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


To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 3:01:03 PM
From: longnshort  Respond to of 1577204
 
"What excuse did the terrorists use for 9/11?"

Bill Clinton was a sexual pervert and Muslim's hate that.



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 3:03:48 PM
From: Alighieri2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1577204
 
What excuse did the terrorists use for 9/11?

You kidding me? We've been messing around in their backyards for decades...

Al



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 3:07:10 PM
From: tejek  Respond to of 1577204
 
Is this an example of the liberal media?

Don't call ex-Vice President Cheney a has-been

By DEB RIECHMANN – 3 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney refuses to be a has-been.

The former vice president's voice appears to carry even more weight than it did in the waning days of the Bush administration.

Some people want him to be quiet and disappear. Others are cheering the public relations tour that Cheney began halfway through President Barack Obama's first 100 days, defending the Bush administration's harsh interrogation tactics and other anti-terrorism policies.

Vice presidents typically fade away quietly.

Not Cheney.

When Obama released memos detailing Bush-era interrogation techniques and wouldn't completely rule out prosecuting or disciplining former Bush administration officials, Cheney couldn't stay silent.

"It wasn't like on Jan. 21, he planned that he was going to speak out in this way," said Cheney's daughter, Liz, a former State Department official who has traveled extensively with her father. "It was driven by events and I think he will continue to do it if he feels it's important to the public debate."

"You just have to know the way he works," she said. "He was watching what was going on. He knew it was wrong and he knew he had an obligation to say it was wrong."

The Cheney camp says it's not about politics.

In Washington, however, everything is about politics and Cheney's decision to make his case on talk shows and deliver speeches at think tanks cuts both ways. His message fires up conservatives, but also rallies Democratic opponents who don't miss an opportunity to portray the unpopular Cheney as the lead spokesman of the Republican Party.

"I would think the Republicans ought to be shy in using him as their front," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He dismisses Cheney's appearances as if they were old TV reruns.

Even some prominent Republicans aren't too happy about Cheney's message.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the nation's first homeland security chief, was asked if he agreed with Cheney's assertion that the Obama administration has made the country less safe. "I do not," Ridge said.

Cheney supporters say the former vice president has received an outpouring of supportive e-mails, calls and comments from the military community, the families of those who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and from people at the CIA, which helped carry out the interrogation program.

His backers claim Cheney is having an impact. They point to Obama's move to reverse himself and fight the court-ordered release of prisoner abuse photos and his decision to revive military tribunals for some suspected terrorists, although he is revamping how that system would work.

They also cite the Democratic-controlled Senate's vote to deny Obama $80 million to close the prison camp in eight months, as the president promised.

"It's nothing personal. It's nothing political. It's not legacy," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin, who has known Cheney for three decades. "There's one and only one thing that's animating and motivating his advocacy and that's Obama's behavior relative to these security policies — the release of the legal memos and the open-endedness of the potential prosecution of the intelligence gatherers or the lawyers."

Matalin said Cheney wouldn't stop talking even if leaders of the GOP asked him to.

Cheney, 68, has squeezed public defense of Bush policies into his private life, which he splits between his suburban Washington home in McLean, Va. and his homes in Wyoming and on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

He still has Secret Service protection, but drives himself whenever possible. He spends time working on his memoirs and at his transition office in McLean. Every few weeks he hosts lunch for guests around his kitchen table to discuss foreign policy and national security issues. He is with his grandchildren at softball games and Sunday dinners. On Mother's Day, he brought the youngsters all the makings for s'mores and roasted marshmallows.

Cheney has always been straightforward. But when he walked in Bush's shadow he had to temper his public remarks, stay on the White House message. He could manipulate the levers of powers behind the scenes, which conjured up the image of "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader.

Out of office, he has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews to insert himself in the public debate — and not only on national security.

In first television interview after leaving office, just 54 days after Obama was sworn in, Cheney said that it's not fair to blame the economic woes on the Bush administration. Cheney said it was a global financial problem that he feared the new administration could use to justify a massive expansion in the government and meddling in the private sector.

"I don't know if this is some sort of psychological liberation," said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who has written extensively on the vice presidency. "Now he can come out of the undisclosed locations. He's his own man again. He's free from those restraints that are inherent in being vice president — even if you are the most powerful vice president in history."

It's deja vu for Cheney, who once was on the other end of a former vice president unplugged.

In September 2004, Al Gore, the cautious campaigner, transformed into a Bush basher, faulting Cheney for "sleazy and despicable" criticism of the Democrats. A Bush White House spokesman dismissively responded: "Consider the source."

The tables have turned. At the White House on Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said it appears that Cheney's latest speech was an extension of the same argument that occurred "inside these walls" for many years during the administration in which he served for eight years.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

google.com



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 4:10:09 PM
From: steve harris  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1577204
 
lol

Martin Riggs ( Mel Gibson ):
"Do you really want to jump? Do you really? Well, that's fine with me. Let's do it."

destinationhollywood.com

cnn.com

(CNN) -- A passerby pushed a would-be suicide jumper off a bridge in southern China because he was angry at the jumper's "selfish activity," Chinese media reported Saturday.



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 4:36:35 PM
From: Steve Dietrich1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1577204
 
Here's what Paul Wolfowitz had to say about it:

defenselink.mil

There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.

Maybe the Iraq war was about reducing the threat of terrorism, just not in the way most people think?

SD



To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (482987)5/23/2009 6:31:35 PM
From: tejek  Respond to of 1577204
 
Al, > That's a slogan, not an argument.

What excuse did the terrorists use for 9/11?


Mecca. Al qaida has religious origins. They didn't want US bases in Mecca. It would be the equivalent of Saudis setting up a military base in the Vatican. How long do you think the Catholics would have stayed quiet?