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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (109656)	11/24/2007 11:13:36 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 173976

Just like the Hurricanes got worse. This year was the worse hurricane season like you whackos said it would be.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (109656)	11/24/2007 11:46:35 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 173976

November 25, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist The Case for Illegal Mingling By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN One of the most talked about stories in the Middle East last week came out of Saudi Arabia, where the government affirmed the sentence of 200 lashes for a 19-year-old Shiite girl who was sitting in a car with a male acquaintance last year when they were attacked by seven men who gang-raped both of them. The Saudi Justice Ministry said the young woman deserved 200 lashes and six months in prison, even though she had been raped, because she was guilty of “illegal mingling” — sitting in a car with a man who was not related to her. Two hundred lashes for a woman who was raped, under any circumstances in even the most traditional country, is barbaric — period. But what also keeps tripping off my tongue is this phrase “illegal mingling.” It seems to me that if the Middle East could use more of anything these days it is more mingling — if not between the sexes then at least between the sects. From Gaza to Lebanon to Pakistan to Iraq there is a huge struggle going on today, primarily between Muslim sects, over who can mingle with whom. This is the central issue in Iraq: Can Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis mingle anymore, after all the blood that has been spilled, and, if so, can the country be stable enough for us to reduce our troops? By mingling I mean something less than embracing each other, but more than total segregation. To the extent that the surge in Iraq has worked, it’s largely because those Shiites and Sunnis ready to tolerate some mingling, some interaction, have risen up against those Shiites and Sunnis who want to just wipe out the other sect and any of their own who don’t agree. There is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. That was key to the surge. The anti-mingling, pro-Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis went way too far — in beheading people, suicide-bombing mosques, forcing marriages with the daughters of Sunni tribal sheiks and demanding that men grow beards and stop drinking whiskey. It was this extreme fundamentalism that prompted something you so rarely see in Arab-Muslim politics: moderate Sunnis going all the way, rather than just going away. That is, rising up, risking their own lives, even aligning themselves with America, to defend their more moderate, traditional, Sunni way of life from the jihadists. And Al Qaeda knows it went too far, which is why, as David Ignatius pointed out in The Washington Post, Osama bin Laden, in a little-noticed Oct. 22 audiotape, scolded his followers for tactics that had alienated Iraqis. “Mistakes have been made during holy wars,” bin Laden said. The same thing has happened among Shiites. Iran seems to have dialed down its support for Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq — which has been purging Sunnis and Shiites to prevent any mingling — because many ordinary Iraqi Shiites had become fed up with this pro-Iranian militia and had begun to blame Tehran. On Nov. 8, Agence France-Presse reported that the local police had publicly accused the Mahdi Army of carrying out a four-year killing spree in Iraq’s central shrine city of Karbala. “The Mahdi Army murdered and tortured and kidnapped people under Sharia law,” the police statement said. “They are the cause of the deaths of hundreds of people.” The news agency added that “the statement marks the first time the Iraqi authorities have directly accused Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia of carrying out killings.” The reason these events are important is that Iraq has become center stage for the struggle between a more moderate, modernizing Islamic outlook, advanced by the United States and some of its Iraqi allies, and another outlook, advanced by the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda, that wants to “purify” the Muslim world of “the other.” The jihadists know that if they can defeat America — in the heart of their world — it would influence the whole region. Gen. David Petraeus understands that if we can defeat them in the heart of their world, it could do the same. But the locals have to lead the fight — we can’t want mingling more than they do. What the U.S. surge seems to have done is embolden more of them to fight. Attention: These pro-minglers are not Jeffersonian Democrats. But they do represent relatively more moderate strands of Sunnism and Shiism. The questions that we and our presidential candidates need to be asking are: How real are these uprisings? Do they represent a larger, moderate push back against the extremists that can be built upon to produce a decent Iraq? And can we do that with fewer U.S. combat troops? Casualties are down in Iraq, but we need to see a lot more. If we do, let’s make sure that our own debate keeps pace with any shifting reality there. Most Americans would still like to see us salvage something decent in Iraq — if it can be done at a reasonable cost.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (109656)	11/25/2007 12:10:38 AM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

As global warming accelerates, fires are too, as is the dying of the coral reefs, melting of the icecaps, lack of drinking water, raising of pollution, storms of all kinds, droughts, heat waves, floods and extinction of vulnerable species. No doubt it's man-made too. The science has proved it. And the US is most to blame, we and are bigger is better mentality about energy use. We will probably not live to see the real damage, though we are already seeing some alarming changes, like these fires. But future generations will look back on pro-pollution leaders like Bush-Cheney and know where to point the finger of blame.