Uncivil Rights

I am researching and writing a book tentatively titled Neo-Unionism, For Unions to Survive, They Must Change-Radically. I would like your help. Any thoughts or comments regarding unions (good or bad) would be greatly appreciated. Here are a few questions I will be submitting to union leadership soon:

Questions

1. What benefits can a union bring to an employer?
2. Why shouldn’t workers have a choice between joining a union and not joining a union?
3. Should union leaders participate in managerial decision-making pertaining to Human Resources? If not, why not?
4. Should union leaders participate in or influence organizational direction, such as policy making and long-term goals? If not, why not?
5. Should unions help transition, train, or educate workers for possible promotions to managerial (non-union) positions? If not, why not?
6. Should unions help transition, train, or educate laid-off, fired, or downsized employees to develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to find a new job? If not, why not?
7. Why do the majority of unions support the Democratic Party?
8. What specific tenets of the Democratic Party favor unions? Why?
9. What specific tenets of the Republican Party do not favor unions? Why not?
10. What changes have you seen in unions over the course of your involvement?
11. Why is union membership on the decline?
12. Is there still a need for unions? Why or why not?
13. What is the biggest obstacle facing a union today? Why?
14. Have unions become “big business” today? Why or why not?

Any thoughts will be helpful. Thanks.

More wisdom by Thomas Sowell.


Some excerpts:

When liberals in the media or in politics start being alarmed about the national debt, it means just one thing: They want higher taxes. The thought of reducing spending would never cross their minds.

How does our national debt today compare to our national income? It is lower than it was a decade ago, during the Clinton administration, when liberals did not seem nearly as panicked as they seem today.

As a percentage of the national income, the national debt today is less than half of what it was in 1950 and about where it was in 1940 -- back in those "earlier and simpler times."

What "tax cuts" cut is the tax rate. But tax revenues can rise, fall, or stay the same when tax rates are cut. Everything depends on what happens to income.

If Congress can just reduce the rate of increase in spending, rising tax revenues can reduce the deficit and eventually eliminate it. But of course that will not give liberals an excuse to raise tax rates or even to denounce "tax cuts for the rich."

There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay for the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.

Promoting the growth of the national economy would be one of the fastest and best ways of reducing the national debt. We could, for example, stop letting little bands of self-righteous activists stifle the building of homes or businesses under "open space" laws or stop the drilling of oil off-shore, on-shore, or anywhere else.

As for taxes, we could stop taxing productivity and start taxing consumption. After all, productivity is what makes a society more prosperous.

This story represents an example of supply and demand. Here is just a breif portion:

With More Jobs Than People, Prairie Life Has Its Payoffs
Nebraska Appeals to Big-City Fatigue, Hometown Loyalty

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 27, 2004; Page A03

SIDNEY, Neb. -- "Here's our problem," says City Manager Gary Person, describing an economic plight that most other cities would love to have. "We've got a town of 6,200 people, man, woman and child. And we've got 6,400 jobs to fill."

Fueled by the explosive national growth of a local retailer and by a general wave of prosperity here on the prairie, Sidney's economy is growing so fast that the town finds itself with more jobs than people. And these days, that pleasant predicament is reflected across Nebraska.

As a result, Republican Gov. Mike Johanns has launched a nationwide recruiting drive to persuade people to come to the Cornhusker State and fill some of those open jobs.

"A lot of states have too many workers and not enough jobs," says Richard Baier, Nebraska's director of economic development. "They're offering all sorts of tax breaks and relocation funding to lure employers. We've got the opposite problem -- we are beating the bushes to fill the jobs we already have."

Here we have a condition in Nebraska of too many jobs and not enough people to fill them. This clearly illustrates supply and demand economics. Now let's look a little deeper into the minimum wage issue here. It is obvious that those businesses that want to hire workers will not be successful if they only offer minimum wage. Since there are more jobs than workers, workers will be able to earn what the market will bear, which will be above the minimum wage level. This situation of basic economics concerns the scarcity of resources, in this case, the resources are workers. The scarcer the resource, the more valuable that resource becomes, and hence, a company will pay more for that resource if that resource is needed by the company to do business. If that resource becomes too pricey (if a comany will spend more on that resource than it can make up in profits) the company will either cease to exist, produce something else, or find an alternative resource.

For those areas that have too many workers and too few jobs, the opposite is true. Businesses could hire workers below the minimum wage if they could. This is an example of government intervention denying the marketplace to set appropriate wage levels. This in turn inflates the prices of those goods and services produced while limiting the number of jobs filled and created. It also stagnates and sometimes prohibits the natural growth and expansion of businesses by creating a false pricing system, thereby altering the value of the goods or services produced.

For the economy to work properly, the market must be allowed to set prices without government intervention. This will benefit, not only businesses, but consumers as well.

These are excerpts from an Op-ed piece from truthout.org (a left-wing, liberal website). You can view the article in its entirety here, http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112104J.shtml.


If you thought the current Bush tax rate rewarded the wealthy, wait until you get a load of his administration's latest plan.

I don’t believe tax rates reward anyone. Consider this: 20% of $50,000 is $10,000, 20% of $1,000,000 is $200,000. Someone making $1 million will pay 20 times the taxes that someone making $50K pays if the same rate applied. To make things EVEN, either the $50K person pays 400% of their salary or the person making $1 million pays tax at a rate of 1%. It concerns me that the liberals continually foster and incite class warfare with the tax argument.

Was the White House really suggesting eliminating incentives for employers to offer their employees health insurance plans? Was it really proposing to shift the country's tax burden even further onto states that didn't vote for Bush, like New York and Massachusetts?

Incentives? Do they mean the government was allowing the companies to KEEP more of their own money? Shift the tax burden to states that didn’t vote for Bush? As I recall, it was the major metropolitan areas that voted for Kerry, not entire states. It also occurred to me that if the government were receiving less in tax money than it should be planning on spending less, NOT looking for other streams of REVENUE.

the Bush administration "plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capital gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth."

Is this saying the government is willing to allow people to keep more of their own money? What a novel concept, yet the liberals are portraying this as bad. Lowering the tax burden on companies and investors WOULD encourage growth.

The plan would further shift the tax burden off of people whose money comes from interest and investments - the very rich - a prospect that liberals find disheartening but not surprising.

I never realized that average people were not allowed to invest. Again, shifting the tax burden seems to be a running theme with liberals. What if the government just curbed their prolific spending to coincide with less collected taxes? Is this a novel concept?

But what really caught financial experts' attention was the next paragraph, which explained how Bush intended to pay for these tax cuts.

This is what concerns me the most. The liberals believe the money is the property of the government. This is a socialistic/communistic philosophy. The money belongs to the taxpayer. There is no such thing as “paying for tax cuts.” That concept is illogical and can only be thought of in relation to communistic ideals.

the Post explained. "To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said."

This excerpt shows that the author is making the conclusion that the government must pay for tax cuts. The author is of course a liberal and is espousing the communistic philosophical views that runs rampant among liberals.

If such policies move forward, says John Irons, associate director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, "You'll see an economy that benefits only the very few at the very top. People in the middle will be squeezed, people in the low end won't be helped at all."

First of all, “liberal think tank” is oxymoronic. Mr. Irons makes assertions that have no logical foundations. How can an economy ONLY benefit a very few at the top? A strong economy benefits everyone. How will the middle be squeezed and low end people not helped? I hate to break another liberal myth, but people are not stuck in the socioeconomic level they are born in; they can move up or down depending on the decisions they make, and how hard they want to work.

The first part of the plan - which would get rid of federal tax deductions for state and local income tax - would fall disproportionately hard on Democratic-voting states, which already pay more in taxes than they receive from the federal government.

