Yes, am happy to still be safe and free. Hope

• Thank you, President Bush, for your service and especially for keeping us safe at home. nm - ms
  • He may have said goodbye... - Marmann
    • Right, it'll be "it's Bush's fault" for at least the next two years. I wonder when O - responsibility for his own actions
      • LOL! I've proved it???!! - Marmann
      • Obama has already taken responsibility, and - huh?
  • You mean thanks for nothing President Bush! - Bushwacked
    • Bush WAS a "uniter" on one front: - Marmann
  • Yes, am happy to still be safe and free. Hope - it lasts. Thanks President Bush.nm
  • I agree. Thank you President Bush. - indy
    • NOTHING is more important from a president than - Natl Security. THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH.NM
      • So what was Bush doing 09/10, or - huh?
  • Short quiz...(sm) - Just the big bad
    • Yes, and EVERY SINGLE THING he did to TRY to - protect us, you would bash. -then just move on.nm
    • And people seem to forget - so sick of this
      • Let's blame Clinton...Let's blame Obama. - grams
        • Never before has a president-elect...sm - m
          • Elevate himself to POTUS? Obama - huh?
            • When I said "enacting policy" sm - m
              • Just my opinion -- - Amanda
              • Firstly, he CANNOT enact policy, and he - huh?
    • Something else happened in 09/2001........ sm - m
      • So sorry for your loss. You make great points. Lets - blame the terrorists for 9/11. Thanks Pres Bush.nm
        • I agree. It was the TERRORISTS who decided... - Marmann
          • I tried to post the corroborating link... - Marmann
      • I am very sorry to hear.....(sm) - Just the big bad
        • Thanks BB.............. sm - m
    • I know, I know (raising hand).. - Susan

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people can take anything out of context and do with it what they want; it still doesn't make it a McCain/Palin issue.

future political career is in the dumpster.  At least he admitted it when he got caught instead of lying under oath like Clinton and at least his wife wasn't dying of cancer like Edwards wife supposedly was....but whatever.  Keep trashing pubs for mistakes that dems make all the time if it makes you feel better JTBB!

It is a shame that we have to hear about politicians doing this sort of thing and I do feel for his wife and kids.  He will have to live with the consequences of his actions.

I did it once and I was crucified for it.  Won't do it again.  Truthfully, and this is not meant to be mean, I don't think I would have much in common with most on this board at all. 

how does it feel?

* I don't know what *9/11 perps* you are talking about, but I don't think anyone has gone free.*

'Dr. Germ,' Others Released in Iraq

Monday, December 19, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq — About 24 top former officials in Saddam Hussein's regime, including a biological weapons expert known as Dr. Germ, have been released from jail, while a militant group released a video Monday of the purported killing of an American hostage.

The first results of Thursday's parliamentary election were released, with officials saying the Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, got about 58 percent of the votes from 89 percent of ballot boxes counted in Baghdad province.

Across Iraq, meanwhile, demonstrations broke out to protest a government decision to raise the price of gasoline, heating and cooking fuel, and the oil minister threatened to resign over the development.

An Iraqi lawyer said the 24 or 25 officials from Saddam's government were released from jail without charges, and some have already left the country.

The release was an American-Iraqi decision and in line with an Iraqi government ruling made in December 2004, but hasn't been enforced until after the elections in an attempt to ease the political pressure in Iraq, said the lawyer, Badee Izzat Aref.

Among them were Rihab Taha, a British-educated biological weapons expert, who was known as Dr. Germ for her role in making bio-weapons in the 1980s, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, known as Mrs. Anthrax, a former top Baath Party official and biotech researcher, Aref said.

Because of security reasons, some of them want to leave the country, he said. He declined to elaborate, but noted some have already left Iraq today.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, would say only that eight individuals formerly designated as high-value detainees were released Saturday after a board process found they were no longer a security threat and no charges would be filed against them.

Neither the U.S. military or Iraqi officials would disclose any of the names, but a legal official in Baghdad said Taha and Ammash were among those released.

The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said those released also included Hossam Mohammed Amin, head of the weapons inspections directorate, and Aseel Tabra, an Iraqi Olympic Committee official under Odai Saddam Hussein, the former leader's son.

The video from the extremist group The Islamic Army of Iraq was posted on a Web site and showed a man purportedly being shot in the back of the head. Last week, the group had claimed it had killed civilian contractor Ronald Allen Schulz, a native of North Dakota.

The video did not show the victim's face, however, and it was impossible to identify him. The victim was kneeling with his back to the camera, with his hands tied behind his back and blindfolded with an Arab headdress when he was purportedly shot. The video also showed Schulz's identity card.

