I looked at the article but I would like you to know

• All those that think abortion is a WONDERFUL thing - this will fall on deaf ears anyway!!! sm
  • WONDERFUL???? - ExMQMT
  • What Bush's ban actually did...(sm) - Just the big bad
  • Maybe if we all supported family planning and free contraceptives - WORLD WIDE - abortion would no l - CDW
    • I agree with one thing you said. Abortion is - wannie
    • What does that mean.......if we all support? - not our job SM
    • Why is it...........sm - m
    • I agree with you CDW, very well written nm - Mrs. M
    • No, necessary evil is just a term used to excuse - the action........sm
  • Only on deaf ears if from misinformed mouth nm - Mrs. M
  • why did you choose the word Wonderful? - have you actually heard this subject described th
    • I definitely have.........ad nauseum PRO-CHOICE - NM
  • I looked at the article but I would like you to know - Christine
    • I totally agree with Christine and would like to add sm - Mrs. M
      • What does Republican have to do with it? - i don't care what party they affiliate with....
        • Because the repubs are anti abortion nm - Mrs. M
          • I used to be a Repub, and when they added anti-abortion to - their agenda, I switched to Democrat.
            • There ya go, I rest my case nm - Mrs. M
    • Oh, there's that self-righteous garbage again - sm
      • You sound irrational...killing ethiopian babies with your money? ??? - Mrs. M
      • So you could always - Christine
        • No, most of those murder enough babies legally as well..... - now I pay to kill others in ALL countries
          • Did you ever think to check his website to see exactly - Lynn
            • Where have you been? - sm
              • You have other options and yelling wont do any good - Lynn
                • Well, if you're so worried about your money - time to get involved.......sm
                • It's "phase"...... time to stop blaming Bush - you need to read up on Obama
                  • And you need to read your dictionary for correct spelling...... - #1 speller
                  • Bless your heart, my faze was entirely right, your correction of me is entirely wrong - Lynn
                    • oooooh....somebody had her little button pushed! - LOL........ nm
                    • Faze is absolutely right! sm - Christian without the hate
  • Looks like.......... sm - m
    • Like I said.......this man has no morals..... - he bends whichever way the wind blows.........NM

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when Obama said that we aren't a Christian nation.  I don't really agree with that given the number of Christians in this country and the fact that all of our money has In God We Trust on it....but whatever.  I understood that he didn't want to tick off the secular part of our country because, as we know by the hate stated on this board, many non-believes truly hate believers. 

However, when he said that we are a Muslim country.....I was like.....excuse me?  We aren't a Christian nation but we are a Muslim country?  Why couldn't he have just said that we are a country with many different religions and we have the freedom to practice whatever it is we choose or don't choose.  I would have respected that a lot more than....we are not a Christian nation......we are a Muslim country. 

I understand trying to make ties with Muslims who aren't extremists and want us dead, but to say something like that.....total BS.  I just don't know what games our President is playing.  You would even think that some of the atheists on this board who hate Christians would have a problem with Obama calling us a Muslim country too....but since Obama said it and some of them love Obama.....I'm sure they will, once again, give the big O a free pass as always.

and I've looked at McCain.  I wouldn't vote for McCain if you paid me.  Did you not HEAR him say he's the biggest free trader ever?

<groan" only 1 more day.

xx

This whole Rove thing is not about outing anyone, it is about the uranium and Wilson finding no evidence that Saddam was trying to buy it.  Great article.  Link is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?incamp=article_popular

    Thursday 18 August 2005

    Cindy Sheehan is still waiting for Bush to answer her question: What noble cause did my son die for? Her protest started as a small gathering 13 days ago. It has mushroomed into a demonstration of hundreds in Crawford and tens of thousands more at 1,627 solidarity vigils throughout the country.

    Why didn't Bush simply invite Cindy in for tea when she arrived in Crawford? In a brief, personal meeting with Cindy, Bush could have defused a situation that has become a profound embarrassment for him, and could derail his political agenda.

    Bush didn't talk with Cindy because he can't answer her question. There is no answer to Cindy's question. There is no noble cause that Cindy's son died fighting for. And Bush knows it.

    The goals of this war are not hard to find. They were laid out in Paul Wolfowitz's draft Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance in 1992, and again in the neoconservative manifesto - The Project for a New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses - in September 2000.

    Long before 9/11, the neocons proclaimed that the United States should exercise its role as the world's only superpower by ensuring access to the massive Middle East petroleum reserves. To accomplish this goal, the US would need to invade Iraq and establish permanent military bases there.

    If Bush were to give an honest answer to Cindy Sheehan's question, it would be that her son died to help his country spread US hegemony throughout the Middle East.

    But that answer, while true, does not sound very noble. It would not satisfy Cindy Sheehan, nor would it satisfy the vast majority of the American people. So, for the past several years, Bush and his minions have concocted an ever-changing story line.

    First, it was weapons-of-mass-destruction and the mushroom cloud. In spite of the weapons inspectors' admonitions that Iraq had no such weapons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and Bolton lied about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Bush even included the smoking gun claim in his state of the union address: that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. It was a lie, because people like Ambassador Joe Wilson, who traveled to Niger to investigate the allegation, had reported back to Cheney that it never happened.

    The Security Council didn't think Iraq was a threat to international peace and security. In spite of Bush's badgering and threats, the Council held firm and refused to sanction a war on Iraq. The UN weapons inspectors asked for more time to conduct their inspections. But Bush was impatient.

    He thumbed his nose at the United Nations and invaded anyway. After the "coalition forces" took over Iraq, they combed the country for the prohibited weapons. But they were nowhere to be found.