Why do Democratic voting states pay more in taxes? Could it be due to the metropolitan areas that actually vote democratic? Could it be that in these metropolitan areas there is more federal funding for social programs such as public housing? Is this a fault of the republican voting states?

Experts say the second part, which would do away with the tax deduction granted to employers for providing health insurance, would likely throw millions of people out of group plans, forcing them to buy far more expensive individual insurance. Right now, employers get a tax break for offering health insurance plans to their employees. Take that away, and there would be no reason for many companies to bother. "Something like 52 percent of everyone who has health insurance has it through their employer." Without the tax benefit, he says, "I would expect a ton of companies to drop health insurance altogether. And that would throw their employees out on the mercy of the market." Of course, people who get health insurance through their companies have to pay for it, generally through payroll deductions, and presumably, if companies no longer offered health benefits, employees would see increases in their paychecks.

That would be the free market at work without government intervention. Health care is not a right. However, private businesses can use the offer of health care to attract the best employees. I would rather trust the free market than the government. Of course the employees and the consumers pay the employee’s health care. Eliminating the tax would increase employee’s paycheck and decrease the price of the business’s goods or services.

But that doesn't mean they could just go out and buy health insurance on their own, as anyone who has ever tried to buy coverage understands. Individual health insurance is far more expensive than group plans, and individuals have less power to negotiate. "People would be tossed out of these group plans and they'd have to fend for themselves, and it would be prohibitive," says Sawicky, who works at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. "They'd have to take [a policy] much more narrowly focused on catastrophic coverage and they'd have to pay much more out of pocket." Health insurance companies, he says, "would make more selling to individuals. Not that they're not making any money now, they'd just like to make more."

Wow, another admission of the liberal and socialistic philosophy, scorning businesses for making a profit. Liberals love to lament about profits. It is more proof that liberals do not have a clue about running a business and would rather leave everything to the government.

Why? Because these state and local income taxes are highest in such blue states as New York, Massachusetts and California, says Press. Manhattan also has an income tax. State taxes are lowest in the red states, which provide fewer services. Texas and Florida have no income tax at all.

I think this says it all. The metropolitan areas are in the blue states. The metropolitan areas have more people on social programs than the red states. The metropolitan areas also have a higher standard of living than the rural areas and hence have higher wage earnings. Therefore, it makes sense that these areas are taxed more. It has nothing to do with “punishing” the blue states. It is simple logic and economics.

Right now, people who itemize their tax returns - about 30 percent of taxpayers, according to Sawicky - can write off the money they pay in local taxes, thus reducing their federal taxes. "If you're in New York and you're a high-income person, you pay more state income tax, but the blow is less severe because you can deduct it," says Sawicky. "So in effect the price of your state income tax has been reduced. If you pay a dollar in state income tax and you're in the 35 percent bracket, you can deduct $.35, so in effect your state income tax is only costing you $.65 on the dollar." "If you take away those deductions, you're in reality increasing the taxes on high-taxing, generally blue states," says Press.

So let me get this straight. If you can’t deduct your state taxes on your federal income tax statement, then you’ll actually have to pay those taxes…hmmm… Perhaps then, your federal income taxes can be reduced overall since the federal government will no longer be subsidizing the state taxes. Very interesting. Liberals are so wanton to pay more taxes, yet they don’t care to pay their rate for state tax.

Because this proposal would increase the sting of state income taxes, it would make it harder for states and cities to raise their taxes and build up state programs like childcare and health insurance. It would allow small-government conservatives to exert their influence on blue-state social policy. "If you take away the deduction for state income taxes, their logic is that you'll force government to be smaller," says Press.

Here is more of the liberal socialism at work. Child care and health care are not rights and should not be subsidized for those who won’t by those that do. This is just a reiteration of income re-distribution.

Sawicky, for one, doesn't actually expect these provisions to pass. He sees them as "bogeymen" - bargaining chips that can be scrapped in the fight to push forward the administration's real agenda: lowering taxes on the wealthy. The new deductions, says Sawicky, could allow the administration to say that it has a plan for paying for its tax cuts, "but I don't think they're very serious."

EGAD! LOWER TAXES ON THOSE THAT PAY THE MOST! ARE THEY MAD? No just smart economics for a free society. Again the “paying for the tax cuts” bit. The socialism philosophy by the Democratic Party will bring this economy to its knees someday.

"The more general problem is the administration's policy, which is to blow holes in the tax system and let the deficit go to hell." He expects this to lead to a financial crisis that will force the government to slash social programs - what right-wing operative Grover Norquist calls the "starve the beast" strategy.

Social programs should be the last consideration for a federal government funding. It is income re-distribution or socialism.

So is the Bush administration truly pushing a system in which someone who lives off interest and dividends - say, Paris Hilton - would pay less tax than the person who cleans her bathroom? "Yes," Press says.

Another liberal myth. She may pay less percentage, but as shown above, would still pay far more money than the one cleaning her bathroom.

Irons explains it this way: "I was recently at the Treasury Department, where they were talking about eliminating the estate tax. The attitude was very much, 'Why doesn't everyone realize that we're the ones who create the jobs? Why doesn't everyone realize that it's us, the super-rich that drive the economy?'" He continues: "The attitude is that everyone who is working 40 hours a week doing an average job at a construction site, or is a store clerk, or me sitting in an office doing economic analysis, is feeding off the people who are the real successes. The attitude is that the economy should be geared to benefit the people who are business owners, who are rich, who are giving us the benefit of jobs. That's what you really see in the tax code."

I have never even been offered a job by someone that was poor or could not afford my services. The businesses and corporations do drive this economy by supplying jobs, and then the employee makes money to spend which further drives the economy. Communistic countries do not have growing economies; they are stagnating and eventually die. History tells us that much.

This is a follow-up to Sticks and Stones post which I pasted recently. It is in regards to the downfall of Europe. It seems that Europe is unable or unwilling to learn from its past. Communism cannot work. No where on this planet has Communism succeeded. Communism has brought nothing but poverty and distress to all who live under its rule.

Yet, with all of history from which to learn, Europe is failing its own citizens while criticizing America for its philosophies and ideologies.

First, a few definitions:

Main Entry: 1to•tal•i•tar•i•an
Pronunciation: (")tO-"ta-l&-'ter-E-&n
Function: adjective
Etymology: Italian totalitario, from totalità totality
1 a : of or relating to centralized control by an autocratic leader or hierarchy : AUTHORITARIAN, DICTATORIAL; especially : DESPOTIC b : of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures (as censorship and terrorism)
2 a : advocating or characteristic of totalitarianism b : completely regulated by the state especially as an aid to national mobilization in an emergency c : exercising autocratic powers : tending toward monopoly

Main Entry: com•mu•nism
Pronunciation: 'käm-y&-"ni-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: French communisme, from commun common
1 a : a theory advocating elimination of private property b : a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed
2 capitalized a : a doctrine based on revolutionary Marxian socialism and Marxism-Leninism that was the official ideology of the U.S.S.R. b : a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production c : a final stage of society in Marxist theory in which the state has withered away and economic goods are distributed equitably d : communist systems collectively

The following article supports my thesis that Europe is failing. It is moving toward a totalitarian/communistic society. This is something of which we all must be aware and wary in regards to future association with and influence from European communities and countries:

