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Politics : FREE AMERICA -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (2887)	4/11/2006 9:08:30 AM
From: paret	Respond to of 14758

Jesse Jackson spews tired leftwing talking points ............................................................... Stop Bush before he attacks Iran-BY JESSE JACKSON sun times ^ \| April 11, 2006 \| Jesse Jackson Here we go again. The administration says ''regime change'' is needed. Warnings are issued about the threat posed by the ''madman'' who leads the oil-rich country. Alarming intelligence estimates are leaked about nuclear weapons programs. The vice president warns ''monumental consequences'' if the alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons are continued. Neoconservatives call for military action. Administration operatives express scorn for international monitoring. The Pentagon is reported not only to be developing contingency plans for an assault, but already launching mock bombing runs to measure air defense capacities. Covert military incursions are said to be active on the ground. This isn't about the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2002. These reports concern the administration's drumbeat about Iran and its fundamentalist government. With violence rising in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden still loose and civil war escalating in Iraq, it is preposterous for the administration to contemplate another war of choice in the Persian Gulf. But all signs point that way. Iran has oil and gas -- lots of it, second only to Saudi Arabia in reserves. It controls the straits of the Persian Gulf, where 40 percent of the world's oil flows each day. It is headed by an Islamist fundamentalist who vows Israel should be wiped off the map. Iran admittedly has a nuclear energy program in process, and many believe that it is committed to building nuclear weapons. But this may well be more about the United States than about Iran. President Bush's polls are at record lows. Republicans face a brutal off-year election. Karl Rove has pledged to make the war on terror a partisan issue in the fall. It surely isn't an accident that the White House is turning up the heat on Iran now, just as it did against Iraq in the run-up to the 2002 elections. The White House preparations are ominous. Bush has said that an Iranian bomb is unacceptable. In dispatching troops to reconnoiter in Iran and airplanes to mock bombing runs, the White House is putting Iran and the world on notice: We're ready to strike if Iran goes on with its program. Despite reservations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reports, the White House is contemplating the first use of nuclear weapons to ''take out'' the underground Iranian facilities that may be part of the weapons program. Is it conceivable that a president who sees himself on a divine mission has learned nothing from the debacle in Iraq? Remember the bit about being greeted as ''liberators'' in Iraq? Now, according to an anonymous contractor in Hersh's story, the White House is said to believe that the bombing will turn the people against the mullahs who run the government. That will counter the experience of every bombing effort since the invention of the airplane. The question is whether the Congress and the American people will roll over or stand up and call the administration to account. Surely, this is the time for Republicans to put aside their partisan zealotry and hold hearings -- open and public -- that explore the nature of the threat posed by Iran, the programs already under way by the administration and the intelligence estimates, here and elsewhere, and what they really say. Reportedly, the White House is briefing selected legislators -- those who are cheerleaders for the war in Iraq. It doesn't want hearings because it doesn't want to inform the minority Democrats, much less the American people. The president believes he has absolute authority to launch a war of his choosing, without congressional approval, U.N. mandate or imminent threat. War would destabilize the Persian Gulf. Terrorism would spread. Bin Laden and others would rouse 1.2 billion Muslims with cries that the United States is seeking to destroy Islam. America would be supported by few if any of our allies -- and actively, if not directly, opposed by Russia and China. We need international diplomacy, not unilateral bomb rattling toward Iran. We need a concerted plan for energy independence, reducing our reliance on foreign oil. We need to engage the world's nations in a grand alliance against terrorists -- not isolate America as a rogue nation. It is time for Congress to act boldly and early before the administration rolls out another supposedly cost-efficient war in time for the fall elections.

To: Bill who wrote (2887)	4/11/2006 9:15:29 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14758

and three he never changes course, vetoes a bill or fires anyone. I guess thats 3, 4, & 5.

To: Bill who wrote (2887)	4/12/2006 1:03:32 PM
From: paret	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14758

Man guilty of manslaughter, not murder for stabbing victim 200 times After killing Barzilai, Lakey covered the body and spent hours in the man's apartment talking on a telephone chat line, watching porn videos and stealing many of his belongings, Conviction in fatal stabbing Jury finds man guilty of manslaughter, not murder By TRACY JOHNSON P-I REPORTER seattlepi.nwsource.com A man who stabbed a Microsoft Corp. program manager more than 200 times while high on methamphetamine was found guilty of manslaughter Tuesday when a King County jury couldn't agree to call it murder. A few jurors believed Ronald Lakey was too intoxicated to actually intend to kill David Barzilai four years ago in Barzilai's Belltown apartment, one juror said later, so they settled on the less-serious charge. The juror, who did not want his name made public, said the decision was "extremely hard" and that jurors believed Lakey would take back that night if he could. Though disappointed, King County prosecutors were relieved the jury agreed the crime involved "deliberate cruelty" -- something that will let them ask for a longer prison term than the 14 to 17 years Lakey faces. "It was a little perplexing that someone could be deliberately cruel without being able to deliberately kill someone -- but that finding will allow us to ask for a sentence that will help us protect society from him," Deputy Prosecutor Jimmy Hung said. "It's hard to imagine anything more cruel than what happened to David." Lakey's attorney, C. Wesley Richards, said he was "pleased that they came back with manslaughter, given his mental state at the time." In Lakey's three-week trial, Richards told jurors Lakey killed Barzilai, a 25-year-old man he met on an Internet Web site for gay men, in a state of delirium caused by injecting meth. "He didn't know why he was stabbing Mr. Barzilai," Richards told jurors. "Mr. Lakey clearly had to be out of his mind." Crying on the witness stand, a tearful Lakey, 36, said he couldn't explain why he suddenly began stabbing Barzilai after they'd been intimate in Jan. 4, 2002 -- or why he cut off the man's hand. "To make sense out of it, it looks like rage ... (but) I don't recall any emotion," Lakey told jurors. "I had the knife in my hand, and I didn't stop." Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz argued that a half-gram packet of meth did not attack Barzilai -- Lakey did, and so brutally that he obviously meant to kill. Barzilai's parents and brother declined to discuss the verdict but thanked prosecutors, Seattle police and their victims' advocate in a statement read by their attorney, Jay Krulewitch. "No words can express the depth of our loss," they said. "David will never return to us." Lakey's friend, Lynn Slowinski, who worked with him at the Bon Marche, said it was " a horrible, horrible situation for both sides." She said Lakey, who's been in jail for four years, "feels terrible, doesn't understand it, and he's doing the best he can." After killing Barzilai, Lakey covered the body and spent hours in the man's apartment talking on a telephone chat line, watching porn videos and stealing many of his belongings, police said. He then got in Barzilai's car, headed south and turned himself in to Kelso police, telling them he'd stolen the car but eventually confessing he'd killed someone. Jurors Tuesday also found Lakey guilty of first-degree burglary and two theft charges for his crimes against Barzilai, along with stealing the car. P-I reporter Tracy Johnson can be reached at 206-467-5942 or tracyjohnson@seattlepi.com.