We have good reason, kind of a knee jerk reaction. LOL.

We're constantly visited by the *compassionate conservative* trolls from the other board who come here only to be spew hatred, personally attack posters and to generally cause trouble, despite constant requests from the monitor that they not do that. 

I've always been in favor of stem cell research.  I believe in science progressing and helping people live longer.  I don't believe in forcing the personal religious beliefs of some down the throats of every American. 

In all honesty, though, here lately it's hard for me to get excited if I see America making progress in any area because it doesn't matter what bill Congress introduces, votes in favor of and presents to the President.  Bush will dismiss what he doesn't like and issue yet another of hundreds of his famous *signing statements.*  I don't know why we even bother to have a Congress any more.  They've been rendered impotent by King George.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/14976584.htm

I apologize if you feel you were being treated negatively.  If you're someone who is legitimate and sincere about debate, then welcome to our board. 

But if you're only here to start trouble, like most of the elephants in donkeys' clothing invading this board lately, then I'd prefer that you just go away.  I won't feed any more hatred because I'm just tired of it all.  I've climbed down to their level too many times in the last few months, the stench way down there is just terrible, and I no longer wish to engage in their kind of communication.

What are your thoughts on the issues I've mentioned?  Please respond.  Thoughtful, intelligent debate, without the use of degrading personal insults, is very welcome here.

• Do you talk about anything on this board besides - LibertyLucille
  • Not that you are owed any explanation for what we chose to post...sm - Democrat
    • Wow, you guys are sure defensive! - LL
      • We have good reason, kind of a knee jerk reaction. LOL. - PK
        • Oh, and as far as vetoes. - LL
          • Bush has never vetoed anything. - PK
            • I wish he would start! nm - MT
        • You know, I just can't get into all that. - LL
      • Long story about the defensiveness.LOL!! sm - Democrat
        • I guess my worry is. - LL
          • Is the new legislature talking about stem cells of aborted fetuses?...sm - Democrat
            • I agree with the scenario you speak of. - LL
              • Me either...nm - Democrat
            • Good post, Democrat. - PK
  • Blind loyalty, sad. You need to wake up.nm - LVMT
    • What in the sam hill are you talking about? - LL

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Barrack Hussein Obama.....nuff said.

watching/listening to him speak.  Instead, my impression is that he's thinking on his feet and trying to choose his words very carefully.  In that regard, he's a definite improvement over his predecessor (LOL).

Having said that, I can definitely understand how he could come across to people as he comes across to you. 

The press seems to be riding his tail pretty close, and I hope they continue to do so.  (Just the other day, I saw a clip where the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was 20 minutes late, and a member of the media scolded him, saying basically to knock it off, that nobody appreciates sitting around and waiting for Gibbs to begin a press conference.)

MSNBC (who was definitely in the "tank" for him) is beginning to challenge some of his actions/words, which I think is good.

 I think you are confusing The Siege at Wounded Knee beginning in February 1973 with the Reign of Terror as it was called by the indians the following three years. During those 3 years 64 tribal members were unsolved murders, 300 harassed and beaten and 562 arrests made of which only 15 were convicted. The seige ended after 71 days. In 1975 the FBI was following a red pickup truck to the Jumping Bull ranch where many AIM members as well as nonmembers were present..AIM having been asked there by the family for protection. What ensued ended in the death of 2 Federal Agents and 1 indian man. The red pickup truck was never seen nor heard of again. What happened is sketchy at best. Three indian men were tried in the deaths of the Feds. Two were acquitted and Leonard Peltier has been in prison for 27 years, although there is little evidence to support his incarceration...or I guess I should say, there was evidence at the time of the trial but at least 4 of the witnesses have recanted their testimonies. They state they testified out of fear. If nothing else, Peltier deserves a new trial and that has been proven and reproven, yet he does not get it.  During the 1973 Wounded Knee, 2 AIM members were killed and 12 others disappeared. There is quite a bit of information on this topic available for your perusal. Aho.

P.S. The reason indians (traditional) would rather be called indians than Native Americans is because the land we lived on was not America until the white man came. Indians called this place Turtle Island. The Native Americans were, in fact, the first Europeans to arrive and name this place America, ergo, they were the first or Native Americans. We are the indigenous peoples, the indians.