State has a role in family life, says minister
By Rachel Sylvester
(Filed: 26/11/2004)
The government has the right to intervene in family life because there are social implications in the way parents bring up their children, one of Tony Blair's closest allies said yesterday.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, said the state had always influenced young people's lives through schools and she wanted to extend that influence to the home.
"There is a proper role for the state in helping parents in the home," she said. "In the past, people got support from the extended family, now they are looking elsewhere. [The state can be] a force for good, enabling families to do the best for their children."
Her comments, which reflect the tone of a speech she will make today to the Institute for Public Policy Research, will lead to "nanny state" claims.
Ministers are under pressure over the hunting ban and proposals to ban smoking in most public places and control advertising of junk food to children.
However, Mrs Hodge said government involvement in family life was justified because the state had to "pick up the pieces" when parenting went wrong.
Educational outcomes were determined far more by what happened at home, for example, she said, than anything taught to children in schools.
The NHS had to deal with the implications of mothers who feed their children an unhealthy diet and society had to pay the cost when young people with a bad upbringing turn to crime.
"There are always tensions between the liberty of the individual and the wider interests of society but the state has a role," she said. "Parenting in the home is crucial."
The aim was to avoid punitive intervention, she said. "If children are taken into care then we have failed, the state has to go in at the beginning and help."
In her view, many parents want government advice on how to bring up their children.
"You take home this little bundle of joy from the hospital and you don't know where to start. People want the state to help them." The Government is to launch a campaign to improve the way parents raise their offspring.
The Department for Education and Skills will publish a booklet, which will be given to all new parents, telling them how to bring up their child.
As well as information about child benefit and healthy diet, it will have "top tips" on reading with children, monitoring what they watch on television and talking to them about sex as they grow up.
Mrs Hodge, who has four grown-up children and one granddaughter, is trying to enlist the help of soap opera producers with story lines about the importance of discipline, safety and education.
A parenting helpline and a website will also be launched.
The important thing is the quality rather than the quantity of the time parents spend with their children, she said.
"If you are just watching the telly or chatting on the mobile phone rather than talking to your baby then your child is not going to prosper."
Although she was reluctant to back Tony Blair's attack on "Sixties liberal values", she said discipline in the home was crucial.
"I am a child of the Sixties, there were lots of freedoms given to me that I relished - women going out to work, the contraceptive pill - but parents have to set boundaries. We need to support parents in setting the boundaries."
While stressing that the Government was determined not to repeat the Conservatives' disastrous "back to basics" campaign, she said ministers should not be afraid to take a moral lead.
She broke with Labour tradition by saying that marriage was the best context for raising children.
"Stability really matters for kids and people are more likely to stay together if they are married."
But she insisted the state should not criticise unmarried parents or single mothers.
The Government's 10-year strategy for child care will be published next week.
Ministers are expected to promise big increases in nursery and child care places and parents will be offered up to a year off after the birth of a child, with a portion of the leave allocated to fathers.
Publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page should phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or e-mail syndication@telegraph.co.uk

Thank You Mr. Meyer

For any of you who have not yet seen Herbert E. Meyer's The Siege of Western Civilization, go buy it, sit your children down and watch it. This his latest, from The American Thinker, an open letter to the Euroweenies:

An open letter to Europe
November 11th, 2004


Hi. Are you nuts?

Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre -- to explain the election’s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that “Bush belongs at a war tribunal – not in the White House.” And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as “stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.”

Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren’t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you’re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars – may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?

We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by the State, and that marriage should take place only between a man and a woman. We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient. We believe in economic liberty, and in the right of purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs to run their businesses – and thus create jobs – with a minimum of government interference. We recognize that other people see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views. But we believe that our country is worth defending, and if anyone decides that killing us is an okay thing to do we will go after them with everything we’ve got.

If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn’t. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe – you -- from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and – not coincidentally – ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Issac Newton and Descartes.


Europe is Dying

It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being “un-religious” to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope’s heroic efforts to the contrary.

Your rate of marriage is at an all-time low, and the number of abortions in Europe is at an all-time high. Indeed, your birth rates are so far below replacement levels that in 30 years or so there will be 70 million fewer Europeans alive than are alive today. Europe is literally dying. And of the children you do manage to produce, all too few will be raised in stable, two-parent households.

Your economy is stagnant because your government regulators make it just about impossible for your entrepreneurs to succeed – except by fleeing to the United States, where we welcome them and celebrate their success.

And your armed forces are a joke. With the notable exception of Great Britain, you no longer have the military strength to defend yourselves. Alas, you no longer have the will to defend yourselves.

What worries me even more than all this is your willful blindness. You refuse to see that it is you, not we Americans, who have abandoned Western Civilization. It’s worrisome because, to tell you the truth, we need each other. Western Civilization today is under siege, from radical Islam on the outside and from our own selfish hedonism within. It’s going to take all of our effort, our talent, our creativity and, above all, our will to pull through. So take a good, hard look at yourselves and see what your own future will be if you don’t change course. And please, stop sneering at America long enough to understand it. After all, Western Civilization was your gift to us, and you ought to be proud of what we Americans have made of it.

'nuff said.

For those of you wondering, let me start by defining my position. Philosophically, I am a libertarian (for the most part).
I believe in the freedom of choices.
I believe that a person’s successes and failures are a result of the decisions that person makes.
I believe people have the opportunity to move up or down the socioeconomic ladder, and that movement is dependent on the decisions one makes.
I believe the government has the right to tax the populace to pay for the common defense.
I believe that competition and the free market system creates innovation and fosters creativity.
I also believe that the free market system will set accurate prices for goods and services through supply and demand.
I believe the more fortunate has a moral obligation to help the less fortunate.
I believe that taxes belong to the wage earner before the government takes it.
I believe corporations and businesses create jobs.
I believe jobs belong to those businesses and not to the workers.
I believe Jesse Jackson is one of the biggest racists on the planet.
I believe the NAACP and Affirmative Action foster racism and continue to enslave the black community.

I don’t believe the government has a right to take your money, in the form of taxes, and redistribute that money to the people who have made bad decisions in their lives.
I don’t believe health care is a “right.”
I don’t believe the government should create a generational welfare state.
I don’t believe the government funds tax cuts, or pays for tax cuts.
I don’t believe compassion is defined by the giving one their wants and needs, rather compassion should be defined by educating so that one may become self-sufficient and satisfy their own wants and needs.
I don’t believe the wealthy should be punished or scorned for being successful.
I don’t believe a job has ever been created by a poor person.
I don’t believe a President can create jobs.

Now with that said…

Just think. The far left really wanted Howard Dean to be the Democratic candidate for President of the U.S. If one listens to him, one can discover his socialistic views. At least that's what I originally thought. Then this article came out. I now believe he has communistic tendencies and philosophies. Is this where the left really wants to go? Let's look at some excerpts:

"The media is a failing institution in this country," Dean said Monday at a Yale University forum. "They are not maintaining their responsibility to maintain democracy."

Who authorized the media to maintain democracy? Isn't the responsibility of maintaining our democracy relegated to the voters and their elected officials?

Part of the problem, he said, was an almost complete loss of objectivity.
"You can't read a piece of newsprint very often in this country without being told what to think," he said, according to the Yale Daily News.

Yes Howard, we all saw the intense left-wing bias in the media; CBS, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, LA Times, etc.. I'm glad you caught on.

He claimed television networks, especially the Fox News Channel, were most to blame for the rise in flash and entertainment. He even suggested his now infamous "scream speech" after the Iowa Caucuses was partially a media fabrication, as it appealed to entertainment instead of news value. Thomas also acknowledged a slight liberal bias in the media, though he said reporters usually search for objectivity.

The "scream speech" was taped and played accurately. There was no media fabrication. None was needed. That was you, Howard. That was your true self, and it scared people. It showed you as the far left-wing psychopath that you are. Fox News, according to various polls, was the fairest of the networks regarding pro and con stories relating to the candidates. Even Evan Thomas acknowledges a left-wing bias. Accurate reporting sucks, doesn't it Howard?

