Chertoff says bird flu = police state.

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Because if you had you'd definitely be able to see the VAST difference between a police state and the American state.

Also, your one-world government theory about the Bush's doesn't sync with your view that Bush is alienating the rest of the world, but I guess you think because Bush wants democracy for the world he somehow is planning to take over the world.

Almost a year ago Bush reserved the right to declare martial law if/when the bird flu comes to the USA.

As for your other points, I'm sure there are home-grown terrorists in the USA. Will Bush limit his target to those people? That's the problem. Nobody knows for sure. All people can be certain of is how he feels about swiftboating and getting revenge on anyone who disagrees with him. And that's why this man should be forced to follow the law and use warrants when spying on Americans. He simply can't be trusted.

I do question which troops he will be using, though. They're too busy fighting Bush's war in Iraq (not to mention likely war in Iran) to be able to fight Bush's war against Americans who don't agree with him.

Many people were confined against their will just because someone wanted them "out of the way." These were normal people with no mental illness - that is why it is so difficult - don't blame the liberals. Blame your state.

CONFINING THE MENTALLY ILL

In the legal space between what a society should and should not do, taking action to restrict the liberty of people who are mentally ill sits in the grayest of gray areas.

Our notions about civil and constitutional rights flow from an assumption of "normalcy." Step beyond the boundaries and arrest and prison may legally follow. Short of that, government's ability to hold people against their will is severely and properly limited. Unusual behavior on the part of someone who is mentally ill is not illegal behavior. Freedom can't be snatched away on a whim, or on the thought that a person is hard to look at, hard to hear, hard to smell.

It was only a few decades ago that the promise of new medications and a change in attitude opened the doors of the mental hospitals and sent many patients into society. There, they would somehow "normalize" and join everyone else, supported by networks of out-patient facilities, job training, special living arrangements and regular, appropriate medication. But the transition has been imperfect, long and difficult.

In some parts of urban America there is little professional support for those with mental health problems. A new generation of drug and alcohol-fueled mental illness has come on the scene. People frequently end up on the street, un-medicated and exhibiting a full range of behaviors that are discomforting at the very least and threatening at their worst.

Written last Thanksgiving: "Some would argue that two different nations actually celebrated: upright, moral, traditional red America and the dissolute, liberal blue states clustered on the periphery of the heartland. The truth, however, is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways, they were the two states competing in the last election. In the world's imagination, you couldn't have two starker opposites. One is the homeplace of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes, and social permissiveness. The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional, and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for Kerry over Bush 62 to 37 percent; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61 to 38 percent.

So ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in actual fact, Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas - which until recently made private gay sex a criminal offence - has a divorce rate of 4.1. A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates in the U.S. are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. And the states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Every single one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every single one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate, in fact, is roughly 50 percent higher than the national average.

Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt - and many clearly don't have the maturity to know what they're getting into. There's some correlation too between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging a highly educated state like Massachusetts. But the irony still holds. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that these socially troubled communities cling onto absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.

But doesn't being born again help bring down divorce rates? Jesus, after all, was mum on the subject of homosexuality, but was very clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study, however, found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not. 29 percent of Baptists have been divorced, compared to 21 percent of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23 percent of married born-agains have been divorced twice or more. Teen births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state like Texas, where the religious right is extremely strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, the teen births as a percentage of all births is 16.1 percent. In liberal, secular, gay-friendly Massachusetts, it's 7.4, almost half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas, the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent; in Massachusetts, it's 26.8 percent. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts manages a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.

Or take abortion. America is one of the few Western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It's a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc, and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it to a country like Holland, perhaps the epitome of socially liberal, relativist liberalism. So which country has the highest rate of abortion? It's not even close. America has an abortion rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?

Even a cursory look at the leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America reveals the same pattern. The top conservative talk-radio host, Rush Limbaugh, has had three divorces and an addiction to pain-killers. The most popular conservative television personality, Bill O'Reilly, just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life. Bill Bennett, the guru of the social right, was for many years a gambling addict. Karl Rove's chief outreach manager to conservative Catholics for the last four years, Deal Hudson, also turned out to be a man with a history of sexual harassment. Bob Barr, the conservative Georgian congressman who wrote the "Defense of Marriage Act," has had three wives so far. The states which register the highest ratings for the hot new television show, "Desperate Housewives," are all Bush-states.

