molson_golden2002

Uh, and the President of Iran would die trying to destroy Israel, so there is a deterent. If you believe the Iranian leadership is bent on suicide then I can't argue with you. But at least post a site that says something about the mullahs saying they want to die. Israel can defend itself. Let's just hope they don't plundge the world into an economic nightmare by attacking Iran

At least I didn't use the term John McCain used

I'm not surprised you missed my point. You clowns say he is suicidal, I say that's stupid. My point is that Hitler would not have attacked the USSR is he knew they had nukes. So ok, Ahmedinijad maybe like Hitler, but he doesn't have the resources, power or wearwithal at all to even try and take out Israel. And Pol Pot and Mao, too? They killed millions, has Ahmedinijad done that? Please provide proof of this, which of course you can't

No difference? Perhaps you need to restate your point. And explain how CNN and local Iraqi sources are no different.

Yup, I remember that speech by Hitler saying he would invade the Soviet Union even if they had nukes. Don't you morons ever get tired of using the Hitler example for everything? Especially where it doesn't make any sense at all?

Ah yes, the Nazi option. Isn't it nice to see what evil direction some people want to pull our country in? Besides, if we wiped out the Sunnis, the Shiite militias of al-Sadr would be very happy

Oh gees, yes, I again missed Blitz Wolfers opinion on this. I guess I'll just have to wait to be told what to think.

What was FDR suppose to do? The Japs were trying to strangle the nationalist Chinese by taking advantage of the war in Europe to pressure the Europeans to cut off all supplies to them. No way we should have supplied the Japs with the material to conquer the Chinese

Ummmmm, no, try again. You are way overstating a point

Honestly, I don't know anything about them. Haven't looked at it yet, been focusing on Iraq and Iran policy. Perhaps I'll read up on it and get back to you

Nutjobs don't seek powerful positions to get themselves killed, they seek them to have power and the trappings of power.

Well Jim, I think Bush is going to throw away the lives of a lot of good young men for no good reason

Yes, stealing land, as we speak actually, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6112100482.html I once worked for a Rabbi--this was pre-911 mind you--and he used the same argument, namely that we stole the land from the Indians so we should not really mind what the Israelis were doing. I find this a very dark argument. What comes around goes around. Hitler used just this argument for invading Poland and the Soviet Union which led to the escalation of the Holocaust. So does that make the Holocaust ok? Its just such a horrible argument and shouldn't be used.

Bush did 9-11? Only someone who thinks the guy is competent enough to run a 7-11 would think the guy could pull off 9-11, and I wouldn't hire Bush to run anything. And thanks for calling me anti-semite. Sort of proves a fact, that the Israelis have made it difficult to criticize their foreign policy without being screamed at for anti-semitism. Nice advantage to have, really. And I guess you missed your vice president linking Saddam to 9-11? You really never heard about that and his infamous declaration that it might have happened even if there is no evidence, "It can't be disproven" he said.

We were talking about foreign affairs and the media's affect on Iraqis. I said it pailed compared to local sources, here is a nice story on that: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16497895/site/newsweek/ In domestic politics, especially during the hysteria created by 9-11, the President's bully pulpit was not challanged by the media here which gave him wide powers to say whatever he wanted.

It's ok, he stayed at a Holiday Inn last night

Get ready for more burning tires on the 90!

Yup, clearly stated to the 80% of Americans who believed Saddam had done 9-11. Yup, real clear! Now where did Americans get an idea like that?