As far as solutions to Dean's gripes, the former Vermont governor said it's necessary to ensure diversity, and cap corporate ownership of media companies, even to the point of federal regulation.
"[The media] are incapable of regulating themselves," Dean said. "What's at stake is our democracy. If you think that American democracy can survive without an ethical media, then you are wrong."


This is the scariest thing yet. For a government to gain control of the populace, it must first take over the media. This is an assault on the first amendment. Howard Dean wants the government to control the media, like China, Russia, and all the other communist countries. This is clearly a communistic philosophy and must not be ignored. The far left would control talk radio right now if it could. We must take all precautions against this from happening. I'm sure blogging would not be far behind. I suggest everyone start talking about this and bring it out in the open. We must not let this one slip by.

The Yale Daily News says Dean received a standing ovation from the crowd of about 200 who attended the symposium.

Potential future leaders of this country are in this crowd giving him a standing ovation. I don't know what's worse, Howard Dean proposing government control of the media, or the idiots in the audience agreeing with him. It's time to take a stand.

This is from the WSJ:

Don't Let Fiscal Phantoms Stop Reform
November 17, 2004; Page A17

While Democrats and the media distract themselves over an anomalous polling question concerning "moral values," it turns out the election was about economics, specifically entitlement and tax reform, stupid.
Thank goodness, for these are real problems susceptible to discussion and consensus about what constitutes good policy. This column has long maintained, for instance, that when all else fails in trying to cope with our health-care mess, reformers will have no choice but to hit upon the real solution: tax reform.
Ditto the problems with Social Security and Medicare. The way out of these thickets is via a fundamental overhaul of the tax system, too.
From this perspective, it's only a matter of tactics whether tax reform is the thin wedge the administration uses to reform entitlements or the other way around. We eagerly await the polling and focus-group metrics that will determine the most politically promising approach. For tidiness’ sake, our preference would be to start with tax reform.
Details can be conjured up later, but the basic architecture would be elimination of the income tax -- "income" being a too vague and loophole-ready concept -- in favor of some kind of consumption tax. Thus any money put aside for future consumption -- aka savings -- would remain untaxed until it's consumed.
Presto, this would eliminate the perverse double taxation of saved income now rife in the system. The natural incentive would be restored to encourage people to save for future consumption, say, for retirement or old-age medical expenses.
This being done, it would be a relatively simple matter of getting out of the working-age population's way with a Social Security and Medicare payroll tax opt-out. Let workers have a choice of whether to remain in the existing federal retirement programs (with all the risk of future benefit cuts) or take ownership of their payroll taxes in the form of private investment accounts.
OK, any reform involving two Big Bangs, rather than merely one, faces the likelihood that an election will intervene, empowering the forces of reform fatigue. So the other possible approach is to let entitlement reform effectively achieve tax reform.
Last year's Medicare bill, which authorized Health Savings Accounts for the masses, is already testing the Fabian approach to reforming the massive middle-class entitlement known as the tax deductibility of employer-provided insurance. Workers and employers alike are just beginning to notice the opportunity here, changing the incentives to over consume and misallocate health care, and creating gains that the worker and employer can share.
If it all works out, employer-provided, gold-plated insurance that is now the rule -- with all its inbuilt incentives for medical inflation -- will become obsolete. From there it would be no biggie to throw Medicare payroll taxes into the pot and let private solutions be extended past age 65.
What HSAs are doing for medical spending and savings, Social Security reform would do for retirement savings.
Option Two produced by the president's 2001 Commission to Strengthen Social Security seems to be the favorite, allowing workers to direct one-third of payroll deductions into a private account up to an annual limit of $1,000. Workers in return would give up a commensurate share of their future federal benefits.
But why any limit at all? Here's where the screaming about the deficit begins, with Democrats insisting essentially that Social Security is unreformable because so-called transition costs would "explode" the deficit. This is a council of despair if not suicide, not to mention a basic misunderstanding: Fiscally, reform is not only doable but mandatory; only the politics are needlessly difficult.
Deficits create additions to the national debt, and are a problem only to the extent that we can't pay back the debt without hardship, because we spent the borrowed money unwisely. Problem One is that we fib to ourselves about the true dimensions of the debt because we count promises made to bondholders (current value $3.9 trillion) but not promises made to future retirees ($10 trillion for Social Security and $62 trillion for Medicare in present value, beyond what's already promised in future payroll-tax receipts).
Even the modest reform proposed by the 2001 commission would reduce by $15 trillion the amount of general tax dollars necessary to prop up Social Security over the next 75 years. Transition cost: between $1 trillion and $1.4 trillion over 10 years. Done right, in other words, Social Security reform would appear to increase the deficit yet actually reduce the nation's real indebtedness from Day One.
Look at it another way: If a homeowner who refinanced his home on advantageous terms kept his books the way the federal government does, the transaction would be seen as huge annual deficit and increase in his debt. On paper, it would look like his financial well-being had declined drastically, when in fact it had improved.
We can prove this to ourselves by enacting Social Security reform, then offering an additional $1 trillion in bonds into the Treasury market to cover the make-goods for current pensions. The reaction of the market would be . . . nothing.
Unless bond investors are dumb, they'd finance the transition without a hiccup in much the same way housing lenders recently swallowed a vast lump of new housing debt (while extinguishing a fair amount of old debt in the process). Indeed, Treasury investors would look out 30 years at a pleasant sight -- themselves no longer facing a war with seniors for the overcommitted revenues of the federal government.
Fail to get that fix in place, and sooner or later the prospect of just such a war is bound to produce rising interest rates, inflation and other Brazilian symptoms of an impending fiscal crash.

This is from the WSJ. It shows one of our biggest problems with the war on terror. I say, we kill the terrorists, show no quarter, display the same love and affection they show their kidnapped victims.

