haha - like half the nation is planning on doing!

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Does this mean he's targeted another country to "spread freedom" to? With 74% of the American public thinking Iraq was a mistake, I'd LOVE to see him try to sell another war to this Congress, after all his lies the first time.

Having 9/11 being an inside job is only a notch or two lower than using that tragedy to promote his own personal war against Iraq, so I don't think it would surprise me.

Such bad, bad taste! Such a disrespectful man! (I forget...what are the other names he's been called by his honor-challenged haters?)

President-elect Barack Obama will host a dinner honoring Sen. John McCain, the Republican he tromped in the election, the night before his inauguration, the Presidential Inaugural Committee announced yesterday, saying the gesture demonstrates Obama's "commitment to bridging the bipartisan divide."

The dinner will be one of a series that night: Gen. Colin Powell and Vice President-elect Joe Biden also will be feted.

"In these times of great challenge and great change, leadership requires rising above the same old narrow partisanship," Obama said on the PIC Web site. "Each of these distinguished Americans has spent his life in service to his country, at each and every moment placing the interests of America before issues of political party."

Congressional leaders from both parties will attend the dinners at the National Building Museum, Union Station and the Hilton Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011001099.html

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job.

If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses � because that goes straight to the bottom line � then I hope I can help the country in some way, Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.

Brown said officials need to take inventory of what's going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, critics complained about Brown's lack of formal emergency management experience and e-mails that later surfaced showed him as out of touch with the extent of the devastation.

The lawyer admits that while he was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency mistakes were made in the response to Katrina. He also said he had been planning to quit before the hurricane hit.

Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is, he said.

Brown said companies already have expressed interested in his consulting business, Michael D. Brown LLC. He plans to run it from the Boulder area, where he lived before joining the Bush administration in 2001.

I'm doing a lot of good work with some great clients, Brown said. My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.

Copyright � 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

As an outsider, I could give you another perspective and one not nearly so dire as yours. However, I also realise that my view is slanted as I simply adore this country and Americans in general. In short, given the information at his disposal, George Bush�s decision to oust Saddam looks altogether reasonable--though, again, not necessarily right. To argue otherwise demonstrates both ignorance and bad faith. So what are we to make of the downward spiral of sectarian mayhem that is currently drawing Iraq into the abyss? The violence seems senseless to us . . . but perhaps that�s the point. Perhaps our enemies recognize that the great exploitable weakness of the American military is that, in the wake of Vietnam, the American public�s grasp of geo-politics runs only as deep as the lyrics to Bob Dylan�s �Blowing in the Wind.� This is a weakness every bit as real, and every bit as deadly, as a missile with a faulty guidance system or a tank that stalls in its tracks--and it will remain a real weakness until the American public is knocked upside the head a sufficient number of times to outgrow it. What the degeneration of the mission in Iraq indicates most profoundly is that one 9/11 was not enough to crack through the platitudes of the late 1960s--which are deeply embedded in the universities, television networks and editorial pages of major newspapers. There remains, in such circles, the delusion that the jihadists are ultimately live and let live types, that totalitarian Islam will eventually just peter out, that the principles of the European Enlightenment will simply dawn on a billion Muslims without us cramming them down their throats.This may in the end prove the deadliest error in geo-political judgment Americans have ever made. Members of the genocidally well-meaning baby-boom generation will likely go to their graves believing they �gave peace a chance,� having spared themselves the anguish of killing hundreds of thousand Muslims . . . and likely bequeathed to their children and grandchildren the anguish of killing scores of millions.

It's just a device used by the neocons to keep the attention of the stifled. They know that the repressed loonies in the county slobber over anything pertaining to sex. Just look at O'Reilly. Nearly every night he has some story about prostitutes, strip clubs, girls gone wild -- he is complaining how horrible it is, yet they always have tapes behind him of half-naked coeds grinding away. If it is so horrible, must we see the tapes over and over?

Tillman didn't talk about why he went into the service to anyone. We will have to assume that what his mother is saying is true. Has the wife spoken out? I would think if he told his deepest heart's secrets, it would be to her. She was his high school sweetheart. Here's a snippet from a Newsweek article.

He joined the service just after a honeymoon to Bora Bora with his high-school sweetheart, Marie. He and a younger brother, Kevin, slipped off to enlist in Denver, where they could avoid publicity. Kevin, who gave up a budding minor-league baseball career, remains in the Army. Pat Tillman wanted no attention, no glory, for joining the rank and file. He didn't want to be singled out from his brothers and sisters in the military, says former Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis. Tillman apparently had made a pact with his family to stay silent about his service, a promise they have kept. They have gathered to grieve inside the comfortable family home in a leafy enclave of San Jose.

His was no simple case of patriotism; Tillman was never known as a flag-waver. His agent, Frank Bauer, told reporters he had suspected that Tillman might quit to teach or to practice law like his father, Patrick Sr., but not to join the military. Snyder, his college coach, said Tillman never used the word patriotism when he explained his plans to enlist. He just seemed to think something had to be done. When players asked why he enlisted, he didn't want to talk about it. McGinnis says there were reasons Pat said he had that he didn't want to divulge, and the coach respected his view and his right to make his own path. Tillman had always been different. When he joined the pros, he rode a bicycle to practice because he didn't own a car. He refused to buy a cell phone. A sports publicist at Arizona State once described him as a surfer dude.

It seems his mother decided the pact no longer had any merit. Personally, I see another Cindy Sheehan, disobeying her son's wishes.