I couldn't have said it better myself. Article by Richard Reeves.

WHY ARE WE IN NAJAF?
Fri Aug 13,12:03 AM ET
Op/Ed - Richard Reeves
By Richard Reeves
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) has not been successful so far in articulating answers to questions about whether and how the United States should go to war. But he will be guided by this draft of military application policy:

"The United States should not commit its forces to military action overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest. If the decision is made to commit its forces to combat abroad, it must be done with clear intent and support to win. There must be clearly defined and realistic objectives. There must be reasonable assurance that the cause we are fighting for will have the support of the American people and Congress. Our troops should be committed to combat abroad only as a last resort, when no other choice is available."
The author of those words, slightly paraphrased here, is not working in the Kerry campaign. Those are the words of President Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), condensing the thoughts of his secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, whose original version, part of a speech he made in late 1984, included the phrase "or of our allies" after "vital to our national interest."
So what are we doing in Najaf? Is killing the followers of a nasty Shiite preacher, killing them at the gates of the most holy shrine of Shiite Muslims all over the world, vital to the national interests of the United States and its allies?
And why is it that we are killing Shiites, the wretched of the earth in the secular Sunni Muslim country of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)? That is the same Saddam who murdered the father of the preacher five years ago. Was that our clear intent and realistic objective in invading Iraq (news - web sites)?
Would the American people and Congress -- and our allies -- have supported a $200 billion war to get preacher Muqtada al-Sadr?
And was invasion our last resort? Even the war-maker himself, President George W. Bush (news - web sites), never claimed that. In the beginning, he said, it was the last resort because the United Nations (news - web sites) had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When there were no such weapons, he said Saddam was a very bad guy. That was true -- and it was true 20 years ago when we were supplying him with weapons to use against Iran. But was he a great enough threat to go to war ourselves? Was killing Iraqis after the war our last resort?
"I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war," said Bush last Wednesday on the campaign trail in Albuquerque. That's good to hear. What exactly are you doing in Najaf? Killing bad guys, I guess. If that is the criteria for putting the Marines around the shrine of the Imam Ali, then we will be at war forever, everywhere.
Reagan, no "girly-man" he, began thinking hard, and differently, about sending young men and women into harm's way after 241 U.S. Marines on a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon were killed by a truck-bomber who crashed into their barracks near the Beirut Airport in October 1983. (Fifty-eight French soldiers were killed in a simultaneous blast.) Seven years later in his autobiography, he wrote:
"Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the Marines' safety that it should have."
Reagan pulled the Marines out five months later, saying: "In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave. ... Yet the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there."
It was then that Reagan wrote his list of policies regarding use of the military and concluded with this: "I would recommend it to future presidents."

Powerful RNC Video about Kerry

The RNC/Bush team have released this 12 minute video showing clips of Kerry speaking about Iraq.
This is powerful stuff that will not only ring true with republicans that eat this Kerry Flip-Flop stuff right up, but also Democrats, most of whom oppose(d) the war and want a strong candidate that will (did) too.

This is a preview of what the RNC in New York will foucs on, Kerry's Senate record.

Heh, I hate to say this but I was right. I looked at Kerry's Senate record and knew it wouldn't fly quite so well in the general election and that a person without a long Senate voting record is always a better bet. Oh well, Kerry's not my man, but he certainly will need to respond to the video and maybe we can help him do that.

They really did some cheap editing with this video. Several times, if not more than half of the time, Kerry's sentences are cut off in the middle, and the viewer has no idea what his point is. For several quotes in the video, audio and visual are not provided, they just past some crap up there and expect the American public to believe what they say. At one point there is a quote from Kerry and then a written quote which tries to use an ellipse to splice together two sentences which were not originally together.

Nonetheless, powerful propaganda.

What Republicans Really Stand for

I dunno whether I despise the Ivy-League educated elitist moderate pro-business Republicans like Bush that run the party and simply pander to the Religious Right, or the Religious Right that actually gets out the vote for them.
But today I want to focus of the radical right with three great examples...

James Hart Is running in for the U.S. House of Representatives in Tennesee on a Eugenics platform. According to James, low IQ based on genes is the cause of poverty and urban decay, thus eugenics is needed.
As someone who has spent a decent amount of time, both academicly and individually, studying genetics I can say that he is probably off on the whole Eugenics thing though. This social darwinist that he worships wrote on a false pretense that natural selection was a brutal process of competition and killing. From what we know now, we know that environmental changes have more to do with natural selection than brute killing, and that COOPERATION is and has been at least as important a part as the brutal competition 'survival of the fittest' notion of the early 1900s. Btw, in 1919 the Supreme Court upheld South Carolina's right to use Eugenics and the ruling still stands. The Eugenics movement started not in Nazi Germany, but in America.
What is facinating about this guy though is that he is right-on as far as the economic issues go: NAFTA, Jobs, Tax Cuts, Social Security, and Worker's Rights.

