I didn't say I believed it, just posted an article

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Bush cut OIL COMPANY PROFITS? Yeah... right! Time of crisis or not, they don't care. I'm no O'Reilly fan, but O'Reilly publicly challenged the oil companies on his show to just voluntarily take a small reduction in PROFITS during this time. Ain't gonna happen.

For all the conservative posts on our board, I haven't seen ONE who can explain who is going to PAY for all Bush's spending. I pity the poor person who is the next President and inherits Bush's huge MESS. If (hopefully) it's a Democrat, you can bet the necons will be trashing him/her from the git-go, calling him/her atheist, drunk, and whatever other libel they invent between now and then.

I'm working as hard as I can because my daughter and her husband won't be able to afford to heat their home this coming winter. There is no way I'm going to let my grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law freeze, and I'm going to try to help out as much as I can.

I've read where some of the most radical whacko evangelicals with a direct pipeline (no pun) to God blamed Katrina on lack of morals of people in New Orleans. In the light of Rita, seems to me that God's actually targeting the people controlling the oil rigs. Maybe God's warning that if we don't quit coveting and trying to steal oil from the Middle East's Gulf, God's going to send in a really BIG storm to destroy the oil rigs in America's Gulf. Maybe it's God's way of telling Bush that Bush isn't listening to what God has been telling him, that we need to protect and take care of our own, and stop lying and murdering and killing for his own personal gain and that of his cronies.

Sorry to go off on a tangent here, but I become very angry at the thought of my family freezing this winter (even though they work hard and are/were considered middle class). Hopefully, I will be able to help so that doesn't happen, but what about all the other families with children out there? What happened to conservative family values? They obviously don't exist if a school choose to CLOSE to conserve fuel, and oil companies keep right on churning and collecting huge profits.

Just like you, I truly hope a revolution is churning. Someone has to start caring about regular, hard-working, underinsured or uninsured people in this country. These are the people who are the backbone of this country, the people who do the REAL work, while the fat cats (Bush's base) sit back and get fatter and fatter with Bush's blessings!

A newspaper (that you admittedly don't LIKE) or YOU, who obviously knows more than I would ever want to know about skinheads? You (and your party of lies and deceit) don't have an ounce of credibility, and I'd believe the NYT any day over the ignorant, bigoted, hateful likes of YOU!

In case you haven't noticed, there is a huge controversy over rape and murder of civilian Iraqis. It certainly makes sense that a neo-nazi skinhead group would carry out these kind of brutal acts with no conscience and without thinking twice.

Your beloved skinheads are making the rest of our very FINE military look bad, yet you defend these filthy subhumanoids.

I'm not surprised that you're angry because apparently what was supposed to be a big secret is now being publicized. I'm also not surprised that you're defending them. I fully expected some from the other board to reveal their true selves when I posted the article.

You're repulsive. Go crawl back under the rock you slithered out of. You're leaving a disgusting slime trail. YUCK!

Bush vetoes children's health bill a second time

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Wednesday vetoed a bill expanding a popular children's health-care program for a second time, angering Democrats who are locked in a fight with the administration over the budget and spending.

Pushed by the Democratic-led Congress but also supported by many Republicans, the bill was aimed at providing health insurance to about 10 million children in low- and moderate-income families. Taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products would have been increased to pay for the aid.

Bush vetoed an earlier version of the bill in October but Congress quickly passed another one that included some changes but not enough to satisfy the White House concerns.

"Because the Congress has chosen to send me an essentially identical bill that has the same problems as the flawed bill I previously vetoed, I must veto this legislation too," Bush wrote in a message to the House of Representatives.

The fight between Congress and the White House over the health bill is one in a series of clashes over spending that have arisen this year.

Bush has said the funding level sought by the Democrats for the health program would have expanded it beyond its original intent of covering poor children and marked a step toward government-run health care.

Democrats say the additional money is needed to help families who cannot afford to buy private health insurance but who earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid health care program for the poor.

"This is indeed a sad action for him to take, because so many children in our country need access to quality health care," House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters.

The bill would have provided $60 billion in funding for the children's health program over five years, compared with the current $25 billion five-year funding level.

The tobacco tax increase would raise the levy on cigarettes by 61 cents to $1 per pack.

