The exact quote is "What a terrible thing to

• The Mind is a terrible thing to lose - TTP
  • The exact quote is "What a terrible thing to - myrtle
    • Yeah, even scarier that you will vote for Obama - Get ready for another depression.nm
      • And I bet you voted for George who got us in this mess. - Bushies are responsible
        • Really? Well, your ignorance of thinking O has any - real plan is an embarrassment to America.nm
        • Wrong. Democrats are responsible for the mortgage meltdown, not Bush.... - sam
          • Sorry Sam - gourdpainter
            • Sorry, gourdpainter....the Democrats are primarily.... - sam
              • What are you smoking? - CJ
                • sam's right on this one. Mainly the dems in power through the past several...sm - ms
                  • All I have to say is - gourdpainter
                  • Unbelievable is all I can say, keep twisting - the truth. nm
                    • Twist away, the truth is out there. Sam's right. You're wrong. nm - ms
                • I wondered that, too. Whatever it is - Sam is smoking, is sure has
          • Right on, Sam. Obama is on TV right now, saying - nothing but "I am being picked on", Waaaah!.

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techniques and that was clearly a political decision and ignored the advice of their Director of National Intelligence and their CIA director".

**Outlining torture techniques**

Nuff said.

thus spats out another great repub VP choice, Dan Potatoe Quayle.

"What are we to do?"  How about drilling for our own oil?  Allowing us to use nuclear energy?

SMOKING (Or drinking?)"

Did I forget any of the personal insults directed at me?

All I said was "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."

If January 20, 2009 comes and goes without a "terra attack" and if the new President is sworn in without incident, then all the chickens will be "hatched."

However, if none of the above happens, then there's one egg that hasn't hatched, and it's likely to be very ROTTEN. 

Regarding your personal insults, they weren't necessary, and they were just plain rude and totally inaccurate.  However, if you choose to think so wrongly about ME (someone you don't know and have never met), then that gives me a pretty good handle on your the accuracy expressed in your other posts. 

Have a great evening. 

to Know Best?

What Reason Do we Have to Trust the State to Know Best?

Christopher Hitchens

Although I am named in this suit in my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA's monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security.

Then it was argued that Congress had already implicitly granted the power to conduct warrantless surveillance on the territory of the United States, which seemed to make the reason for the original secrecy more rather than less mysterious. (I think we may take it for granted that our deadly enemies understand that their communications may be intercepted.)

It now appears that Congress may have granted this authority, but without quite knowing that it had, and certainly without knowing the extent of it.

This makes it critically important that we establish an understood line, and test the cases in which it may or may not be crossed.

Let me give a very direct instance of what I mean. We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of national security however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.

The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies.

Oh, wait....no...it can't be....the audacity of this man.  He isn't even president yet, and just look at how he has changed this country.  He has given people hope for a brighter future....the nerve.  Things were much better when we could just torture people at will, invade who we want, pi$$ off the world, and not have to deal with those pesky civil rights.  Oh, those were the days! 

Keep counting.

If we just "let it go" then we have said it is okay to torture and to break the law.  We are supposed to be a nation of laws.  Those laws apply to everyone, even the former administration.

You guys constantly try to justify the war in Iraq by saying that Saadam was a tyrant (which he was) and that he was committing inhumane acts on his people.  We also ridiculed the Taliban for its treatment of women.

How much credibility do we really have to judge anyone else if we don't hold ourselves accountable for our OWN laws?

I hope the whole Bush bunch that came up with and ordered torture go to trial and are given the most severe sentence possible.  Maybe that way when other countries look at us they can see that we mean what we say instead of having a double standard for ourselves. 

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too. ~Oscar Levant

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

If the person you are trying to diagnose politically is some sort of intellectual, the chances are two to one he is a Democrat. ~Vance Packard

If you can't convince them, confuse them. ~ Harry S. Truman

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. ~ Harry S. Truman

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. ~ John F. Kennedy

Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair. ~ George Burns

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross ~ Sinclair Lewis