Susan Wagle: There is now a war between the religious radical right of the Republican Party of Kansas and the ruling-class pro-business corrupt branch of the Republican Party. The religious right has oulled into the lead. This week republican moderate and Wichita Mayor for over 20 years, was defeated in a primary by Susan Wagle. Now Susan tried to pull all funding to the University of Kansas because she didn't approve of the content of their sex education class. It was really quite embarrassing. What's even worse is that she not only stands by her bill that would have ruined KU, but she is making it a centerpeice of her re-eleciton and fundraising efforts. Susan beat Knight for a Kansas State Senate seat in my city 64% to 36%.

There is also a guy running on an anti-evolution platform. We fought not to re-elect two of the State Board of Education members who made Kanss that laughingstock of the nation with their anti-evolution campiagn a while back. Well, the far right's moneymakers are back and putting up candidates.

The Religious Right will seriously vote for anyone!

How does this moron not choke on his own food... Oh wait, he does.

Today Bush said, "Our enemies are Innovative and resourceful and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Audioclip available here.

This guy is not qualified and doesn't deserve to be President.

Why wait until November, impeach this imbecile now!

Long Live 'The Pretzel'

Republican National Convention Platform

I have received an exclusive peak at the 2004 RNC platform. It goes as follows:


Freedom through conformity

Sadam is Osama

God is Country

Ignorance is power

Shalt not kill is shalt not murder

Supporting troops is shutting up

More deaths is more security

Five Votes is Democracy

Left is Wrong

Right is Left

Country is God

Life is Death

Black and White

Us and Them

Up is down

Ignorance is Strength

Freedom is Slavery

War is Peace

Obey

'Who's paying for the war?' Good Article from William Buckley

WHO'S PAYING FOR THE WAR?

Tue Jul 20, 8:00 PM ET

William F. Buckley
 
For all that the critics rail against the war in Iraq (news - web sites), surprisingly little time is given to decrying the sheer cost of it. Somebody, somewhere, was cluck-clucking about $87 billion back during the Democratic high jinks that preceded the ouster of Howard Dean (news - web sites) and the anointment of John Kerry (news - web sites). We do hear of ancillary costs. For instance, with the call-up of the National Guard, the state governors are running out of the backup manpower they habitually look to for help with crime and fire-fighting. You can let crime slide for a while, but not forest fires. And that means extra expenses to lure men and women from retirement or to train recruits.

But how are we feeling the pinch of the direct expenses of the war? We coast along as if we can take care of that kind of thing simply by borrowing. In the last two years, our deficit spending has been in the neighborhood of $800 billion. If you are sitting at the national poker game you can get away with a fugitive smile by counting in current inflation. At 3 percent, we can figure that the $7 trillion national debt gives us back $210 billion, inflated away (whsk!). But reasoning along those lines wouldn't make much political headway in an election year. We need some straight talk, and straight talk speaks of impositions on U.S. citizens, foremost of which is -- taxation.

We have been waiting for word from Sen. Kerry. Here is his most recent on the subject: "George Bush wants to defend giving a tax cut that's permanent to people who earn more than $200,000 a year. I'm fighting to roll back George Bush's unaffordable tax cut for the wealthy and invest it in --" a new and better Army? a new fleet of aircraft carriers? a missile defense? increased pensions for soldiers?

Oh no: "-- invest it in health care, education, job creation, and to build America again." Therefore, raise taxes in order to increase social spending. That leaves -- untouched -- the expenses of this war and any correlative privations. Again, wars are free.

The Democrats would certainly be entitled to call on President Bush (news - web sites) to advise the public in the matter. Using political language, it's his war, not the Democrats' war, and the costs of it should be his to apportion. The administration has made no public accounting of the cost of the war framed in this language. Candidate Kerry could seek to reorient the whole question by telling us what we have forfeited on account of the war -- more health care, education, job creation and America-building. But he can't do this effectively without first telling us how to do away with the war in Iraq and its attendant implications. To talk about raising taxes on the wealthy may be effective boob bait, but it leaves unanswered the question of how to finance national defense operations.

President Bush can try to skim over the question much as President Reagan did. If the economy grows, so do tax returns at current levels. But Mr. Bush has to take a very deep draught of optimism to explain how we are going to alter the current forecasts, other than by inflation. The debt is at $7 trillion and is projected, in 10 years, to be at $9 trillion. That figure can only be attenuated by a relative rise in income, over against outlays. Or -- by inflation, which, whatever its incidental benefits, is the surest enemy of stable growth and an impartial reward to savings and enterprise.