A separate video, shown on a split screen, showed images of Schulz alive. The group had aired that video when he was first taken hostage earlier this month.

Schulz has been identified by the extremist group as a security consultant for the Iraqi Housing Ministry, although family and neighbors from his current home in Alaska, say he is an industrial electrician who has worked on contracts around the world.

Schulz served in the Marine Corps from 1984 to 1991. He moved to Alaska six years ago, and friends and family say he is divorced.

The German government, meanwhile, said kidnappers had freed a German aid worker and archaeologist taken hostage with her driver in northern Iraq more than three weeks ago. Susanne Osthoff, 43, was reported in good condition at the German Embassy in Baghdad. It was unclear whether Osthoff's Iraqi driver had also been freed.

The military said a U.S. Marine was killed by small arms fire Sunday in the town of Ramadi, in central Iraq. The death brought to 2,156 the number of U.S. service members killed since the start of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

In other violence Monday, a suicide car bomb exploded outside a children's hospital in western Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding 11, including seven police, officials said. Police believe the bomb had targeted a convoy carrying a police colonel, who was among the injured.

In western Baghdad, gunmen attacked the convoy of Deputy Baghdad Gov. Ziad Tariq, killing three civilians and wounding three of his bodyguards, police said. Tariq was not injured.

Iraqi soldiers on Monday began Operation Moonlight, which the U.S. military described as the first large-scale operation planned and executed by soldiers of the Iraqi 1st Brigade. The mission's aim is to disrupt insurgent activity along the Euphrates River near the border with Syria.

There are five Iraqi Army companies and one U.S. Marine company taking part in the operation, said Marine Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool.

With 89 percent of the ballot boxes counted in Baghdad province — Iraq's largest district — preliminary results showed the United Iraqi Alliance received 1,403,901 votes, or about 58 percent, while the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance party got 451,782 votes, and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National List with 327,174 votes, the electoral commission said.

The commission did not say how many people voted in Baghdad province or provide further details. Baghdad is Iraq's biggest electoral district with 2,161 candidates running for 59 of the 275 seats in Iraq's parliament.

Results from southern Basra province, also mixed but predominantly Shiite, saw the clergy-backed United Iraqi Alliance significantly ahead, winning 612,206 votes with 98 percent of ballot boxes counted. The list headed by Allawi, a secular Shiite, was in second with 87,134 votes, while the Sunni accordance party trailed with 36,997 votes.

Kurdish parties were overwhelmingly ahead in their three northern provinces.

In a speech Sunday, President Bush praised the vote and warned against a pullout of U.S. forces. He said the election would not end violence but means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror. He also warned that a U.S. troop pullout would signal to the world that America cannot be trusted to keep its word.

The fuel prices were raised Sunday — some as much as nine times — to curb a growing black market, Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said.

A gallon of imported and super gasoline in Iraq was raised to about 68 cents, but Iraqis were upset by the fivefold increase. The price of locally produced gas was raised to about 48 cents per gallon, a sevenfold increase.

In Amarah, 180 miles southeast of Baghdad, police fired into the air to disperse the hundreds of protesters who had gathered in front of the provincial government headquarters. The demonstrators, however, didn't leave, and scuffles broke out with police.

Drivers blocked roads and set tires on fire near fuel stations in the southern city of Basra, and hundreds demonstrated outside the governor's headquarters to protest the increases.

Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum said when the Cabinet raised prices, it also decided that the extra money would be used to support more than 2 million low-income families. Some aid money was supposed to reach the families before the increases, but that didn't happen, he said.

Dr. Ibrahim will submit his resignation to the Iraqi government if the situation continues as is, he said, referring to himself. We should take in consideration the living conditions and the economic situation of the citizens.

Iraq's oil minister has previously said that cheap domestic fuel prices had encouraged smuggling to other countries. Iraq's government has continued Saddam's practice of heavily subsidizing fuel prices.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,179103,00.html

SLide show with music, worth watching.  The song is also one of my favorites.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8199.htm

for a $500,000 contribution to the RNC.

Do you really think the government will give us worse insurance than the for-profit insurers are doing now?   Really???

I'm sick of paying something for nothing - after all the deductibles, out of pocket charges, copays and disallowed claims - that's pretty much what we get.  I'd rather take the money I pay in premiums to a greedy corporation who will refuse to pay a cent when the time comes I need them - and pay it in taxes for a free healtchare plan.  At least everybody would be in the same boat, with no nasty surprises.

