enough, he lets go of his secrets. Discomfort is actually much more useful than pain.


5) What’s the best way to get information?


Unquestionably water-boarding.


6) Gosh, I live in an intellectual broom closet and determinedly try to avoid any enlightenment on this subject. Please, please, please – don’t tell me what water-boarding is.

No dice. In water-boarding, the subject is strapped to a board with his feet above his head. A sheet of cellophane is placed over his face. Since the technique has existed and been used successfully for centuries, cellophane wasn’t always the face-covering tool of choice. It used to just be a cloth. The interrogator pours water over the cellophane. This triggers a gag reflex. The prisoner feels like he’s drowning. He feels that way because the combination of everything causes supreme disorientation. If one speaks with intelligence agents who openly used this technique like the French, Germans or Russians, they swear by it. It also works quickly. The rumor is that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad broke in under a minute.


7) But Amnesty International and the left say the information gleaned from this technique is unreliable. Is it?


Amnesty International is either confused, dishonest or both. Some people do say it’s unreliable. But the undeniable consensus is that water-boarding is an extremely productive interrogation tool.


8) That’s a very clinical way of putting it. Why don’t you go have yourself water- boarded and see how you like it.

No thanks. I’m sure I wouldn’t like it. I’m sure it’s extremely unpleasant. Does it rise to the level of “torture”? That’s for each individual to decide.


9) What do you think?

I don’t care. If some body of linguists or semanticists convened a weekend retreat in Cambridge, impartially studied the issue and labeled it torture, I still wouldn’t care. The welfare of terrorists is not my concern. Even if all the Jack Bauer-type crap you see on “24” was the best way to go, I’d still be okay with it.


10) But it’s not just terrorists. It’s suspected terrorists. Surely that bothers you.

It does. It’s inevitable that innocent people will be subjected to this kind of treatment. But this is war, and in war we make moral compromises. For example, normally we don’t like to kill people. In war, we try to kill people by the thousands. That Amnesty International guy that I was on TV with last night kept whining that we wouldn’t be having any of this if it weren’t for 9/11. Duh. If we weren’t at war, we could comfortably remain in the moral sphere that we aspire to. But right now, that’s not an option.


11) But we didn’t do stuff like this in World War II, did we?

I don’t know. But I do know we fire-bombed Dresden. I know we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know that in doing these things we knowingly engaged in actions that killed tens of thousands of innocents. When you’re at war, moral compromises are part of the deal.


12) But tell the truth – you and the others who support the measures we’re talking about, including the president, don’t seem particularly broken up about these so called “moral compromises.”

With you, I always tell the truth. Look, it’s a grim reality. It stinks that we have to do this. It would be nice if all those Jihadist lunatics would give up on their dreams of a global caliphate and leave us alone. I think what we have to do is clear, so I’m unbothered by the administration’s direction.


13) But wouldn’t you like to have a president who is more bothered by (or at least cognizant of) such things?

Definitely not. Bush 41 was so bothered by the ugliness of war that he enshrined the Powell Doctrine and refused to topple Saddam. People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men are ready to do violence on their behalf. I’d rather these rough men not be contemplating their navels and flagellating themselves over doing what needs to be done.


14) Now I know you’re on a little bit of a high because you debated this issue on TV last night. How’d it go?

The guy I was debating, the head of the local chapter of Amnesty International, had three points he kept raising. They were Abu Ghraib was bad, Bush is bad, and giving field-agents carte blanche to torture is bad. Since all three of these were irrelevant and just partisan talking points, I didn’t really address them.


15) How do you see the politics of this playing out?

The Democrats hate this issue. Abu Ghraib, which truly was a national disgrace, didn’t move public opinion because the public just doesn’t care about the welfare of these people. The fact that a guy like Sherrod Brown, one of the most liberal members of the House who’s running to become one of the most liberal members of the Senate, supported the bill tells you that the smart Democrats don’t like this issue one bit.


16) Smart Democrats? Heh.

Heh indeed.

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Common/Print.aspx

16060
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 02:21:30 AM »
And what is with this coverup nonsense.

 Looking at the timeline provided by thinkprogress,  as GOP leadership became knowledeable of the transgressions,  they handled it.

16061
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: October 01, 2006, 02:02:07 AM »
Quote
Foley was engaging in cybersex with underage boys.  Are you really going to shrug your shoulders and say, "Hey, no harm done..."?


I saw the Im's . I saw inappropriate comments. I didn't see cyber-sex.

Perhaps you can post something to back up your latest claim.

On the other hand, perhaps Florida will pass a civil sexual deviants registry law so that folks like this are better known to the public. Apparently full court press reporting laden with political undertones like when CREW gets involved isn't sufficient.

Also can you explain why this is just coming out now when the offences took place a full year ago?


16062
3DHS / Re: To Free Iraq from Dictatorial Oppression
« on: October 01, 2006, 01:22:06 AM »
Quote
“It is the right of the Iraqi government, as it combats terrorism, to silence any voice that tries to harm the national unity,” said Mr. Sadr, of the Iraqi Media Network

Wasn't this the same justification Mikey used to defend Castro for silencing critics?

16063
3DHS / Re: Is the Iraq War unwinnable? Indeed, what is winning?
« on: September 30, 2006, 09:46:43 PM »
Good question Domer. My apologies for the initial round of responses.

Perhaps everyone involved would like a do-ever and try to respond seriously to the question posed.

Personally i think Iraq is but one piece of the puzzle. And i don't think peace wil break out until all countries in the region (including a free Palestinian State) are willing to recognize each others sovereignty and be willing to peacefully co-exist.

16064
3DHS / Re: Anti-Muslim Hate Speech Has Consequences
« on: September 30, 2006, 09:41:36 PM »
So the pope is responsible for Muslims rioting.

A danish cartoonist forced muslims to lose their cool.

A politician points out that mainstream islam should do a better job of policing their fringe and suddenly they are to blame for some gunmen acting inappropriately.

What ever happened to free will?


16065
3DHS / Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« on: September 30, 2006, 09:23:14 PM »
Perhaps someone can explain to me what law was broken.

Perhaps someone can also show me where Foley sent any other "inappropriate" emails after he was told not to communicate with former pages by Rep. Shimkus, who was in charge of the page program.



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