In job growth! Bush's 'pro-growth' policies sure grew the national debt! Seriously though, I think oil prices affct the economy more than taxes do, but whatever http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/08/bus...t.ap/index.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy has cranked out fewer jobs under President Bush -- by millions -- than it had by the same point in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Democrats say it's evidence that Bush's economic policies aren't working. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez counters, in an interview, "It's just a matter of timing and when we started getting out of the recession that the president inherited." Economists suggest something fundamentally different also may be going on in the economy: The labor force of available workers is growing more slowly as the baby boom generation ages. Under Bush, the economy produced 3.7 million new jobs from January 2001 through December of last year based on nonfarm payroll figures collected by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure is likely to be higher -- perhaps by an additional 810,000 -- when the government releases annual revisions based on more complete information next month. However, that doesn't change the basic historical picture. When Clinton was in the White House, the economy generated 17.6 million jobs during the corresponding period -- from January 1993 to December 1998. Under Reagan, 9.5 million jobs were created from January 1981 to December 1986. Those are the two most-recent two-term presidents before Bush. Some 2.6 million jobs were created during the four-year term of Bush's father, who took office in January 1989. Reagan had two recessions -- one of which began in July 1981 and ended in November 1982. It was the most severe recession since the Great Depression, pushing the monthly unemployment rate as high as 10.8 percent. Terms marked by economic challenges Bush, too, has had his economic challenges. He had the 2001 recession and that year's terror attack. And, Gutierrez noted, Bush faced lingering fallout from the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000. He also was confronted with a wave of corporate accounting scandals that rocked Wall Street -- and with Iraq war beginning in 2003. The economy lost jobs in 2001 and 2002. Since then jobs have been growing each year -- including 2006, when the economy was hit by the real-estate bust. Those jolts did affect jobs on Bush's watch, economists say. Yet they see deeper reasons for slower job growth, too. "The principal reason is that the labor force has grown much more slowly during the president's term than under the presidencies of Clinton and Reagan and that has nothing to do with anything but demographics," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. Baby boomers -- a huge block of workers -- poured into the work force in the 1980s and were rising through the ranks in the 1990s. That's not the case now as boomers face retirement, and there are fewer young people to take their places. Women, meanwhile, who helped to bulk up the labor force over the past few decades, aren't streaming into jobs as they once did. These changing demographic factors will shape the country's future. "The impending retirement of the baby boomers and the fact that women are no longer increasing their participation in the labor force at the rate they were in the past will tend to restrain the future growth of the U.S. labor force," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a major speech on the economy's outlook in late November. Earlier in the decade, most economists estimated that monthly job growth of about 150,000 was consistent with the economy growing close to its potential. Now research suggests monthly increases of roughly 100,000 jobs, says Michael Moskow, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Democrats, who took control of Congress last Thursday for the first time in a dozen years, say Bush's trade and other economic policies have contributed to the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and to the slower job creation. They also argue that the poor haven't reaped benefits of the country's economic expansion. "It has generally been an accepted fact that economic growth is a good thing and that the rising tide will lift all boats," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts. "The 'rising tide lifts all boats' has always been a problem. If you think about that analogy, the rising tide is a very good idea if you have a boat. But if you are too poor to afford a boat and you are standing tiptoe in water, the rising tide goes up your nose. And so that's a mistake," he said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California wants the House to approve legislation this week boosting the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. Supporters say the move will help the working poor. Critics say it could force companies to cut jobs.

I think kittens are cute

Yup, they all want to ie. The whole coutry would just love to kill itself. Yup, that makes sense

Many people do not appreciate them stealing land and claiming to be the only victims in this world. But so be it. If they attack Iran and the oil stopps flowing out of the straights of Hormuz, we have a real problem, maybe even a Great Depression.

If Bush launched a war just for oil you wouldn't see that as bad? Maybe if the taking of the oil was designed to flood the oil markets to weaken Iran and Russia there may be some merit in some way to it, but that's debateable. I don't think it was just about oil, but it was a factor. It's obvious Bush had personal and political motives for attacking Iraq. He wanted to play war president and be a liberator. What fun! The revenge for 9-11 factor was real big, IMO. Yes, Iraq was not responsible but the ignorant American public didn't know that. The Israeli lobby got what it wanted, I think. No way in hell they wanted a stable democracy with oil revenue and a population that hated Israel. No way. I think they wanted what they got, a failed state that will not be a threat to them.