The complicated truth is that America truly is a divided and conflicted country. But it's a grotesque exaggeration to say that the split is geographical, or correlated with blue and red states. Many of America's biggest "sinners" are those most intent on upholding virtue. In fact, it may be partly because they know sin so close-up that they want to prevent its occurrence among others. And some of those states which have the most liberal legal climate - the Northeast and parts of the upper MidWest - are also, in practice, among the most socially conservative. To ascribe all this to "hypocrisy" seems to me too crude an explanation. America is simply a far more complicated and diverse place than crude red and blue divisions can explain.

they are adding police and only in the big cities do they have paid firemen. The rest are volunteers.

I look at it this way: If a state can't stay in the black, then they have to cut spending some place that wouldn't jeopardize the safety of the citizens. Threats of cutting essential services like Barney Fife stated today are unjustified. Cut the non-essential services first.

Our governor talks about cutting back on services, laying off government workers, which I think is a good idea because government is too big anyway, but then he turns around and spends more money on non-essential items. Doesn't make sense.

The intent of the post was not to compare an embryo to a turkey, but rather simply a joke saying that she would take up one cause but not the other. If you read the posts below you might understand the joke.

However, since you mentioned it, I'm sure I could make that comparrison. Our ideas of when life begins are obviously not the same.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Insurgents have infiltrated Iraq's security forces, a senior Iraqi official said, as the fallout continued over British forces' use of armed vehicles to smash their way into a police station to rescue two undercover soldiers.

The British government said it would not pull troops out of Iraq after the fury over the controversial rescue of two special forces soldiers arrested in Basra and allegedly handed over to local militia.

Iraq's National Security Adviser, Dr Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said he did not know how far security forces had been undermined by insurgents.

He told the BBC: Our Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well.

I can't deny this. We are putting in place a very scrupulous, very meticulous vetting procedure in the process of recruiting a new batch of police and Iraqi army, which will, if you like, clean our security forces as well as stop any penetration in future from the insurgents and terrorists.

Al-Rubaie added: I can't give you a percentage of the extent of the penetration, but I have to admit that the Iraqi security forces are penetrated, to what extent I don't know.

Meanwhile U.S. officials revealed that nine Americans, including five soldiers, were killed by bombs in Iraq during Monday and Tuesday.

Four troops, assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, were killed Monday in Ramadi, the U.S. military said. The deaths brought to 1,904 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. (Full story)

In Basra Wednesday the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior said it was looking into what led to UK armored fighting vehicles bulldozing the wall of a Basra police station jail in a bid to free the special forces soldiers.

Inside, troops discovered that the two men had been handed over to the militia by Iraqi police and freed them.

The men's capture Monday came just a day after British forces in Basra arrested two leading members of the outlawed Mahdi Army which is loyal to firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and is widely believed to have heavily infiltrated the local Iraqi police, the UK's Press Association reported.

The two arrested men from the Mahdi Army were the group's Basra area commander, Sheikh Ahmad Majid al-Fartusi, and his aide Sajjat al-Basri, PA said.

According to PA, the two British men detained by police were members of the Special Air Service and appeared to have been quickly handed over to militiamen by police.

The mission to rescue them, which was condemned by many Iraqis, was launched amid fears they could face summary execution, PA said.

One Iraqi member of parliament said that following the arrest of the SAS men, the Mahdi Army had tried to take them hostage to exchange them for its two leaders.

Four tanks invaded the area. A tank cannon struck a room where a policeman was praying, policeman Abbas Hassan told Reuters.

Standing next to mangled cars outside the police station and jail that he said were crushed by British military vehicles, he added: This is terrorism. All we had was rifles.

A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said the British operation against the jail had been a very unfortunate development but his office later released a statement saying there was no crisis in relations with the British.