Sunday, Oct. 02, 2005 Power Outage House leader Tom DeLay's indictment upends the Republicans' to-do list and their outlook for next year's elections. Can they recover in time? By KAREN TUMULTY AND MIKE ALLEN The news that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had been dreading for months was brought by an aide, who interrupted DeLay's weekly lunch with Dennis Hastert in the House Speaker's office. DeLay absorbed it, and then the man widely called the Hammer on Capitol Hill (though rarely to his face) did what he does best: he hit back. All right, DeLay replied. Let's go. Let's go fight. Less than three hours later, before a roomful of reporters, DeLay addressed a Texas grand jury's charge that he and two political associates conspired to funnel $155,000 in illegal corporate campaign contributions into Texas legislative races. He called it one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history and the prosecutor who brought the case a partisan fanatic. That night, anxious to show he's not a recluse, he introduced Rudy Giuliani at a Friends of Israel banquet. DeLay even made an uncharacteristic round of the cable shows, hinting darkly on cnn that he would soon produce very good evidence that his nemesis, Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle, had engaged in a conspiracy of his own--with the Democratic leadership here in Washington. Combativeness has seen Tom DeLay through near-death experiences before, but on the Hill late last week, it was hard to miss the signs that his foot soldiers and allies had begun positioning themselves in anticipation of his demise. G.O.P. rules require that DeLay, 58, majority leader since 2003, relinquish his post while he fights the conspiracy charge, and speculation is rife that even if he is acquitted his days as one of the most powerful men in the House could be over. You leave a job like this, there is no coming back, says a top Republican official who likes DeLay and thinks he will be cleared. Politics abhors a vacuum more than anything else, and it's going to move past him too quickly. Almost immediately, it did. A plan engineered by DeLay and Hastert to install complaisant Rules Committee chairman David Dreier as temporary majority leader was nixed by conservatives who dislike Dreier's moderate positions on stem-cell research and gay marriage. Instead the brain trust installed ambitious whip Roy Blunt, who will share some of the majority leader's duties with Dreier. The setup is so shaky that some House Republicans are pressing for the election of a new leadership team as early as January. Meanwhile, lobbying shops that had traded on the access to DeLay were desperately dialing House aides to forge new relationships. Those not tied to DeLay were calling the same staff members to gloat. There's millions of dollars on the table, said an aide who had heard from both camps. These guys are going to slaughter each other. What's left of the G.O.P. leadership, already beset by a raft of other political problems, was trying to figure out how to salvage the ambitious legislative agenda of more tax cuts, hurricane help and gas-price relief that they want to carry them to next year's midterm elections--a more difficult challenge with the sidelining of the man who had so determinedly pulled off many of their close victories. DeLay may not have seen the worst of it yet. Sources tell TIME that while Earle was closing in on DeLay from Austin, Texas, a federal investigation into the spreading scandal around disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, accused with Michael Scanlon (a former press secretary of DeLay's) of bilking their Indian-tribe clients out of $66 million, has begun lapping at the edges of the former majority leader's operation. A former Abramoff associate who was questioned by the FBI in August says, They had a lot of e-mails, a lot of traffic between our office and DeLay's office. Many of those exchanges involved lavish travel by DeLay arranged by the lobbyist but requested, the e-mails suggest, by aides in DeLay's office. (House members are allowed to accept gifts under limited circumstances but not to solicit them.) Says the source: There was nothing I saw that hit DeLay personally, but there was a lot of questionable stuff that was going on with his staff. 'Tom wants this. Tom wants that.' Was it really him or just the staff that was being aggressive? DeLay's office wouldn't comment on the Justice Department investigation, and neither would the FBI. Republicans had plenty of problems even before the latest blow to DeLay. Voters are angry about gas prices, the war in Iraq and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Polls show President George W. Bush at or near the lowest public-approval ratings of his presidency. On the other side of the Capitol, Senate majority leader Bill Frist faces an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into the circumstances surrounding his decision to sell all of his stock in the hospital chain founded by his family, Hospital Corporation of America, in June, just before the share price dropped following a bad earnings report. So dispirited are Republicans that some worry about losing control of the House--a danger that once seemed remote. We're looking in the crystal ball. We're moving into an area where we don't know what will happen, says deputy whip Tom Cole, a conservative from Oklahoma. With a switch of only 15 seats required to end their majority, Cole is anxious that the party may have to contest as many as 100 tight races if the winds arraying against it turn into a national backlash like the one that ended the Democrats' 40-year reign in 1994. Having seen how the Democrats failed to galvanize their voters in that campaign, Republicans say the chief goal in rewriting their strategy for the fall will be to re-energize their base. The plan taking shape calls for a robust conservative agenda through next spring, including a tax-reform package. That move would allow Republicans to pivot back to issues like education tax credits that would appeal more to moderates as the elections approach. As for DeLay, his struggles appear likely to consume him for many months. He has launched what amounts to a major political campaign to convince supporters that the indictment is flimsy and he is a victim of a political smear. DeLay pointed to Democrats' vow to use G.O.P. ethics as a campaign issue, and supporters noted criticism of Earle in Texas for speaking in May to a $100,000 fund raiser for a Democratic political action committee (PAC). But DeLay has produced no evidence Earle conspired with Democrats in Washington. While it's true that Earle and DeLay have been locked in a complicated war of Texas-size egos for years, the charges against DeLay are fairly simple. During the 2002 elections, a committee DeLay founded to support conservative politicians--Texans for a Republican Majority, or TRMPAC--allegedly accepted $155,000 in corporate donations and then included that in a check for $190,000 to the Republican National Committee, which then routed a similar amount to seven Texas legislative candidates. DeLay's lawyers say the transactions were separate and that the PAC accepted money from both individuals and corporations. The contribution helped produce six wins that were crucial to DeLay's political ambitions in Washington because they resulted in a Republican majority in the state legislature, which redrew congressional district lines and helped add five more Republicans to the state's congressional delegation. If convicted, DeLay faces up to two years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. DeLay has done his best to paint the D.A. as a Democratic loose cannon. But Earle, 63, points out that of the 15 public officials he has prosecuted, 12 have been fellow Democrats. Texas law makes it a felony for corporations and labor unions to contribute money to political campaigns, Earle tells TIME. My job is to prosecute felonies. I'm doing my job. The grand jury foreman, William Gibson, 76, insists that this was not one of those rubber-stamp deals. Ronnie Earle did not indict Mr. DeLay. Twelve people on that grand jury voted to indict. If DeLay has cause for hope, it may be that Earle has been more successful convicting minor figures than major ones. The majority leader has put together a legal team headed by Dick DeGuerin, who handed Earle the most spectacular failure of his career: a 1994 misconduct case against former state treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison that Earle was forced to drop on the first day of trial. Hutchison is now the state's senior Senator. There are those who predict that DeLay will be able to balance mounting a defense with pulling strings behind the scenes in the House. But whereas he had been accustomed to just stepping downstairs to the majority leader's spacious suite of Capitol offices after a House vote, dusk last Thursday afternoon found DeLay outside on the Capitol Plaza, waiting at a traffic light to return to his office in the Cannon House Office Building across the street. Just like any other Congressman.