Judicial Overreach
By RUTH WEDGWOOD
November 16, 2004; Page A24

The basic principles of the law of war are immutable. Civilians should be protected in battle and cannot be deliberately attacked. Postwar occupation should shelter ongoing civilian life. And, of course, captured enemy personnel must be treated humanely, and given a fair trial on any charge of war crimes.
But major conflicts also pose new problems. Western democracies have had to update war's regulatory rules to fit new circumstances, by interpretation, distinction, or amendment. In World War II, the trial procedures used at Nuremberg were in tension with Arts. 63 and 64 of the 1929 Geneva Convention. The Allies were put to argue that an unconditional surrender was different from wartime capture, and so the Nazi leaders would not be covered by the 1929 pact. The postwar rebuilding of Germany and Japan, with new democratic institutions, was arguably in tension with the 1907 Hague Convention. But the collapse of the Axis, said the Allies, created a legal condition of debellatio -- or total defeat -- to which Hague occupation law should not apply.
* * *
The interpretive problem for law-abiding democracies is how to hold true to the core principles that animate a treaty regime while working within a text that may not anticipate new problems. It would not surprise historians to discover that the treaty rules crafted for state-to-state wars do not always easily fit an unconventional conflict against a nonstate actor such as al Qaeda.
It has suddenly become an urgent question to ask who should make these necessary adaptations of the law of war. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that the statutory writ of habeas corpus should extend to the Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba. The right to petition a federal district court was accorded any captured prisoner who alleges that he was not a combatant at all, and that he was wrongly swept up in allied operations in Afghanistan or elsewhere. In the companion case involving Yasser Hamdi, a plurality of the Justices, led by Sandra Day O'Connor, seemed to invite the administration to convene military tribunals that could handle these questions of identity.
In compliance with the Court's ruling, the Bush administration has created a new Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to provide formal review of the identity and status of persons captured on the Afghan battlefield or elsewhere. A captured detainee can question witnesses before the Tribunal, call his own witnesses, and testify if he wishes. The decision on whether he is an enemy combatant is to be made by a "preponderance" of the evidence -- a traditional legal standard for status determinations. In addition, the administration has put in place a second Administrative Review Procedure to re-examine, at least annually, whether an adjudicated combatant can nonetheless safely be released. The combatant has the right to present and gather information, including from his relatives and home state, to show that he poses no continuing threat, and he is given a summary of the government's information about future dangerousness.
This brings us to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen captured in Afghanistan in late 2001. In a hearing on Oct. 3, 2004, Hamdan was found by a three-officer Combatant Status Review Tribunal to have been an enemy combatant who was "either a member of or affiliated with al Qaeda." Hamdan is also separately charged before a military commission with one count of war crimes, namely, criminal conspiracy to attack civilians and commit murder as an unprivileged belligerent. The criminal charge alleges that Hamdan was a bodyguard, driver and weapons handler for Osama bin Laden, and agreed to al Qaeda's criminal purposes to mount attacks against civilians and U.S. military targets.
Hamdan allegedly transferred weapons to the head of al Qaeda's security committee in Kandahar, and delivered weapons and ammunition to other al Qaeda members. He allegedly drove in the convoy that shepherded bin Laden out of harm's way on Sept. 11, 2001, and during the attack on the U.S. Embassies in East Africa in August 1998 helped the al Qaeda leader escape expected American retaliation. He allegedly trained at the al Farouq camp in Afghanistan, in the use of handguns, rifles and machine guns.
Hamdan's trial was slated to begin in December 2004. But a federal district judge in the District of Columbia has now used the writ of habeas corpus to enjoin the government from trying Hamdan on any criminal charge, arguing that procedures of the military commissions do not conform to the Third Geneva Convention because they are not the same as courts-martial.
The Commission's procedural rules respect the presumption of innocence, place the burden of proof on the government, require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, permit the defendant to call witnesses, require the government to produce any exculpatory evidence, and forbid any adverse inference to be drawn from a defendant's silence at trial. The Commission rules, revised in March 2002, were endorsed at the time by a panel of legal luminaries including former Nuremberg prosecutor and University of Chicago law professor Bernard Meltzer and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler. And the military commissions have an appellate panel that includes former Attorney General Griffin Bell and former Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman Jr. -- who are among "the most distinguished civilian lawyers in the country," as the federal court concedes.
Yet the federal district court is unwilling to wait to see how the commission procedures are applied at trial, and how the appellate panel of the commission system opines on the matter.
The judge does not dispute that the Geneva Conventions draw an important distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants. Irregular combatants (such as saboteurs, spies and guerrillas) are accorded different protections because they fail a four-part test: They disguise themselves as civilians without distinguishing uniforms or insignia, fail to carry their arms openly, lack a responsible commander, and as a group, deliberately flout the laws of war. Lawful belligerency is also limited to combatants fighting for a state, rather than a private sponsor. At least in its attacks in East Africa and the U.S., al Qaeda was fighting as a private terrorist network.
The district judge finds no inherent fault with the procedure by which the administration's Status Review Tribunal designated Hamdan as an enemy combatant belonging to or affiliated with al Qaeda. But he cavils that the tribunal did not add a final phrase to say that Hamdan was an "unlawful" combatant.
A democracy is bound to respect the role of the judiciary. Still, judges sometimes get things wrong. In this case, the district judge's ruling is either wordplay, or a misunderstanding of the role of status review panels under the Third Geneva Convention.
The district court, which did not take any testimony on the point, may be unaware that only three countries have ever convened administrative status review panels under the Convention -- Canada, Britain and the U.S. It is thus difficult to pin down any "general international understanding" of Art. 5 of the Convention. U.S. Army regulation 190-8, used in conventional interstate wars, goes beyond the requirements of Art. 5. The Geneva Convention asks only for a "competent tribunal" to resolve any case of doubt about an individual's status. In Canada, a single military lawyer (or "judge advocate") sitting alone has been deemed sufficient to constitute such a tribunal. In the U.S.'s Combatant Status Review Procedure, the review panel requires three officers, including a judge advocate.
It is true that the individual combatant status review panels have not been invited to countermand the president's treaty interpretation that al Qaeda fighters do not qualify as lawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions. But this deference to the treaty interpretation of the commander in chief is accepted in conventional wars as well -- Geneva status tribunals look at the facts and circumstances of an individual case, but are bound by the executive's general understanding of treaty categories. In Vietnam, for example, the tribunals were given guidance by the Military Assistance Command on how to categorize combatants found to be Viet Cong irregulars, self-defense forces, and secret self-defense forces. It would be inappropriate to have varying groups of majors and colonels offering varying readings of the same treaty, if one values regular treatment.
Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford, makes a suggestion that a district judge might note. "In a struggle involving an organisation that plainly does not meet the criteria" of lawful combatants, he wrote in 2002, "and especially where, as with Al Qaeda, it is not in any sense a State, it may be reasonable to proclaim that captured members are presumed not to have PoW status." The judge may equally wish to take account of the advice of British law-of-war authority Col. GIAD Draper, who wrote in 1970 that "the Detaining Power seems to be the sole arbiter, in good faith, of whether a doubt occurs as to the status of the individual concerned." Francophone scholar Ameur Zemmali, now with the Red Cross, takes the same view in his scholarly work.
* * *
Last June, in its habeas ruling, the Supreme Court delivered the message that executive power has limits, even in wartime, and that courts may seek to provide a remedy should things go badly out of balance. But there is a companion lesson of prudence. There are limits to what judges should seek to do. Applying and adapting the law of war to meet unprecedented challenges will depend upon sensible judgments that often must be made by the president. Changes in state practice, as much as formal negotiating processes, are the way in which customary law and treaty law are adapted to unanticipated circumstances.
Constitutional law scholar Alexander Bickel once famously remarked that the courts are the "least dangerous branch." In the common effort to prosecute a war, while respecting the fundamental rights of enemy combatants, one hopes that the courts abide by that assumption.
Ms. Wedgwood is a professor of international law at Johns Hopkins and a former federal prosecutor.

I think it's time for the Euroweenies to shut up. By continually spouting their rhetoric, they are getting deeper and deeper in trouble with the U.S. citizenry.

Here is a nice article on French Prez, Chirac trying to shove a wedge between the U.S. and Europe.

A few tasty excerpts:

"President Chirac doubted whether anyone could play the “honest broker”. Speaking before he visits London on Thursday, he said that it was not in the nature of this Administration to return favours. " “Well, Britain gave its support but I did not see anything in return. I’m not sure it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favours systematically.”

Yes, Jack, we know all about your "reciprocation" from Saddam. It doesn't mean the whole world runs on bribes, but it doesn't hurt to ask does it?

In other remarks that will sting the Bush Administration, he again outlined his vision of a “multipolar” world in which a united Europe would be equal with the US, and mocked Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, for his division of Europe into old and new.

This of course is Europe's biggest problem. They are jealous of the U.S. and want to be as strong, if not stronger. Have you guys not yet realized that will NEVER happen?

Here Jacques, this is just an excerpt from the WSJ on the OIL-for-FOOD scandal. You know about that, don't you?

Oil for Food was designed to help feed poor Iraqis who were suffering under international sanctions. Instead, Saddam was able to exploit the program and sanctions generally to finance his regime and maintain power. Remarkably, Democratic Senator Carl Levin still seems to think that sanctions were a success -- or at least he said so at yesterday's hearings. That's precisely the kind of self-delusion that Saddam was able to exploit at the U.N.