House Democratic leaders said they will not try to override the veto right away and would vote on a bill to ensure the more than six million kids now in the program can stay enrolled.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

(Additional reporting by Donna Smith and Richard Cowan)

reply that I think got deleted.......not unjustly. It was dripping in sarcasm. LOL I believe the article it is on Yahoo news though, my husband said something about it. I didn't post a link to it, probably someone else.

We can all agree to disagree. What I would like for everyone to do is research the facts for themselves. I've always felt like you can belive nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

I'm not against immigration and I don't think Lou Dobbs is either. I'm all for LEGAL immigration. I even researched Mexico's immigration requirements and that ought to be an eye-opener for anyone who wants to compare immigration policies. I am dead set against ILLEGAL immigration. What I don't understand is what about ILLEGAL do people not underestand. AND both Obama and McCain are in favor of giving people who have broken the law a "path to citizenship" translated means amnesty. That didn't work too well under Reagan and it won't work now which is one thing I have against both candidates because the path to citizenship is one thing they agree on but you don't hear either one of them talking about it. That's an issue to me. No need to worry about terrorists when our borders are wide open and terrorists could stroll right on across our borders any time they so desired and neither NEITHER of these candidates have anything to say about that. Why? I'll tell ya, they both don't want to offend the Latino vote and I don't think they care whether the voters are legal or not.

that you would root for Chavez over Colin Powell. Chavez is losing popularity in his own government. His socialist promises are becoming more and more difficult to see to fruition, just as always happens. In the end, the entire countries go bankrupt and no one wins. Just as in history.

And how can I believe him when he has done nothing but lied before? Boy who cried wolf? I s'pose I'm putting my trust, whatever trust is left, in congress.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin

Pat Tillman, Our Hero

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was f***ing illegal and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman's death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as an American original--virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be. She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article's source was Pat Tillman's mother, Mary.

Mary and the Tillman family are relentlessly pushing for answers to the questions surrounding Pat's death in Afghanistan. They want to know why it took the Pentagon five weeks to tell them he died in a tragic case of friendly fire. They want to know why they were unwitting props at Pat's funeral, weeping while lies were told by eulogizing politicians. Mary is now hoping that a new Pentagon inquiry will bring closure. There have been so many discrepancies so far that it's hard to know what to believe, she said to the Chronicle. There are too many murky details.

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling a side of Pat Tillman not widely known--a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books...to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author. Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, 'You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.' And we all said, 'Yeah.' That's who he was. He totally was against Bush. With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman's transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn't play their game. To the Pentagon's chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

But when Tillman fell in Afghanistan the wheels once again started to turn. Now the narrative was perfect: War hero and football star dies fighting terror. The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to hit the press, so the President found it especially useful to praise Tillman as an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror. His funeral was nationally televised. Bush even went back to the bloody well during the presidential campaign, addressing his team's fans on the Arizona Cardinals' stadium Jumbotron.

We now know, of course, that this was all a brutal charade. Such callous manipulation is fueling the Tillman family's anger. As Mary Tillman said this past May, They could have told us up front that they were suspicious that [his death] was a fratricide, but they didn't. They wanted to use him for their purposes.... They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that. A growing number of military families, similarly angered, are criticizing the war in Iraq through organizations like Military Families Speak Out.

As for Chomsky, whom Ann Coulter would undoubtedly label treasonous, Mary Tillman says a private meeting was planned between him and Pat after Pat's return--a meeting that never took place, of course. Chomsky confirms this scenario. This was the real Pat Tillman: someone who, like the majority of this country, was doubting the rationale for war, distrusting his Commander in Chief and looking for answers. The real Pat Tillman, the one with three dimensions, must stick in the throat of the Bush-Coulter gang, a pit in the cherry atop their bloody sundae.

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11�indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade�, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Herskowitz�a longtime Houston newspaper columnist�has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers�expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript�pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior�who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush�personally�in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"�because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

And is in no way or shape complete or accurate. Rumsfeld served 3 years. You think a flight instructor is a small job? That's pretty telling. Clinton dodged the draft by deferring for a ROTC duty, which he never fulfilled after writing his famous loathing of the military letter. So if we are going to post these lists again and again, let's get it right.