Internet muse.
Daring, bold, never sold.
My daily weblog of politics, humor, philosophy...and a constant and nagging reminder of the existence of universal love....
Q: Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?Just a number, Tony?
MR. SNOW: It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something.
"...what is being proposed is nothing more or less than, really, a charade."
- Walter Jones (D-NC 3rd district)
"Do not put us through the farce and the fraud of a pseudo-debate going nowhere and ending nowhere. This is not about a discussion of cutting and running. This is a question of whether the Congress is going to sit and watch while people are dying."The House leadership continue to misjudge the hearts and minds of the American people. They've taken them for chumps - suckers - for just a little too long. You see fatheads like Karl Rove belligerently spouting, like a rebellious pimply-faced adolescent, that his party owes no one an apology for their tremendous amount of misjudgements and errors and lies told about Iraq, labeling a pointless occupation as "the central front in the war on terror."
- Rep. Neil Ambercrombie (D-HI)
"It is a cynical attempt to mold politics into a document that their political spinmeisters come up with to turn Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror, all munched in together, assuming that the American people are too stupid to know the difference."I don't personally want my government representatives to sit on their partisan asses and make cute and meaningless little "thank-you" resolutions and propaganda statements to cable news pundits while people die needlessly and soldiers fight for freedoms being blatantly denied to the People of the United States to have a realistic discussion about a war in which those soldiers are engaged.
- Rep. Martin Meehan (D-MA )
"Let those who believe that we should be in Iraq for the next 15 years or 20 years go on the floor and talk about it. Let the members of the House meet their constitutional responsibility and debate it and vote up or down."
- Rep. Walter Jones (D-NC 3rd district)
"Are they really changing anything that we're doing in Iraq? Or is this designed basically to shore up and win public support."If Bush uses this opportunity as a turning point - convincing the new Iraqi government that the U.S. needs to change its course in Iraq and turn this into a successful political effort with an earnest attempt to fully internationalize it, and to begin redeployment of U.S. troops now, he will begin to heal what are now almost non-salvageable wounds - the deep and bleeding gashes - felt by the American public for all the lies and misleadings about why the Bush administration made pre-emptive war upon the government of Iraq and many of its people while there was no WMD, no imminent threat to the United States, and no connection found by any reputable journalist to the planning and carrying out of the 9/11 attacks. It will also force the Iraqis to get on the stick and become responsible for themselves. Bush has been covering for their responsibility for too long.
"...the enemy doesn't stand for anything. They have no message of hope. They have no positive philosophy. All they can do is kill and hope that the government splits up, or that the American people lose their will."America's will to do what? Our military presence for the past three and a half years has contributed to the Iraqi people's sectarian strife. If our "will" is to win hearts and minds, it's high time for Iraqis to take responsibility for themselves and it's time to end the U.S. occupation of their country.
This writer's belief is that the only long-term hope the world has of avoiding a quite widespread further proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional nations in the coming decade is for the U.S. to undertake honest and serious multilateral negotiations aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons everywhere.
We need to rethink how we are "fighting terror." Unless the object is to generate more terrorists.'Thirty-year-old professor Ahmad Yassin said 'the martyrdom of the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi represents a grave loss for both the Arab and Islamic Worlds. We lost a great man who died defending the Islamic civilization from Zionist imperialism. I don't think this man can be replaced.' linkAnd Mr. Cole's informed comment:
Zarqawi would just have been a serial killer if he had lived in normal times, the sort where police are surprised to find hundreds bodies buried in his back lot, and suddenly solving missing persons cases in the region for years back. That anyone at all, much less a highly educated intellectual, could speak of him in these glowing terms sends chills down my spine. Because it means he has a legacy.
"The importance that the left
puts on capturing or killing Bin Laden
is almost laughable."
returns to the very place that nourished it and created its beauty. We look to the same place to see the return of the rose's beauty when Spring begins because we belong to the same cycle of life. It is no accident that Christians, who believe in the resurrection of their savior, celebrate his glorious return and transcendence to his heavenly father in the sky when the Spring comes each year. The sky, ever unchanging, reflects an eternal awareness - even though our thoughts and moods are as changing as the clouds that roll by. Watch the clouds and you recognize the shapes as something that calls to mind a reflection of your own thoughts or memories. We, as a community of man, are both the clouds and the sky; just as we are the waves and also the ocean. And each of us, try as we may, will never escape the fact that we are like the rose, ever-bending earthward with age while being capable of spreading such beauty in the short time that we exist. The emerging models of families in the homosexual world also contribute to a new understanding that families are no longer defined by the models of the 1950s, but today come in many different shapes and forms. The key to family is love, and that love is at least as abundant in gay and lesbian families as it is in heterosexual families. Similarly, when homophobia is removed from the picture, children of homosexual families flourish at least as well as children from heterosexual families.Our common goal should be to flourish - each and every woman, child, and man. If you walk through the world fully aware of the nature that surrounds you, you will find that not only does it surround you, but that you are an undeniable part of it. We belong to the world, each and every person is connectedness in nature, and we are all part of the same nature. Our capacity to love did not spring from a Bible or a set of laws. Our capacity to love springs from our nature and it is only in recalling that we all belong to the same web of life and cycle of death as the rose that will increase our awareness of our need to keep the American founding alive, defending equality and justice for each and every person living in this country and living on the face of the earth.