Of course I had to throw in the Democrat thinking the sanctions were working...yes they were working for the countries of the bribed. Thanks Carl.

I address you, the members of this new Congress, at a moment
unprecedented in the history of the union. I use the word
"unprecedented" because at no previous time has American
security been as seriously threatened from without as it is
today.
Since the permanent formation of our government under the
Constitution in 1789, most of the periods of crisis in our
history have related to our domestic affairs. And,
fortunately, only one of these --the four-year war between
the States --ever threatened our national unity.

It is true that prior to 1914 the United States often has
been disturbed by events in other continents. We have even
engaged in two wars with European nations and in a number of
undeclared wars in the West Indies, in the Mediterranean and
in the Pacific, for the maintenance of American rights and
for the Principles of peaceful commerce. But in no case has
a serious threat been raised against our national safety or
our continued independence.
What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United
States as a nation has at all times maintained opposition
--clear, definite opposition-- to any attempt to lock us in
behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of
civilization went past. Today, thinking of our children and
of their children, we oppose enforced isolation for
ourselves or for any other part of the Americas.

That determination of ours, extending over all these years,
was proved, for example, in the early days during the
quarter century of wars following the French Revolution.
While the Napoleonic struggle did threaten interests of the
United States because of the French foothold in the West
Indies and in Louisiana, and while we engaged in the War of
1812 to vindicate our right to peaceful trade, it is
nevertheless clear that neither France nor Great Britain nor
any other nation was aiming at domination of the whole
world.

And in like fashion, from 1815 to 1914 --ninety-nine years
--no single war in Europe or in Asia constituted a real
threat against our future or against the future of any other
American nation.
Except in the Maximilian interlude in Mexico, no foreign
power sought to establish itself in this hemisphere. And
the strength of the British fleet in the Atlantic has been a
friendly strength; it is still a friendly strength.
Even when the World War broke out in 1941 it seemed to
contain only small threat of danger to our own American
future. But as time went on, as we remember, the American
people began to visualize what the downfall of democratic
nations might mean to our own democracy.

We need not harp on failure of the democracies
to deal with problems of world reconstruction. We should
remember that the peace of 1919 was far less unjust than the
kind of pacification which began even before Munich, and
which is being carried on under the new order of tyranny
that seeks to spread over every continent today.
The American people have unalterably set their faces against
that tyranny.
I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way
of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every
part of the world --assailed either by arms or by secret
spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to
destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still
at peace.

During sixteen long months this assault has blotted out the
whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of
independent nations, great and small. And the assailants
are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and
small.
Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional
duty to "give to the Congress information of the state of
the union," I find it unhappily necessary to report that the
future and the safety of our country and of our democracy
are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our
borders.

Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly
waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the
population and all the resources of Europe and Asia, Africa
and Australia will be dominated by conquerors.

In times like these it is immature-- and, incidentally,
untrue-- for anybody to brag that an unprepared America,
single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can
hold off the whole world.
No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace
international generosity, or return of true independence, or
world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of
religion-- or even good business. Such a peace would bring
no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who would
give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are
soft-hearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed. We
must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a
tinkling cymbal preach the ism of appeasement. We must
especially beware of that small group of selfish men who
would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to
feather their own nests.
I have recently pointed out how quickly the tempo of modern
warfare could bring into our very midst the physical attack
which we must eventually expect if the dictator nation win
this war.


The first phase of the invasion of this hemisphere would not
be the landing of regular troops. The necessary strategic
points would be occupied by secret agents and by their
dupes-- and great numbers of them are already here and in
Latin America.
As long as the aggressor nations maintain the offensive
they, not we, will choose the time and the place and the
method of their attack.
And that is why the future of all the American Republics is
today in serious danger. That is why this annual message to
the Congress is unique in our history. That is why every
member of the executive branch of the government and every
member of the Congress face great responsibility-- great
accountability.

The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy
should be devoted primarily-- almost exclusively-- to
meeting this foreign peril. For all our domestic problems
are now a part of the great emergency.
Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been
based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity
of all of our fellow men within our gates, so our national
policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect
for the rights and the dignity of all nations, large and
small. And the justice of morality must and will win in the
end.

Our national policy is this :
First, by an impressive expression of the public will and
without regard to partisanship, we are committed to
all-inclusive national defense.
Second, by an impressive expression of the public will and
without regard to partisanship, we are committed to full
support of all those resolute people everywhere who are
resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from
our hemisphere. By this support we express our
determination that the democratic cause shall prevail, and
we strengthen the defense and the security of our own
nation.
Third, by an impressive expression of the public will and
without regard to partisanship, we are committed to the
proposition that principle of morality and considerations
for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a
peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers. We
know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of
other people's freedom.

And today it is abundantly evident
that American citizens everywhere are demanding and
supporting speedy and complete action in recognition of
obvious danger.

Let us say to the democracies : "We Americans are vitally
concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth
our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to
give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world.
We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes,
tanks, guns. That is our purpose and our pledge."

In fulfillment of this purpose we will not be intimidated by
the threats of dictators that they will regard as a breach
of international law or as an act of war our aid to the
democracies which dare to resist their aggression. Such aid
is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally
proclaim it so to be.
And when the dictators --if the dictators-- are ready to
make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on
our part.
The happiness of future generations of
Americans may well depend on how effective and how immediate
we can make our aid felt. No one can tell the exact
character of the emergency situations that we may be called
upon to meet. The nation's hands must not be tied when the
nation's life is in danger.


The best way of dealing with the few slackers or
trouble-makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by
patriotic example, and if that fails, to use the sovereignty
of government to save government.
As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by
armaments alone. Those who man our defenses and those
behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and
the courage which come from unshakeable belief in the
manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action
that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of
all the things worth fighting for.

The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from
the things which have been done to make its people conscious
of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic
life in America. Those things have toughened the fiber of
our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their
devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.
Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking
about the social and economic problems which are the root
cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme
factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about
the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.

The basic things expected by our people of their political
and economic systems are simple. They are :
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a
wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, the basic things that must never be
lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of
our modern world. The inner and abiding straight of our
economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree
to which they fulfill these expectations.


In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look
forward to a world founded upon four essential human
freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere
in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his
own way-- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to
every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
--everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into
world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to
such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation
will be in a position to commit an act of physical
aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite
basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and
generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of
the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators
seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception --the
moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of
world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history we have been
engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a
revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself
to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the
quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is
the cooperation of free countries, working together in a
friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands, heads and
hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith
in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the
supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to
those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our
strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.



THE FOUR FREEDOMS
delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on January 6, 1941

News Flash!!!!!!!!!!

Marines in Fallujah were attacked from a Mosque. Marines returned fire and eventually overtook the Mosque. This was all on videotape. In the Mosque, one Marine points to an insurgent and says "he's not dead, he's faking"; the video goes black, and a shot is heard. The insurgent is now dead.

This news is breaking, but IT HAS BEEN RELEASED. No doubt, there will be an investigation since, if it is true, would be against the rules of engagement. The facts will come out and appropriate action will be taken.

This shows that no one in the U.S., either here or there, in a war or not, is above the law, and that rules and procedures must be followed or consequences will follow.

Unfortunately, the terrorists are not held to that standard, or any standard for that matter. They kill women and children at will, they torture and maim with no consequences. Yet it is this American soldier that will feel the wrath of the world for he is expected to act like a decent human being while trying to fight a war.