    Faced with the need to explain to the American people why our sons and daughters were dying in Iraq, Bush changed the subject to saving the Iraqis from Saddam's torture chambers.

    Then the grotesque photographs emerged from Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. They contained images of US military personnel torturing Iraqis. Bush stopped talking about Saddam's torture.

    Most recently, Bush's excuse has been "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people." On June 28, 2004, he ceremoniously hailed the "transfer of sovereignty" back to the Iraqi people. (See Giving Iraqis What is Rightly Theirs). Yet 138,000 US troops remained in Iraq to protect US "interests."

    And Iraq's economy is still controlled by laws put in place before the "transfer of sovereignty." The US maintains a stranglehold on foreign access to Iraqi oil, private ownership of Iraq's resources, and control over the reconstruction of this decimated country.

    For months, Bush hyped the August 15, 2005 deadline for Iraqis to agree on a new constitution. But as the deadline came and went, the contradictions between the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds over federalism came into sharp focus. The Bush administration admitted that "we will have some form of Islamic republic," according to Sunday's Washington Post.

    So much for Bush's promise of a democratic Iraq.

    The constitutional negotiations are far removed from the lives of most Iraqis. When journalist Robert Fisk asked an Iraqi friend about the constitution, he replied, "Sure, it's important. But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I'm too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can't even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can't eat federalism and you can't use it to fuel your car and it doesn't make my fridge work."

    Fisk reports that 1,100 civilian bodies were brought into the Baghdad morgue in July. The medical journal The Lancet concluded in October 2004 that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the first 18 months after Bush invaded Iraq.

    Unfortunately, the picture in Iraq is not a pretty one.

    Bush knows that if he talked to Cindy Sheehan, she would demand that he withdraw from Iraq now.

    But Bush has no intention of ever pulling out of Iraq. The US is building the largest CIA station in the world in Baghdad. And Halliburton is busily constructing 14 permanent US military bases in Iraq.

    George Bush knows that he cannot answer Cindy Sheehan's question. There is no noble cause for his war on Iraq.

By John Yewell/City Editor

With Cindy Sheehan gone home to take care of her stroke-stricken mom, President Bush can enjoy the last week of his Texas vacation free of the distraction of her encampment outside his ranch. But a grieving liberal mom whose son died in Iraq demanding an audience may not be Bush’s biggest problem.

His biggest problem may be my mom.

My mother is a lifelong Republican. She got it from her father, a yellow-dog Republican if ever there was one. As unofficial GOP godfather of Fillmore, Calif., he collected absentee ballots every election for his large family and marked them himself. No sense in taking chances that someone might vote for a Democrat.

So when my mother called me the other day and told me she was considering registering as a Democrat, I was, well, stunned. Somewhere in a cemetery plot near Fillmore a body is spinning.

For the last year or more my mother has been gradually expressing ever greater exasperation with President Bush, the war, and the religious right. “Have you heard about this James Dobson guy?” she asked me on the phone, referring to the head of Focus on the Family. “If they overturn Roe vs. Wade, that’ll be it for me,” she said.

Then she mentioned Cindy Sheehan.

For all the efforts to discredit Ms. Sheehan, what she accomplished in drawing attention to the human cost of the war, if my mother’s opinion is any indication, crossed party lines. There’s a Mom Faction in American politics, and while it isn’t a monolithic Third Rail, it’s at least and second-and-a-half rail. When their children are dying on a battlefield of choice, you touch it at your peril.

My mother has her fingers on the pulse, and scalps, of many such women. She’s a hairdresser with a clientele that has been coming to her regularly for decades. Now grandmothers, these women were moms during Vietnam, in which over 50,000 American sons and daughters died. They worried then about their kids’ safety, now they’re worried about grandkids - theirs or someone else’s. Most are pretty mainstream, most Republican, and most, my mother tells me, pretty much fed up with George Bush.

There is other evidence of trouble on the Republican horizon. According to the latest compilation of state polls produced 10 days ago by surveyusa.com, of the 31 states Bush won in 2004, he now enjoys plurality job approval in only 10. This includes a 60 to 37 percent disapproval rate in the key state of Ohio, and a 53 to 44 disapproval rate in Florida.

A recent assessment from the influential and scrupulously nonpartisan Cook Political Report reads: “Opposition to and skepticism about the war in Iraq has reached its highest level, boosted by increased American casualties, a lack of political progress inside the country and growing signs of an imminent civil war. Given the centrality of the Iraq War to the Bush presidency and re-election, a cave-in of support for the president on the war would be devastating to his second-term credibility and influence.”

If Republicans are wondering where Cook is finding this “cave-in of support,” they could start looking in worse places than my mother’s one-chair salon, where Cindy Sheehan found sympathetic ears.

According to various reports, Bush and his team concluded that granting Sheehan an audience would only have encouraged other malcontents to demand similar attention from the president. Whatever the rationale, the decision alienated the clientele of Natalie’s Beauty Shoppe.

In the end my mother decided against changing her registration. Any criticism she might have of Bush, she decided, would be more credible if she stayed in the party, a sophisticated conclusion I admire and applaud.

Although Democrats can’t count on being the automatic beneficiaries of such dissatisfaction, Bush’s refusal to acknowledge fault, his “because I’m the Daddy and I say so” attitude, doesn’t work for a lot of women anymore. Women resent being patronized, and that’s how many view the president’s treatment of Cindy Sheehan.

The next election may be 14 months away, but when my mom and a lot of others like her walk into their voting booths, they may well be reflecting on their children and their choices, and which party is less likely to put either in harm’s way.

John Yewell is the city editor of the Hollister Free Lance. He can be reached at jyewell@freelancenews.com.