Iraqi policemen at the jail Tuesday surveyed a mass of rubble, broken plywood and air conditioning units where their perimeter wall and a number of prefabricated structures once stood.

A number of flattened cars appeared to have been run over by British Warrior armored fighting vehicles.

The two special forces soldiers, who were travelling undercover, were arrested after allegedly becoming involved in a firefight with Iraqi police at a checkpoint. Iraqi officials claimed they had shot dead a local policeman and wounded at least one other.

The British soldiers are believed to have feared the men were really insurgents dressed in police uniforms, PA said.

British Defence Secretary John Reid defended the subsequent action by British troops against the Jamiat police station jail, saying it was absolutely right.

We do not have designs to stay (in Iraq) as an occupying imperial power. Nor are we going to cut and run because of terrorists, Reid was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

The paper said that Reid and British defense chiefs would meet Iraqi PM al-Jaafari Wednesday in London to discuss security issues.

In dramatic scenes outside the jail Monday, British troops were confronted by an angry mob, hundreds strong, throwing stones and petrol bombs and several soldiers suffered minor injuries.

After they discovered the two SAS men were not in the jail, Iraqi police were confronted with a 30mm cannon and revealed they had been given to the militia.

Brigadier John Lorimer, commanding officer of 12 Mechanised Brigade in Basra, said: We will be following up with the authorities in Basra why the soldiers were not immediately handed over to the multinational forces as Iraqi law shows that they should have been.

It is of deep concern that British soldiers held by the police should then end up being held by militia, he added.

NBC: Charges against Sheehan to be dropped
Antiwar mom removed from State of the Union for wearing protest shirt

WASHINGTON - Charges against antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan, who was arrested after an incident involving a T-shirt she wore to the State of the Union address, will be dropped, officials told NBC News Wednesday.

U.S. Capitol Police took Sheehan away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor, when she showed up to President Bush�s address Tuesday night wearing a shirt that read, �2245 Dead. How many more?� � a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.

But Capitol Police will ask the U.S. attorney's office to drop the charges, NBC News� Mike Viqueira reported Wednesday.

�We screwed up,� a top Capitol Police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Sheehan didn't violate any rules or laws.

Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq, was not the only one ejected from the House gallery. The wife of a powerful Republican congressman was also asked to leave, but she was not arrested.

Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Florida � chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee � was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, �Support the Troops � Defending Our Freedom.�

The Capitol Police official said officers never should have approached Young.

Criticism from Rep. Young
Holding up the shirt his wife wore, Rep. Young said on the House floor Wednesday morning: �Because she had on a shirt that someone didn�t like that said support our troops, she was kicked out of this gallery.�

�Shame, shame,� he scolded.

Beverly Young was sitting about six rows from first lady Laura Bush and was asked to leave. She argued with police in the hallway outside the House chamber.

�They said I was protesting,� she told the St. Petersburg Times. �I said, �Read my shirt, it is not a protest.� They said, �We consider that a protest.� I said, �Then you are an idiot.��

They told her she was being treated the same as Sheehan, who was ejected before the speech. Sheehan wrote in her blog Wednesday that she intended to file a First Amendment lawsuit.

She did not issue an immediate response to the charges being dropped.

�I don�t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government,� Sheehan wrote in her blog.

Sheehan was invited as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif. She later was released on her own recognizance.

Told she could not wear shirt?
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said police warned Sheehan that such displays were not allowed in the House chamber, but Sheehan did not respond, she said.

Sheehan, however, told a different story in her blog.

�I was never told that I couldn�t wear that shirt into the Congress,� Sheehan wrote. �I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things, ... I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later.�

She said she felt uncomfortable about attending the speech.

�I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn�t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket,� Sheehan wrote. �I didn�t want to be disruptive out of respect for her.�

She said she had one arm out of her coat when an officer yelled, �Protester.�

�He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs,� she wrote in her blog. She was then cuffed and driven to police headquarters a few blocks away.

Sheehan was arrested in September with about 300 other anti-war activists in front of the White House after a weekend of protests against the war in Iraq. In August, she spent 26 days camped near Bush�s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was spending a working vacation.