The insurgent would no doubt have killed the Marine had the roles been reversed. In fact, the Marine would probably have been taken to a discreet location and tortured then beheaded. There would be no outcry, no outrage. Just a statistic. Remembered only by his family and friends.

I believe it is time to level the playing field. It is war. The goal is to win - the war, not friends. We should fight to win and not worry about being politically correct. The terrorists would do no less. Cameras should be off; reporters should leave. Let John Kerry talk about the atrocities after we win, and Iraq is safe.

I would much rather have a Marine put a bullet in an insurgent's head now, than give that insurgent an opportunity to heal, and be fed, on our dime, only to return to their ways and kill innocent Americans in the future.

May peace and honor be with our men and women in battle. You are fighting more than the insurgents.

But that's just my opinion.

This article illustrates why the terrorists must die, hopefully a painfully long and tortuous death with no virgins waiting at the end of the tunnel, only satan ready to perform a colonoscopy and a cystoscopy with an endosocpe the size of Montana (you guys are right after Yasser - please wait in line.)

This is from the turkishpress.com
Body of blonde Caucasian woman found in Fallujah: marines
AFP: 11/14/2004
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov 14 (AFP) - The body of a blonde-haired woman with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found Sunday lying on a street in Fallujah, a notorious Iraqi enclave for hostage-takers, marines said.
"It is definitely a Caucasian woman with long blonde hair," said a military official, who cut open a cover that had been over the corpse.
The gruesome discovery was made as the marines moved through the south of Fallujah, hunting out the remaining rebels after a week of fierce fighting to regain control of the city.
"It is a female ... missing all four appendages, with a slashed throat and disemboweled, she has been dead for a while but only in this location for a day or two," said Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the Navy Corps, who had inspected the body.
An AFP photographer embedded with the marines noted that the woman was wearing a blue dress and her face was completely disfigured.
The marines said she appeared to have been on the street for about two days.
Sweeps of rubble-strewn neighbourhoods in Fallujah have already uncovered a grisly underworld of hostage slaughterhouses, prisons and torture chambers as well as the corpses of Iraqis who had been executed, marines say.
Surviving hostages have also been found, but only one has been a foreigner -- a Syrian driver who was abducted with two French journalists in August.
Two foreign women have been abducted in Iraq and remain missing.
One, Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole, has blonde hair, the other, British aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, has chestnut-coloured hair.
Borcz, married to an Iraqi and a resident in Iraq for 30 years, was abducted late last month. She has appeared in two video cassettes appealing to the Polish government to help her but her fate is unknown.
Hassan, the Iraqi head of relief agency CARE International, was kidnapped on her way to work in Baghdad on October 19 and has appeared in three videos.
She also holds Iraqi citizenship after marrying an Iraq and is a long-term resident of the country. Her fate too is unknown.
A marine staff sergeant, who deals with detainees, said it appeared as though a kidnapping squad used Fallujah to hold its captives.
"We broke a safe in one room and found a list of Iraqi hostages," he said.
"These guys have a kidnap squad, working outside Fallujah and bringing their victims to the city," he told AFP, without giving his name.
Just one-and-a-half days into the operation, marines found alive Mohammed al-Jundi, the Syrian driver who was kidnapped with French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, the staff sergeant said.
"I have no news of the French hostages," he added.
More than 200 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since April by different militant groups and many have been beheaded.
11/14/2004 12:28 GMT - AFP

And so, Iran begins to negotiate with the rest of the world. Iran promises to freeze its nuclear enrichment program...for now. They understand what economic sanctions would do to its economy. Smart move. For now.

Only in France...and maybe Palastine. Can the French be anymore anti-semetic, or anti-American for that matter?

Yes, Richard Clark was ignored by Bush when Bush took office. It was Bush's fault that 9/11 happened. If it weren't for Bush...blah...blah...blah. What about the Clinton administration? What did they miss?

Supply and Demand Economics. This is for all you liberals that think Bush, his oil buddies, and Halliburton are responsible for the price of oil - yes, the profits are going right into their pockets...NOT!

The Socialist and the Secularist. We came so close. Thank God Kerry wasn't elected.

Imagine. John Kerry wanted to hand the US armed forces over to this anti-American idiot. Liberals, oay attention to the people with whom your party associates, praises, and idolizes. Remember the old saying: if you friends are assholes, you must be one to. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

Kofi's Heroes
November 12, 2004; Page A12

Kofi Annan ordered United Nations flags at half-staff yesterday in tribute to lately departed Palestinian supremo Yasser Arafat. This, the folks at Turtle Bay tell us, is standard operating procedure whenever the head of a member state dies in office. Excuse us for asking, but what U.N.-member state did Arafat lead?
Well, none: "Palestine" has observer, not member, status. But Mr. Annan amended protocol in order to give Arafat the same recognition in death as the U.N. accorded him in life.
Say what you will about Mr. Annan's decision, it is certainly true that for 30 years the U.N. did what it could to elevate Arafat from terrorist to statesman. That's something Americans might bear in mind when next told the war on terror must be conducted under U.N. auspices.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, responsible for more than a score of suicide bombings, has renamed itself the Arafat Martyrs' Brigades. Now, there is a fitting tribute.

And for all the UN lovers out there, here are a few tidbits on their anti-semetic ways. Some readers talk about the UN resolutions against Israel, without mentioning the UN resolutions against the PLO suicide bombers. Here is nice table for the liberal illiterate.

I say, we get out of the U.N. immediately.

Could someone shut this guy up? He is a disgrace to America. His "stolen election in 2000" rant coupled with his legitimization of Chavez in the Venezuelan election was bad enough. Now he's claiming the Revolutionary War was unnecessary. I guess his disdain for the behaviors inherent in men is making him delusional.

It's time to go away Jimmy. Just go away.

This is from "Hardball" with Chris Matthews.

Similarly, in an Oct. 18 interview on MSNBC's "Hardball," the Media Research Center noted, host Chris Matthews painted the Iraqi insurgents as modern Minute Men in his discussion with former President Jimmy Carter, author of a novel set during the Revolutionary War.

Matthews asked Carter whether in the Founding Father's "insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the, the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?"

Carter replied, "Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we've fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war. Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial's really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way. I think in many ways the British were very misled in going to war against America and in trying to enforce their will on people who were quite different from them at the time."

Arafat's Terrorist Legacy: A Partial List
17:13 Nov 11, '04 / 27 Cheshvan 5765

Yasser Arafat, considered the founder of the modern-day terrorism, began a wave of murder against Jewish targets around the world shortly after taking control of the PLO in 1968-9. For example:

Among the murderous exploits he inspired were the following:

* the Savoy Hotel attack of March 1975, in which seven hostages and two soldiers were killed after Fatah terrorists landed on the beach and seized the hotel.

* the Maalot massacre in May 1974 in which a school building was taken over while children from Tzfat on a school trip were sleeping there. Three teachers and 22 schoolchildren were killed.

* the Munich Olympics slaughter, in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed in September 1972.

* the Nahariya/Avivim school bus attack, May 1970. Palestinian terrorists crossed the border from Lebanon, ambushed the bus with a barrage of gunfire, and murdered 12 children and 3 adults, and left several others crippled.

* the Lod Airport Massacre, May 1972, carried out by three Japanese Red Army terrorists in an operation planned and supported by PLO faction PFLP-GC, killing 26 and wounding 78.

* the Kiryat Shmonah apartment building attack in April 1974: PFLP-GC terrorists penetrated the Israeli border town, entered an apartment building on Yehuda HaLevy St. and killed all 18 residents they found there, including 9 children.

