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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299189)	8/10/2006 7:24:21 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1578495

BIG FOOT, SCOOP JACKSON DEMOCRATS AND OTHER MYTHS By Ann Coulter Thu Aug 10, 12:52 AM ET I suppose we'll have to wait yet another election cycle for all those "Scoop Jackson Democrats" to come roaring back in and give us a Democratic Party that does not consistently root against America. On the bright side, it is now official: Democrats are not merely confused patriots, so blinded by their hatred for President Bush that they cannot see their way to supporting any aspect of the war on terrorism. Would that they were mere opportunistic traitors! As some of us have been trying to tell you, Democrats don't oppose the war on terrorism because they hate Bush: They hate Bush because he is fighting the war on terrorism. They would hate him for fighting terrorists even if he had a "D" after his name. They would hate Bernie Sanders if he were fighting a war on terrorism. In the past three decades, there have been more legitimate sightings of Big Foot than of "Scoop Jackson Democrats." That's why Hillary Clinton has anti-war protestors howling at her public events. That's why she has drawn an anti-war primary opponent, Jonathan Tasini, who appears to believe that Israel is a terrorist state. If those rumors I've been hearing about a Hezbollah/Hamas/DNC merger are true, we might be in for a slightly longer fight. In Tuesday's primary, Connecticut Democrats dumped Joe Lieberman, an 18-year incumbent, because he supports the war on terrorism. This is the same Joe Lieberman who voted against all the Bush tax cuts, against banning same-sex marriage, against banning partial-birth abortion, against the confirmation of Judge Alito, against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in favor of the Kyoto accords. Oh yes, this was also the same Joe Lieberman who was the Democrats' own vice presidential candidate six years ago. Despite all this, Connecticut Democrats preferred stalwart anti-war candidate Ned Lamont, great-nephew of Corliss Lamont, WASP plutocrat fund-raiser for Stalin. Lamont's main political asset is that he is a walking, breathing argument in favor of a massive inheritance tax. His plan for fighting the terrorists is to enact a single-payer government health plan and universal pre-K education programs. His goal is to unite the "cut" and "run" wings of his party into one glorious coalition. The Democrats can hold it in for a few years, but eventually the McGovernite face of the Democratic Party reappears. Lamont declared victory surrounded by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Kim Gandy of the fanatically pro-abortion group known euphemistically as the "National Organization for Women." Congresswoman Maxine Waters had parachuted into Connecticut earlier in the week to campaign against Lieberman because he once expressed reservations about affirmative action, without which she would not have a job that didn't involve wearing a paper hat. Waters also considers Joe "soft" on the issue of the CIA inventing crack cocaine and AIDS to kill all the black people in America. Gandy's support for Lamont must have been a particularly bitter pill for Lieberman to swallow, inasmuch as he has long belonged to the world's smallest organization solely to satisfy bloodthirsty feminists like Gandy -- Orthodox Jews for Partial-Birth Abortion. (OJFPBA has just slightly more members than GBRFC, "Gay Black Republicans for Choice.") To give you a snapshot of today's Democratic Party, in 2004, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked likely voters if they believed America was generally a fair and decent country and whether they believed the world would be a better place if more countries were like America. Republicans agreed that America is generally fair and decent, 83 percent to 7 percent. Eighty-one percent agreed that the world would be a better place if more countries were like the United States. By contrast, Democrats were nearly split, with only 46 percent agreeing that America is generally a fair and decent country, and with 37 percent saying America is not a generally fair and decent country. Only 48 percent of Democrats said they thought that the world would be a better place if more countries were like the United States. Democrats constantly complain that the nation has never been so divided, but consider that half of them think the statement that America is a good country is a divisive remark. So remember: When you vote Democratic, you're saying NO to mindless patriotism. This country isn't so great! The free world, which is rapidly boiling down to us and Israel, is under savage attack. Treason is rampant in the country. True, Democrats hate Bush, but they would hate anybody who fights the war on terrorism. It is a hostile world, and there is now a real question about the will of the American people to survive.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299189)	8/10/2006 7:36:24 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1578495