The administration isn't in a position to establish absolutely that the tax relief for the wealthy generated more for the economy than the amount of that tax relief. Mr. Bush profoundly believes that this is so, and practitioners of supply-side economics accept this as a doctrinal matter. But Mr. Bush has to arrive prepared to cope with the immediate appeal of Candidate Kerry's call for more taxes for the wealthy. This is not easy to do, because the imagination tends to freeze when higher taxes on the rich are pleaded. In the good old days we could begin our thinking the other way around, not by saying that the tax cuts help or hurt, but by saying simply: The money is theirs, not ours. So think of something else.

Mr. Bush has some fine writers on his staff. Add this one to their special challenges.

Article I read at www.peroutka2004.com

What’s Wrong With the Pro-Life Movementby Bob StrodtbeckThis article originally appeared on DaveBlackOnlineThe pro-life movement defends the principle of protecting the right-to-life for all people. As America’s post-modern culture attracts more individuals with the allure of convenience and relativism, the pro-life principle covers an increasing number of individuals from embryos created in a laboratory to incapacitated geriatrics in nursing homes.The national debate over abortion has kept a high profile for most of the nearly three decades that Americans have been erroneously told that killing babies in the womb is protected by the U.S. Constitution. The focus of the debate has been on the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which asserts a penumbra right to privacy in the Bill of Rights entitles women to access abortion procedures.Over the years that the national debate over abortion has been measured by polls and propaganda America has been dragged into a relativistic culture that endorses killing babies in the womb and applauds scientists creating babies in the lab. Meanwhile governments are increasingly subjected to the desires of wealthy international corporations or the whims of unrestrained judicial branches which show an interest in both.It is not the advocates of abortion rights that have forwarded this lurch into social destruction, however, but the pro-lifers who have wasted 30 years pursuing an agenda rather than fighting for principles that have defined American liberty.The U.S. Constitution establishes multi-leveled government with defined responsibilities so the nation would not be subjected to the whims of power-lusting individuals. This balance of powers is not limited to the branches of national government outlined in the Constitution, but includes the state governments that are referred to in Article I, Section 3, clause one (the selection of the Senate was originally under the authority of state legislatures) and in the tenth amendment.Roe v. Wade did not so much create a right out of thin air, but was an usurpation of state legislative authority by the federal courts. This expansion of federal judicial power is now so broad that any state or local law can be struck down by judicial fiat. The power grab by the courts is a clear violation of its limits to hear only “...cases in law and equity, arising under this (the U.S.) Constitution....” This means the federal courts have the authority to hear cases regarding laws written by the U.S. Congress and enforced by the president.The pro-life movement, however, has been preoccupied with attempting to influence the national government to support its agenda when it needed to educate the general public of the dangers of a central government taking power unto itself.  In pursuit of this unfruitful strategy, pro-lifers are busy raising support for the reelection campaign of President Bush in spite of his lukewarm action on pro-life principles.Pro-life support for Mr. Bush is creating more threats to the structure of constitutional government than even Roe. Mr. Bush is an unflinching internationalist who seems to have no problems eliminating American borders and converting the military into a rapid deployment force for political and economic agendas that are poorly defined and executed without a shred of constitutional support. His agenda focuses on unconstitutional expansions of federal authority into education, medical practice, and church missions. He has further expanded executive control over the use of lands that was initiated through executive orders written by Bill Clinton and his lust for fast track trading authority for trade agreements has subverted congressional oversight in relations with trade partners.Pro-lifers are willing to accept these abuses of power because Mr. Bush will use their politically correct clichés at opportune moments. This concession on the part of pro-lifers, though, is in absolute defiance of the major principle that the framers of the Constitution used to develop legal limits on federal office holders – that is that human nature is self-serving and continually seeking personal aggrandizement.The pro-life movement seems to be committed to gauging its influence by endorsements it gets from national political celebrities, but time has proven that those platitudes won’t stop babies from being killed. The movement’s support for the current president might even help to finish the work of destroying the U.S. Constitution that was so hideously forwarded by Roe.---Since 1993 Bob Strodtbeck has been writing commentaries for The Apopka Chief, a news weekly circulated in a community ten miles north of Orlando. His analyses investigate a wide range of topics from what he calls a “Christian pragmatic” view – that is to say, he considers that human interactions are largely driven by the human instinct toward self-service, which is traditionally known as sin. This perspective has given Bob great liberty to criticize governmental officials from both parties upon the standards of constitutional laws they swear to uphold and review cultural and economic phenomena from moral standards defined in the Bible. Bob currently lives in Orlando with his bride Pam and children Charlotte and Richard. He may be reached for comment here.