* the Coastal Road bus hijacking of March 1978, in which 11 Fatah terrorists ,who infiltrated by sea, killed a photographer and a taxi driver and hijacked a bus filled with adults and many children. The terrorists fired on passing cars from the bus, and when they were finally stopped, they began firing missiles. The massacre left 35 people dead and 100 injured.

* the brutal murder of three U.S. diplomats held hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, in March 1973. The terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. Arafat was recorded as having given the execution orders.

* the Achille Lauro hijacking of a cruise ship in October 1985, in which wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, 69, was shot and thrown overboard into the ocean. Israeli intelligence later showed that the terrorists had been in contact, via the ship's radio telephone, with a PLF coordinator in Genoa, who in turn was in touch with PLO headquarters in Tunis for final instructions.

Arafat was famous for denying responsibility for the terrorism committed by his underlings. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence official who defected to the West after working closely with Arafat, writes that Romanian dictator Ceausescu advised him how to do this:
"In the shadow of your government-in-exile, you can keep as many operational groups as you want, as long as they are not publicly connected with your name. They could mount endless operations all around the world, while your name and your 'government' would remain pristine and unspoiled, ready for negotiations and further recognition."

Describing Arafat in his memoirs, Pacepa writes that Arafat represented "an incredible account of fanaticism ... of tangled oriental political maneuvers, of lies, of embezzled PLO funds deposited in Swiss banks, and of homosexual relationships, beginning with his teacher when he was a teenager and ending with his current bodyguards. After reading that report, I felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever I had been kissed by Arafat, or even just shaken his hand."

Internationally, in 1972 alone, PLO groups blew up a West German electricity plant, a Dutch gas plant and an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy. In 1975, the presence of Arafat and his 15,000-strong army in Lebanon triggered a bloody civil war that raged on for nearly two decades, costing 40,000 lives.

Arafat was banished from Jordan to Lebanon in 1970 in the course of a violent war against the PLO by King Hussein, and from Lebanon to Tunis in 1982 following the Peace for Galilee War. He orchestrated the first "intifada," beginning in 1987, from Tunis, though it had supposedly started spontaneously.

In 1994, following the Oslo Accords, Arafat was allowed to enter Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Israel essentially forbade him from leaving Ramallah for the last three years of his life. Palestinian terrorists, funded and encouraged by the "statesman" Arafat, have murdered over 1,300 Israelis since the signing of the Oslo Agreement.

For those that believe Iran have no ties to terrorists or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.


FROM JOSEPH FARAH'S G2 BULLETIN
Iran supporting
al-Qaida terror
U.S. military, intelligence services now certain Tehran backing Iraq Islamists tied to bin Laden

________________________________________
Posted: November 8, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin is an online, subscription intelligence news service from the creator of WorldNetDaily.com – a journalist who has been developing sources around the world for almost 30 years.

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Iran is covertly supporting al-Qaida-aligned terrorists in Iraq, not just anti-American Shiite insurgents, U.S. defense and intelligence sources say with certainty.
The acknowledgment of the long-held suspicion as certainty raises the stakes in Iraq and the Persian Gulf as President Bush begins his second term and Iran, with its nuclear aspirations, moves to the front burner as an international crisis in the making.
According to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, al-Qaida-linked terrorists have been observed moving supplies and new recruits from Iran to Iraq, say the sources. While it has long been known Iran was backing the uprising led by Moqtada al-Sadr in the southern Shiite region of Iraq, the Iranian ties to Sunni Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist leader who has pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, has not been certain.
The development is potentially explosive given the standoff between Iran and the West over its nuclear program and the mullah regime's desire to build nuclear weapons. It was Iraq's flirtation with weapons of mass destruction and support of terrorism that provided the impetus for the U.S.-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Iran no longer even denies that elements of Ansar al-Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaida, entered the country from Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion of that nation in 2001. Iran claims it offered no assistance to the group.
But some senior al-Qaida operatives who were among those fleeing to Iran after the Afghanistan war may have developed a working relationship with the Revolutionary Guards, a special military unit in Iran linked to Tehran's mullah government, say U.S. military and intelligence sources.
The 9-11 commission also found contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al-Qaida figures and found evidence that eight to 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers passed through Iranian territory.
Iraq and Iran share an 800-mile border. U.S. officials say terrorists who cross over into Iraq from Iran most often head for Mosul, the largest Arab Sunni Muslim city in the north and an area where Islamic extremist groups are powerful. Others have been tracked going to Fallujah, now surrounded and sealed off by U.S. Marines who are expected to storm the city at any moment.
Links between Iran and al-Qaida are nothing new, however, the fact that the connections are now being taken seriously by U.S. senior officials who recognize the impact they are having on the ground in Iraq is explosive.
Back in June, former CIA analyst Douglas MacEachin, a member of the 9-11 commission staff, said Iran and its terrorist group ally Hezbollah were linked to the al-Qaida terrorist group.
Other U.S. intelligence officials said there is also evidence Iran is linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the officials, two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were aboard the aircraft that hit the Pentagon, had stayed at the Iranian ambassador's residence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before entering the United States in January 2001.
MacEachin disclosed that the Iran-al-Qaida ties were revealed in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers residence complex that housed U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia. The bombing killed 19 Americans.
U.S. intelligence agencies mistakenly assumed then that, since a Shiite group was involved, rival Sunnis were not, he said. That's a mistake senior defense and intelligence officials are no longer making.
Iran's links with al-Qaida go back to at least 1995 when an Egyptian members of bin Laden's group, Mustafa Hamid, visited Tehran. He is believed to have met with representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to discuss cooperation – cooperation that now appears to be a matter of fact.
Between the middle of 1996 and the end of 1998, 10 percent of all of bin Laden's outgoing satellite phone calls were to Iran, say U.S. sources.
In October 2000, Ali Muhammad, in testimony before the Southern District for New York federal court, described setting up meetings in the early 1990s between bin Laden and Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group.
Bin Laden's No. 2 in al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was the long-time leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, which had extensive ties to Iran. Al-Zawahiri traveled frequently to Iran in the 1990s, and he is believed to have been one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks.
According to a European intelligence official, Mughniyeh, who reports directly to Iranian intelligence, met in Mashad, Iran, with a senior Iranian intelligence official and a "top deputy to Saddam Hussein in charge of intelligence matters," to discuss cooperation with bin Laden. This meeting reportedly took place the month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the U.S.
President Bush warned that any nation cooperating with al-Qaida would become an enemy of the U.S. In fact, in 2002, he singled out Iran for special attention.
"(Iran) must be with us or against us in the war against terrorism and make no attempt to destabilize the interim Afghan government," he said. "Iran must be a contributor in the war against terror; our nation and our fight against terror will uphold the doctrine, either you're with us or against us; and any nation that thwarts our ability to rout terror out where it exists will be held to account, one way or the other. ... If they (Iranians) are trying – if they in any way, shape or form – try to destabilize the government (of Afghanistan), the coalition ... we'll deal with them, in diplomatic ways, initially."
U.S. officials in the Pentagon and intelligence services are now convinced Iran is actively undermining the occupation of Iraq – and doing so through direct collaboration with al-Qaida forces.

What kind of bias did we see during this campaign from the NEW YORK TIMES, and should we expect more of the same over the next 4 years?

How's the economy? It depends who you ask, and what their motives are.

What about Media Bias in general?

How about this idea for Social Security Reform?

The Electoral College.

The Employment Picture.

The truth about Saddam's WMD's.

I say we get out of the UN. Kofi Annan is an anti-American idiot.

Poverty and Economic Inequality?

Some Truths about Income Inequalities.