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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (7531)	3/5/2004 8:50:32 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 20773

911 is a legitimate campaign issue. Whether one side wants to pretend it didn't happen or not. THE PRESIDENT'S 9/11 CASE NY Post - Editorial March 5, 2004 -- Is it fair for President Bush to use images from Ground Zero in his reelection campaign? Damned right it is. The more, the merrier. Just as Rudy Giuliani stood tall for New York City in the hours, days and weeks after 9/11, so did George W. Bush offer calm, reasoned, determined leadership to a nation shaken to its roots by acts of unfathomable barbarism. Moreover, U.S. troops are today deployed around the world, prosecuting a manifestly necessary war on international terrorism - in whatever form it may take. So it doesn't hurt to remind America, in no uncertain terms, exactly why the war is necessary. The president and his policies have absorbed one left hook after another - from as many as 10 Democratic presidential candidates - during the primary campaign that effectively ended Tuesday. Sen. John Kerry is now the presumptive Democratic nominee - so now it's "No More Mr. Nice Guy" for the president. It is time for Bush to remind voters who he is - and who John Kerry is. Thus the first round of re-election ads, which lean heavily on 9/11 and the president's response to it. Since the attack, Bush has: * Waged successful military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, countries whose tyrants hosted oppression - and exported murder and disorder throughout their regions and beyond; * Placed both countries on the road to representative democracy with a swiftness that few could have imagined, and * Provided such moral clarity on confronting terror-sponsoring states that longtime bad agents began to clean up their acts. Libya, for one, voluntarily abandoned its development of weapons of mass destruction. Yes, America has paid a heavy price in lives and treasure - but what choice did the president have? Effectively ignore the threat, as did his predecessors, going back to the terror attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983? Or fight back? He fought back - and God bless him for it. No doubt some sensitive souls will be offended by the imagery in the ads. And that's regrettable. But most of the outrage so far has been manufactured - churned out in bulk by the spewmeisters at Moveon.Org, related left-wing crank factories and a tabloid fellow traveler. It won't work. Because America knows better. It's legitimate to ask how a President Kerry would have handled 911. My guess is he'd have handled it the way Clinton handled the embassy bombings and the USS Cole attack. We'd be seeing periodic videotapes of OBL laughing at the US and winning mass support in the Arab world. A revolution in SA putting OBL in power (or a wing of the royal family under his control) would be a real possibility by now.

To: epicure who wrote (7531)	3/10/2004 11:44:30 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

globeandmail.com This is a little different.... Sex Clearly Undefined For Today's Youth By Alanna Mitchell The Globe and Mail 3-10-4 When is sex not really sex? When it's oral, manual, on-line or conducted over the phone and sometimes even when it involves intercourse without orgasm. At least, that's the finding of a study of 164 heterosexual university students being published today in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, and it's raising troubling questions about whether the message of safe sex is being hampered by different definitions between the generations. Hilary Randall, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of New Brunswick and one of the paper's co-authors, said the findings point to a gaping hole in programs designed to deal with preventing sexually transmitted infections such as HIV/AIDS. Young people, bombarded with the safe-sex message, are applying it only to what they consider to be formally having sex. Older adults, who are designing the safe-sex programs, are using it to refer to a wide range of sexual activity, including oral sex and certainly anal and vaginal sex, with or without orgasm. "This old, antiquated language is not getting the information across," said Ms. Randall. To be effective, sexual-health programs will need to be far more specific in describing sexual activities rather than relying on omnibus terms such as "having sex," her paper says. When safe-sex educators talk about limiting the number of sex partners to avoid infection, that message, too, may be understood differently by younger Canadians, who may be counting only those with whom they have had vaginal intercourse with orgasm, said co-author Sandra Byers, a psychology professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. "They are saying: 'I didn't have sex. I had sexual activity,'." she said. For example, just over three-quarters (77 per cent) of the males interviewed said that anal intercourse without orgasm qualified as having sex, meaning that the same act wasn't sex at all to 23 per cent. If orgasm happened with anal intercourse, 84 per cent of the men said it was sex. For females, the figures were 80 per cent and 83 per cent. Among males, 10 per cent did not consider vaginal intercourse to be sex if orgasm failed to happen. For women, 96 per cent said vaginal intercourse without orgasm constituted sex. Approximately the same percentage for both men and women defined sex as vaginal intercourse with orgasm. Fewer than a quarter of the students said that oral sex - with or without orgasm - was real sex. Hardly any of the students said that masturbating to orgasm over the phone or over the computer was having sex. Ms. Randall said it is even possible ó though not proved ó that the safe-sex campaigns have somehow skewed the younger generation's idea of what sex is. "It's possible that we've given them the impression that sex is whatever you use a condom for," she said. She said studies in the United States that attempt to define sexual abstinence come up with similar findings: To the U.S. students, having oral sex qualified as being abstinent. The Canadian findings reflect the centuries-old sexual focus on loss of virginity and the breaking of the hymen, said Ed Herold, a professor of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph and the founder of the Guelph Sexuality Conference. He added, though, that the findings suggest a sea change in the way people view oral sex. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey did his ground-breaking work on human sexuality, oral sex was often considered to be more intimate than vaginal penetration, and it tended to happen long after vaginal intercourse had been established. Today, it is often a prelude to vaginal intercourse or an act that never leads to further sexual activity. "What it's saying is that there certainly is a lot more experimentation," said Prof. Herold. Alexander McKay, research co-ordinator of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada, which publishes the journal, also said the study shows that ideas about sexuality are evolving in Canada. "Twenty years ago if we asked people whether oral-genital contact was 'having sex,' most people would have said quite definitely that it was," he said. He said the evolution is healthy. "It certainly helps to legitimize the sexual expression of people that is not specifically directing sexual behaviour toward procreation." The study also found that when it came to sexual jealousy, the students were prepared to say that almost any activity - including deep kissing and on-line sex - amounted to being unfaithful. © 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.