Show Your Support For Out Troops

[Menchhofer]

www.defendamerica.mil

[Darin]

Did you catch a glimpe of the director of Bowling For Columbine on the Academy Awards last night? "Shame on you Mr. Bush, Shame on you." When do these Hollywood libral morons want to leave the country? Let's face it nobody wants war, but everyone wants peace? Unfortunately, we have to take down the problem with force. Really, I could care less if they find zero weapons of mass destruction. This guy killed on an average day, 289 of his people. They had no chance of knowing what every one of us knows, in freedom. They were too scared to have an opinion or risk losing their life for their opinion. So hell ya, I am backing up everyone who is fighting for what I believe in and praying for everyone who lost their life making what I believe in a reality.

......also am very proud of the other troops (BRITS). Tony Blair is doing a helluva job over there.

In other words, I am with ya Steve.

[Menchhofer]

I saw and heard that director's comments. I was also proud that while he was trying to make his point, the audience tried to boo him off the stage.

Just like the people blocking traffic with their demonstrations throughout some major cities.
I believe everyone has the right to their opinion, but when our police are distracted with these demonstrations and brought into these areas to provide support, it is taking them away from their current job of protecting us against terrorism. This is wrong.

People should just think a little before they act.

And of course if the public does not agree with 43, I also support giving the demonstrators a free airline ticket to Iraq.

[Eric E.]

Here's more on were the celrebrities stand.

http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint...ovie+Stars.htm

Makes you wonder why there were no protests or negative media reports while slick willie was in office. Free press...Yah right! or should I say left.

[TimberMcPherson]

He certainly livend the oscars up. Some of the stuff the guy spouts is extreme at times but he has in the past exposed alot of wrongs done by corperations who exploit and rip people off all over the world.

Saddam is evil, he should be got rid of, he kills alot of his citizens, few people in the world disagree with that.

But attacking those who are believers in freedom or try to make a stand against the actions of leaderships and against the loudest voices of the people is what saddam does. I have heard people say that you should drop bombs on the protesters or anyone that argues against the military action or have them leave the country.

what makes that different from what saddam does or what hitler did?

[mquinn]

re: michael moore - not to mention, his whole movie, for which he won the award in the first place, was purportedly about exactly what he was saying in his speech (sorry, i really didn't watch the awards - or the movie - i only read about them, so maybe i shouldn't be making a comment about it, but that doesn't seem to stop too many people) - what the heck did they expect him to talk about?

and as for the booing, not that it matters, but the story that came out that you didn't see was that it was the stage hands who started shouting him down, and the audience was booing them - who the heck knows? it's a freaking free-for-all around here any more.

movie stars and celebrities are like every other group - some for, some against. painting them all the same color must take an awfully large brush.

uh, eric....when slick willie had troops in the field, the republicans were impeaching him!! ...where were you? negative media reports? i can sure provide you with some links, if you really are wondering. maybe you didn't have access to the media back then.

support "43"? give me some reasons. and the fact that he is the president and the commander in chief don't cut it. he got there by an illegal act of being "embedded" (to use the mot du jour) by the supreme court, and he apparently didn't have a clue about how to run this war...from all indications now. what's the lie of the day today? i can't keep up.

as for supporting our troops - okay, i'm not even going to go where the hideous stories are about one of our boy's incredibly stupid and outrageous comments about "basking in the glory" and being "exhilarated" from a bombing mission that took out a marketplace, not to mention the ones about the "yankee" pilot twice attacking a british crew, killing one and putting the other three in the hospital...okay, so i went there a little ways...heaven help us, i can only hope that those guys are in the very smallest minority - maybe i can talk myself into believing they are the only two. (okay, that's somebody's cue to drop in and say: more liberal propaganda.)

what i am going to provide is a link to a site that has information on ways to support the troops without supporting the war:

http://windsofchange.net/archives/003234.html

and, no, i don't support this war - i could not be more against it - but yes, i do support our troops, and when i think about what those kids are going through, i have to find something else to think about, but don't let me get hold of those two mentioned above. well, i can imagine that the second one just lost it, which would be another reason for me to oppose war in general (or perhaps he was an al-qaeda plant, huh?) - but that exhilarated kid....

if we're going to be so bent on managing the "news" and putting so much into PR (and we are), perhaps we need a little more control over journalists' access to interviews with the soldiers themselves.

and, to round this off, on a lighter note, a humorous article written by a former soldier, Christian Bauman:


3/27/03


A nice lady on the radio was just soliciting for letters and packages to send to our troops overseas. You write down some friendly, supportive words, throw in a few candy bars, and ship it off to Any Soldier, FPO Iraq.


Man, we used to love getting those envelopes. Of course, my two turns were in little wars, so we didn’t get busloads of Any Soldier packages like they did in Vietnam or Gulf War I, or the way they will in this war. We’d get a few small things, every few weeks. But it was great to get them. Great to know someone back in the world knew we were alive.