Yes, we wait breathlessly for Bush's threatened veto of stem cell research funding! Brave stand! But it might just be a bi-partisan Congress that issues the big veto, namely the one on Bush's murderous plan of escalating this war. Stay tuned

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...home-commentary BURIED IN THE NEWS last week was one of the most potentially significant stories of recent years. The Military Times released its annual poll of active-duty service members, and the results showed something virtually unprecedented: a one-year decline of 10 percentage points in the number of military personnel identifying themselves as Republicans. In the 2004 poll, the percentage of military respondents who characterized themselves as Republicans stood at 60%. By the end of 2005, that had dropped to 56%. And by the end of 2006, the percentage of military Republicans plummeted to 46%. The drop in Republican Party identification among active-duty personnel is a sharp reversal of a 30-year trend toward the "Republicanization" of the U.S. military, and it could mark a sea change in the nature of the military — and the nature of public debates about national security issues. For most of U.S. history, issues of national security rarely divided Americans along sharp party lines: The old adage that "politics ends at the water's edge" generally held true. The military, while institutionally conservative with a small "c," was not closely identified with a particular political party. But somewhere between the end of the Vietnam War and the middle of the Clinton era, the U.S. military began to look like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. The rightward shift was dramatic: In 1976, 25% of civilians characterized themselves as Republicans, while 33% of military officers were Republicans — a military-civilian "gap" of only 8%. By 1996, the military-civilian gap on party affiliation had grown to 33%; while 34% of civilians self-identified as Republicans, so did a whopping 70% of military officers. In Britain, the Anglican Church used to be snidely described as "the Tory Party at Prayer." In the United States over the last 30 years, the military became, to a significant extent, the Republican Party at War. The Republicanization of the professional military came about for many reasons, some obvious, some less so. To some extent, it resulted from changing perceptions of how "pro-military" the two main parties were: In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party became associated, in the popular mind, with antiwar, antimilitary policies. With the end of Vietnam-era conscription, which guaranteed a relatively representative military, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats may have opted to join the military (at least as officers), while many career military personnel transferred their allegiance to the political party they saw as "on their side." But the Republicanization of the military was not just because of "natural" self-selection. It also resulted from changed recruitment and base-closing policies, combined with the steady Republicanization of the American South. The period since the late 1960s saw the closure of many northeastern ROTC programs and the expansion of those programs in the South. By the late 1990s, more than 40% of all ROTC programs were in the South — mainly at state universities — though the South is home to fewer than 30% of the nation's college students. Similar patterns in base closures have meant that disproportionate numbers of military personnel are now stationed at bases in the South and Southwest. For a time, the Republicanization of the military became self-reinforcing. The GOP has controlled the White House for all but 12 of the last 34 years and has made a determined effort to identify itself with the military and to court military voters. By the turn of the millennium, the perception that Republicans were "pro-military" while Democrats were "soft" on defense had become an entrenched facet of American politics. The latest Military Times poll offers the most telling evidence yet that this is beginning to change. Although the reasons for the recent military flight from the Republican Party can only be guessed at, it's a safe bet that disgust at Bush administration bungling in Iraq is the single biggest factor. The poll shows that only 35% of military personnel approve of the president's handling of the war, and three-fourths of those polled say that the military is "stretched too thin to be effective." Anecdotal evidence suggests that many career officers also are skeptical of the administration's approach to combating terrorism and unhappy with its undermining of the norms of the Geneva Convention. The partial de-Republicanization of the military is a hopeful sign — and not just for Democrats. A politicized military presents a threat to democratic ideals of civilian control. Over the last 30 years, the Republicanization of the military also has had a deeply distorting effect on public debates about national security, making it almost impossible to question Republican national security policies without being labeled "anti-military." As we struggle to move beyond the horrors of Iraq, we desperately need to develop fresh approaches to changing security threats. That requires a military that isn't partisan — and political leaders who won't make posturing in front of the troops a substitute for responsible policies.