Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rock_nj who wrote (33970)	8/21/2005 10:23:20 PM
From: Bill on the Hill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361502

Not only based on alternative fuels but alternative lifestyles that support sustainability in their own personal lives. I see these sustainable communities being lights in the coming darkness. Politics, either Democrat or Republican offers no way out and this will not change. To hope for this in my opinion wastes valuable time. We are not talking about a lifestyle that has no fun. I have more fun in this life now that I have changed my habits than I had five or ten or fifteen years ago. It is a challenge to learn to be self sufficient. Worthy of years of practice.

To: Rock_nj who wrote (33970)	8/21/2005 10:30:45 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361502

The cowards in Congress deserve a message from everyone in this country... tvnewslies.org

To: Rock_nj who wrote (33970)	8/21/2005 11:43:21 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361502

Congress Must Probe Whether President Lied Us into War by Gilbert Cranberg Published on Sunday, August 21, 2005 by the Des Moines Register _______________________________________________________ As polls show that Americans increasingly believe the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, so, too, do they show a growing conviction that the Bush administration lied the country into war. To be sure, pollsters do not use such blunt-edged words as "lie." Instead, they ask, as the Washington Post-ABC News poll did recently, "In making the case for war with Iraq, do you think the Bush administration told the American people what it believed to be true, or intentionally misled the American public?" "Intentionally Misled" topped "What It Believed to Be True" 52 percent to 48 percent. When the poll substituted "intentionally exaggerate" for "intentionally misled," 57 percent said in substance that the case for war was deliberately overblown. Each version of the question has been asked three times since 2004, and in each subsequent poll, ever-greater percentages said, in effect, that they had been duped. The Gallup organization had the same experience the five times it asked whether the administration "deliberately misled" Americans about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Only 31 percent believed in 2003 there had been deliberate deception, but that had climbed to 50 percent by last April. A lie is a knowing mizsstatement of fact. "Intentionally misleading" and "intentionally exaggerated" simply are euphemisms for the same thing, and it is clear that a large chunk of the public believes it was lied to by the administration. Just because many people believe something, of course, does not make it so. But neither can it be ignored. Yet the administration seems to be doing exactly that. When it created the Commission on the Intelligence Capability of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004, it carefully walled it off from any investigation of possible misuse of intelligence by the administration. Instead, the commission was told to examine only the "intelligence community." At about the same time the president established the commission by executive order, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a press release that appeared to say the committee would explore the very issue Bush had barred his commission from investigating. The Senate committee said it would examine whether "public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information." To eliminate any ambiguity, the committee's vice-chairman, John Rockefeller, announced, "We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused . . . " Except it didn't; the committee got cold feet and quietly let it be known recently that it would not look into the misuse of intelligence. So the American people are left to figure out for themselves whether the administration lied. Increasingly, they are deciding that it did. The mainstream press may be beginning to find its voice with the same conclusion. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for one, editorializing May 30 about Iraq, declared, "President Bush and those around him lied . . . Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes." The editorial-page editor describes reader reaction as generally supportive. Whether the Bush administration lied is immensely important, not only because of the lives and limbs lost, but because reliable, accurate information is a bedrock of democratic government. Aldous Huxley warned, "The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information." A public fed a heavy diet of misinformation cannot make the adequately informed decisions democracy requires of them. President Bush says the mission in Iraq is to spread democracy in the Middle East. It would be bizarrely ironic if the administration knowingly hoodwinked Americans and thereby subverted a basic tenet of democracy in the name of advancing it. The widespread belief by Americans that their government deceived them makes it urgent that Congress quit ducking the questions the Senate Intelligence Committee promised the country to address. © 2005 Des Moines Register commondreams.org