Whoever was on the mail run the day a bag of Any Soldier letters came in was a lucky bastard. All letters are not created equal, you understand. There would be fights over them: some were perfumed; always a good sign. Some had little hearts all over them; those promised to be keepers. I knew this kid who was on the mail run to the Kismaayo (that’d be Somalia, y’all) airport on one day the mail had an Any Soldier bag. He heaved it up into the back of a 5-ton truck, and stuck his head in, digging through, amazed at his good luck of being alone for thirty minutes with first dibs at the Any Soldier mail bag. The convoy got shot at on the way back to the coast, the drivers of the trucks and Humvees flooring it through the city, running over animals and anything else that got in the way. Back in the compound, it became apparent this kid had no idea of what had happened. He was too busy sniffing through the letters to notice his near demise.


The coup, of course, was getting the letters with a picture or two inside. Some sweetie from Oklahoma City. Or Laramie. I don’t know why, but the further west the return address, the more likely the envelope had a picture. And the more north, the more likely the picture was, shall we say, revealing. Triangulate this equation and you discover that the girls in the northwest get a real charge out of showing the troops exactly what it is they’re fighting for. And do the troops appreciate it? What do you think.


There was always a lot of food. And it was always melted. Or spoiled. We didn’t care. We ate it anyway. Nothing like a brownie from Vermont that’s been melted, reformed, melted again, reformed, crushed, radiated, and sniffed over. Yeah baby.


Lots of Bibles. Those were the sucker packages. You took your chances with one of the six brown packages in the mail pile, went to your little rock, sliced open the paper with your knife, already tasting the moldy three-month-old cookies that awaited you…and a Bible came out instead. There’s a hill near the port of Kismaayo (that’s Somalia, y’all) where I’ll bet a pile of those Bibles still sit today.


So this nice lady on the radio this afternoon, soliciting for Any Soldier packages. She ended her little speech with a giggle and the statement: “Of course, any kind of alcohol or ####ography is strictly prohibited.”


“Lady,” I’m thinking. “That’s all we ever wanted.”

[WRW]

What is "embedded" & how is it illegal?

[mquinn]

actually, bill, the illegal part is that the supreme court is not supposed to be deciding elections.

the embedding was just a tip-of-the-hat to the term used for the placement of journalists with military units. sorry about that one, because it's probably not really a proper term for what the supreme court did. emplaced? installed?

[WRW]

Refresh my memory, if you would. Wasn't the Supreme Court asked to make a decision on the legality of Florida's election laws? I thought that was how the system worked.

[mquinn]

i don't know that i can refresh your memory, but...
yes, that is how the system works if you work it.

the following is a synopsis of the analysis of the election fiasco presented by vincent bugliosi - a lawyer whose name you may know...and yes, bill, i know that there are people (including other attorneys, and most especially, the supreme court judges) who will disagree with him....

and before i get accused of being a gore apologist, i didn't vote for him, either. i had no idea what bush and his crew were capable of - i wasn't paying attention - and if i had been, i would have voted for gore for the simple reason of trying to keep bush from the white house. (it may have come out the same anyway, and i would have taken the same view of the mess.) in the end, after the incredible horror of it all, i can only hope that the world will have awakened and started on a more equitable path.

that said, here's the synopsis:

quote:

Some of the many points Bugliosi makes regarding both the illegality and questionable motives of the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore include:

* The Florida court acted in accordance with Florida case and statutory law which states that when there is a challenge to an election result, it can "provide any relief appropriate under the circumstances." That is exactly what the Florida court did when ordering a manual recount of all disputed ballots. The Supreme Court, however, intervened and called a halt to the count.

* On November 22, when George W. Bush first petitioned the Court to consider three of his objections to the earlier, more limited Florida recount taking place, the Court only denied review of his third objection-the lack of a uniform standard to determine the voter's intent violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet three weeks later, the very same Court ruled in favor of Bush, enthusiastically embracing the very same objection they had dismissed just a few weeks earlier.

* The Supreme Court's ruling was made on December 12. However, since the electors in the fifty states were not scheduled to meet and vote until December 18, Bugliosi says that if the Court were truly concerned about the different standards to count votes, why didn't it simply remand the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to establish a uniform statewide standard and continue the count until December 18?

* Bugliosi notes that the five conservative Justices who ruled in favor of Bush are ardent federalists, promoting states' rights. Therefore, if it weren't for their desire to see Bush win, they would have done what they normally do: stay out of the state's business. Yet, in this case, the Justices overruled the Florida Supreme Court.