I hope we never forget that brave American soldiers fought and died for our freedom to post on this very board!  Here's hoping that we all still have the same freedoms in the USA next year this time as we have today. 

My flag is hanging proudly.  I hope you all have a wonderful day.

To see that a couple of people will stand up with me.  This nation was founded on the principals of Christianity.  We kicked God out of our schools, courthouses and everywhere else a few thought He should go and look where we are now.  Kids killing each other in the schools, etc. etc. Now I hear they want to take "In God We trust" off of our money.  And my further opinion.........these radical evangelicals who think that anyone who says, "Lord, Lord" must be a Bible thumping Christian, have done more to turn people away from God than the other way around.   No wonder we're in such a mess. 

For anyone who wants to jump on this as "religion"....well don't.  I don't propose that anyone who doesn't want to turn to God be forced to do so but I do believe that it is high time that Christians.....or those who follow Christ (or try to)... stand up and be heard.  AND I believe when enough of us do that, God will lead us.  Again....this is my opinion and I'm not talking about "religion," I'm talking about those of us who have accepted Jesus Christ as our Savoir.  He gave us a choice to accept Him or reject Him and I don't believe he would want us to cram him down anyone's throat who does not want to be a believer.

I'm off my stump now.

I must admit that I am not happy about Barrack Obama winning.  I do still have some fear because it seems like there is so much about him that we do not know.  I still worry about his inexperience as well.

However, I hope he is successful as president.  I don't wish him to fail because if he fails.....we all fail.  I hope he is a wonderful president who can bring us out of our crisis.  We will just have to wait and see. 

Just because I'm worried and scared of what is to come....doesn't mean I won't give him a chance.  I will give him a chance and hope and pray that I was wrong about him all along, but until he proves to me that I am wrong....I'm still naturally going to be worried, nervous, scared, etc.  That doesn't make me unpatriotic or a radical republican.  It makes me human.