He hasn't proven anything.  To liberals accusation is a verdict.  Mr. Bennett has written a book of virtues.  Why don't you hold your accusation/label until you've read that book..not that I expect you will.  Anyone who knows Bennett and his work know he's not a racist.  He was taken out of context and that was that.  He stated a hypothetical situation and in the next breath said it would be morally reprehensible.

You  may think us conservatives are so illiterate that we would just believe the baloney taken from context, but you are wrong.

One was killed while going for his gun after being shot at.  The gun was so high powered, it severed his hand. He was married and a father.  I don't think Wounded Knee is anything to be proud of. 

his own personal reasons.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050620/why_george_went_to_war.php

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11—indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Conversations With Bush The Candidate

Herskowitz—a longtime Houston newspaper columnist—has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers—expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript—pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior—who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

Debating The Timeline For War

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush—personally—in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"—because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way…"

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."

"I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred…" …

"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Woodward: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"

Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam—and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

Woodward: "Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible."

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

Everything below is from their official, sanitized website, but for the real view of this group read their forum which includes lots of photos of firearms, many with children alongside them.

________________

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

-- John Stuart Mill

(From the Mission portion of the website):

War IS an ugly thing, but as long as nations and leaders exist that detest freedom, sometimes it is the only way to secure a lasting peace. Most leftist anti-war protesters and pundits don't understand this. They state that this use of force is always unnecessary -- that war, ANY war, is never good. Some of them, born into the luxury of American freedom, believe that liberty can exist passively, that somehow the world's natural state will always settle into utopian harmony. Others, in an attempt to absolve themselves from the unearned guilt they harbor living in a nation of prosperity and wealth, try to buy morality on the cheap by pronouncing themselves for the 'good'. To them, the derivation of the 'good' is based on a simple, yet peculiar standard: the powerful and competent are wicked, while the feeble and impotent are innocent - regardless of the context. That is why they defend Iraq instead of America, and the Palestinian "resistance" instead of Israel.

"

Do any of you watch Survivor?  I love that show.  I think Im in pretty good shape but there is no way I could survive for a month on an island like they do but I like to watch and make believe that I could (smile).  Snakes and alligators and bugs..YIPES. 

Don't know who you are referring to but I suppose all countries have residents who don't wish it well but I assume that statistically they would be a very tiny minority as really, why would they live in a place they wish to see destroyed?  Seems silly.

This country seems to be unable to educate itself about the nature of our foe.  We rely on leaders who seem to flaunt their ignorance about the middle eastern culture.  So perhaps you are right, there are those who wish us harm.....by utilizing repeatedly the same failed techniques/agendas that as you stated, continue to stoke the fires of hate that have been burning for a very very long time -- the agendas of ignorance and unwillingness to learn from history.  As long as this runaway ignorance prevails our soldiers will continue to die along with the Iraqi civilians and our world will become less safe.

There is a world of heartache ahead in the very near future.  In case you haven't been following the trend, there is one church that has been advising its members for over 100 years to stock pile food and supplies, be self-sufficient, and otherwise make nice with the world.  The holocaust is coming, but there isn't going to be some saving-grace rapture first.  The righteous people will collect into specific locations to survive while the unrighteous have a slug fest and kill each other off.  Its very real and it is likely going to be within this lifetime.

creepy thought for you to be fixated on.  EEEWWW.

I agree with everything you said.

I think that lumping people together and making gross inaccurate generalizations does nothing but prevent any intelligent discourse from occurring, and that's very sad because these issues are very serious.  Our very ability to keep BREATHING may be in jeopardy, particularly if we don't start concentrating on our own safety. Bush  has made Iraq much less safe place to be, and he hasn't done much to make the United States a safe place to be.  If we truly NEED our military someday to protect US in a homeland attack, where will they all be?

What also worries me is that our enemies might consider this a bilateral "religious" war.  They already believe it is, yelling and effecting "Jihad."  But the current focus on one particular brand of Christianity in this country -- not religion in general, but one particular BRAND of Christianity -- makes me wonder if Bush himself doesn't think this is a religious war.  The fact that he might think so is what scares me the most, as history tell us they are the most deadly, bloody wars of all. I personally don't want the U.S. to be known as a "Christian" nation.  One of the things I love the most about this country is the freedom that we're SUPPOSED to have to worship freely, and I will personally oppose anyone who tries to take that away from us.    

It's sad that tolerance and respect aren't in more people's hearts and souls.