“If you landed here from Mars and looked at Congress’s agenda,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, “you’d think that the problem in America is that rich people don’t have enough money.” Deceit Beyond Bounds By BOB HERBERT It sure looks like American voters want change. And here’s an example of the kind of thing they want a change from. In a move that was typically and patently deceitful, Republicans in Congress tried to pass a minimum wage measure last week in which the biggest winners would have been some of the wealthiest people in America. The G.O.P. has tended to fight minimum wage hikes the way the Hatfields battled the McCoys. But suddenly this summer, Republicans discovered minimum wage legislation that they could truly love. G.O.P. leaders in Congress linked a modest increase in the minimum wage to a whopping decrease in the estate tax. The cut in the estate tax would have cost the government at least $268 billion in revenue over the next decade, and probably a lot more. In exchange for this estate tax bonanza for the fabulously wealthy, the G.O.P. was willing to approve a $2.10-an-hour increase, stretched over three years, in the miserly $5.15-an-hour minimum wage. It was made clear that any Democrats who dared oppose this raid on the Treasury would be targeted by Republicans as obstructionists blocking a sorely needed wage hike for the lowest-paid workers in the nation. I’m for an increase in the minimum wage and against a cut in the estate tax. But that’s not the point here. The point is the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to engage in deceit to try and achieve ends it could not achieve any other way. The latest incarnation of the Republican Party has taken deceit in government and politics to dangerous new extremes, and it’s time to call a halt to it. The war in Iraq will be remembered as one of the greatest exercises in systematic governmental deceit in U.S. history. But the Iraq fiasco is just the most stunning and tragic example of a style of governing and politicking that has become second nature to the Bush administration and much of the national Republican establishment. This is a crowd that will tell you with a straight face that it is creating a wondrous new world in the Middle East, that it is doing what it can to stem the ominous tide of global warming, that the United States does not engage in torture, that the administration carefully guards the civil liberties of ordinary Americans, and that it does not favor the wealthy over poor and working people. These are folks who will tell you that up is down, and punish you for insisting that up is up. It is in that same deceitful and vengeful spirit that the party is now attacking Democratic senators who managed to hold fast, under the leadership of the minority leader, Harry Reid, to defeat the legislation that cynically tied the estate tax windfall to an increase in the minimum wage. The National Republican Senatorial Committee declared that Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington who voted against the bogus bill, “decided that giving in to pressure from her party’s leadership was more important than voting to raise the federal minimum wage.” Senator Cantwell, who is up for re-election this year, favors an increase in the minimum wage, as does her party’s leadership. It has been the Democratic Party that has been pushing for years for an increase in the minimum wage, but there is no room for that reality in the G.O.P.’s corrosive culture of deceit. The buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. Members of Congress have raised their own pay by $31,600 since the last increase in the minimum wage nine years ago. For Republicans to exploit the plight of workers buried in economic hardship in order to put millions of additional dollars into the portfolios of the already wealthy is beyond egregious. “If you landed here from Mars and looked at Congress’s agenda,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, “you’d think that the problem in America is that rich people don’t have enough money.” If the Republicans wanted to increase the minimum wage, they could do it in about the time it takes to snap your finger. Democrats would be on board, and the legislative language would not have to be much longer than a paragraph. They don’t want a minimum wage increase; they want a cut in the estate tax. Regrettably, there is always a certain amount of deceit in politics. Republicans do not have a monopoly on it. But for a system like ours to work even reasonably well, governmental deceit has to be held within certain limits. Otherwise the system will break down. Today’s Republican Party has gone far beyond those limits.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299189)	8/10/2006 12:30:28 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578495

Ted, If it did, then it couldn't get the water it covets in the West Bank. Water is a real mundane reason to occupy the West Bank and piss off hundreds of millions of Arabs. I'm sure Israelis would be happy to desalinate their own water if it meant peace You really don't get the picture, do you? First off, Israel is semi desert. Secondly, the ME is in an 8 year drought. Thirdly, desalineating water is hugely expensive. Fourthly, Israel's economy stinks. If it weren't for the US, Israel would be in financial trouble. It rarely is able to pay its own way. And you want them to replace all the water they get from the WB aquifer with desalineated water.......making things even more expensive? You really don't get it. Israel is a costly experiment and the cost is being borne by the US. For the life of me, I will never understand how the US got into this predicament. Every year, we shell out 6 billion dollars to keep the sucker going. We shell out more money having to come to its defense from time to time. And 1/2 the world hates us for it. And do you want to know whose going to pick the tab for all the destruction in Lebanon? You have two guesses and the second one doesn't count. Damn, we need a constitional congress badly. This country is out of control.