* All appellate court decisions enunciate legal principals that future courts cite as support for their legal rulings. Yet the Court knew its ruling that differing standards for counting votes violated the equal protection clause could not be used in future cases. Why? Because different standards for counting votes exist throughout the fifty states. Therefore, to apply the equal protection ruling of Bush v. Gore would have invalidated virtually all elections throughout the country. So the Court, for the first time in its history, held that its ruling was limited to the case before it. This fact alone, and all by itself, clearly and unequivocally shows that the Court knew its decision was not based on the law, and was solely a decision to appoint George Bush president.

The Supreme Court asserted that because of the various standards of determining the voter's intent in the Florida counties, voters were treated unequally, constituting a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause. Accordingly, the Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's order that the undervotes (those the voting machines did not pick up) be counted, effectively delivering the presidency to Bush and rendering worthless the votes of 50 million Americans in fifty states who voted for Al Gore.

But Bugliosi makes this penetrating observation:
"...if the Court's five-member majority was concerned not about Bush but the voters themselves, as they fervently claimed to be, then under what conceivable theory would they, in effect, tell these voters, "We're so concerned that some of you undervoters may lose your vote under the different Florida county standards that we're going to solve the problem by making sure that none of you undervoters have your votes counted"?

This is exactly what the Court did.

Bugliosi explains that in equal protection cases, it's the one who is harmed who brings the action. But how would a full count of all legal votes harm Bush, asks Bugliosi. Bush could only be harmed if he did not actually win the majority of votes. In trying to justify its decision to stop the count, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia unbelievably wrote that counting these votes could "threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush]...by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." But as Bugliosi points out, Scalia was presupposing that Bush had won the election indeed, had a right to win it even though the election had not yet been decided!

Moreover, if none of the undervotes were to be counted because of various standards used in different counties to count them, then to be completely consistent, Bugliosi says, "the Supreme Court would have had no choice but to invalidate the entire Florida election, since there is no question that votes lost in some counties because of the method of voting would have been recorded in others utilizing a different method." The ramifications of the decision by the five Supreme Court Justices are enormous. The very institution trusted most by Americans to protect its freedoms violated the law itself. Yet, he notes, no one is treating these justices as if their behavior was criminal.

[WRW]

Peter Berkowitz, law professor at GMU law school, didn't appear to think much of Bugliosi's "Betrayal of America".

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...tz072001.shtml

If you choose to believe only negative remarks and opinions about Bush, you have done yourself a disservice. If you spout those negative views as the only truth, you do others a disservice.

[mquinn]

i try to believe that there's good stuff about everybody. i haven't seen it about bush, yet, but i'll admit it's going to be hard to do, because i cannot bear to look at the man, or hear him speak - so i'm stuck with what i read.

now, see, you haven't gotten into the philosophy of me enough yet - you only just noticed it one day and didn't follow up. i don't believe there is any one truth to anything. so, it's not likely you'll find me saying anything is the only truth.

and, bill, ignore what i say anyway...it's just that i'm about out of duct tape, and still mad because somebody dropped a house on my sister.

[WRW]

Allright!
Who's responsible for that tornado?

[Darin]

Slick Willie, does he know what the military is? The ***** is why we are in the mess we are in right now. The man made us the weakest we had been in history. He ruined the economy. He treated the governments books like Enron did there and Arthur Anderson did his. He lied about b*** jobs....but that isn't sex, so the american public won't care about that. Democrats are notoriously bad on protecting america through military actions, they mostly *** kiss and try to make everyone like them. One way is too give everyone aid. I don't like war anymore than the next guy, but this is a necessary action. North Korea should be another place to bomb. That is one crazy SOB. As for Bush, I feel he has done a great job. Usually if the quarterback looks good the rest of the crew has done good too. They have!!! Bush is good because he actually backs up what he says he is going to do. Everyone says we need more time, we need more time. He gave them a time limit, they didn't comply. Sorry you loose. Time to bomb all your government buildings. Innocent lives are lost all the time. We even bomb ourselves sometimes. We don't want to kill our own or innocent lives. You have to give innocent people to gain freedom. We have proved that since 1776. We have to give up the fact that we can't make everyone happy, I do that on Arboristsite everyday. If I had to give my life to have a million other people enjoy the freedom I enjoy, I would. Take it right now!!!

Mquinn, about the Florida count. Give it up and the attorney should too. Slick Willie won the same way. Didn't hear a republican cry.....wait a minute I did..... for 8 years.

I just love to read all this junk. Have a good one all.
Victory is within site.

[mquinn]

The queer is why we are in the mess we are in right now....He lied about blow jobs....

let's see...from the "posting guidelines" section:

* No posts that contain vulgarities directed toward another individual or group.

* Contains content intended to victimize, harass, degrade or intimidate an
individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, race,
ethnicity, age, disability or sexual orientation. Hate speech is unacceptable.

looks like there's a link here to "report this post to a moderator"....

oops. you ARE a moderator....

If I had to give my life to have a million other people enjoy the freedom I enjoy. Take it right now!!!

i think the recruiting office opens up around 9 in the morning...