And if you expect ME to condemn it for YOU, I would not stoop so low.

But I guess someone in your position needs ANY morsel of news that might allow you to get even with all of us prescient lefties. We tried.

He is stationed at Walter Reed Hospital were he is recovering from wounds and had a leg removed in 11/06. He'll be there another year for further medical treatment.

Wow. Spitting on a one-legged war vet. Oh well, they knew he couldn't chase them down.

The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president's priorities.

This time, a substantiated one. This time, in the face of the whole country, and of the world.

NYT, January 30, 2007
Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation

    WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 -- President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

    In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president's priorities.
    ...
    Peter L. Strauss, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the executive order "achieves a major increase in White House control over domestic government."

    "Having lost control of Congress," Mr. Strauss said, "the president is doing what he can to increase his control of the executive branch."

Waxman seeks climate inquiry evidence
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer 21 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The Democratic chairman of a House panel examining the government's response to climate change said Tuesday there is evidence that senior Bush administration officials sought repeatedly "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming."

Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said he and the top Republican on his oversight committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, have sought documents from the administration on climate policy, but repeatedly been rebuffed.

"The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security," said Waxman, opening the hearing. "We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."

"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," Waxman said.

Evidence of a large settlement full of houses dating back to 2,600 BC has been discovered near the ancient stone monument of Stonehenge in southwest England, scientists said on Tuesday.

Of all the articulate, enlightened voices of the last two hundred years, Mead 'just happened' on the words of an Imperial Wizard to tell us more about Andrew Jackson than Jackson could tell us himself.

It's funny that when a Fox News "personality" says something like this, the same sense of indignant outrage is conspicuously lacking.

"I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider," Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said during a hearing on Congress' war powers amid an increasingly harsh debate over Iraq war policy. "The decider is a shared and joint responsibility," Specter said.

Oh dear.....

Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) on the House floor today:

In his new book What's Left?, Cohen, a columnist for the Observer and London Evening Standard, examines why the left abandoned its allies -- in Iraq, in particular -- and began making excuses for the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein. According to Cohen, the left is motivated by one overwhelming factor: an all-consuming hatred for America. "The apparent commitment to help Iraqis [overcome a murderous, fascist regime] vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy," Cohen writes.

The left's anti-Americanism is compounded by an irrational loathing of Western democratic values. In the past the left might hold that the lack of women's rights in the Third World was a horrible injustice that demanded feminists' divine intervention. Indeed until recently feminists were scurrying all over the globe, holding righteous conferences that bemoaned the lack of women's rights in the Third World and Arab states, not to mention the existence of forced marriages, honor-killings, marital rape, the murder of homosexuals and the banning of education for women.

But once the Baathists and militant Islamists became America's enemies, the left turned its ire toward George W. Bush and its attention to protesting the war and to perceived hate crimes against Muslims in the West. Liberals demanded that Bush and Blair be impeached and Donald Rumsfeld be hauled into the dock for war crimes. A few went so far as to defend forced marriages, restrictions on the movement and education of women, the forced wearing of the burka, etc., on the grounds that these were the legitimate customs of an authentic, traditional culture, a tradition equally as valid as the West's imperialist, patriarchic, racist culture. Women's rights were put on the backburner or forgotten. Betrayal is the word Cohen uses time and again. "It was somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and ideas, as long as they aren't European or American reactionary movements and ideas," he writes. "This delusion is everywhere now. It lies behind the extreme form of multiculturalism we have in this country."

All of this is spot on to me, and I think even more so when I consider that none of the regulars here can answer me when I ask what they will be willing to give up if we have to negotiate with the radical moslems.

After you've refuted the same things over and over and over ad nauseum from him for months on end and watched him ignore the refutations and flatly deny facts you present to him and deflect away from topics and move goal posts and make blanket condemnations of peoples and races without ever doing it explicitly but with insinuation and innuendo, you'll start to read between the lines of his posts.

... and the questions he asks have been answered for him repeatedly (and ignored by him) by myself and by many others over the past few years so often that he leaves no doubt that he does not ask with any honest intention of reasonable discussion, and is here only to disengenuously troll, and for no other reason, IMO.

That disengenuous, as well as his performance in this thread today (which is far from unusual for him), is why I also said yesterday that:

...it should be clear after this thread, if it was not before. PPJ is not worth engaging. He refuses absolutely to have an honest or sensical discussions. And he does it on purpose. Not because he is incapable or does not understand fact or logic.

On purpose.

Joshua Sparling, (b. 1981- ) is a Private First Class in the U.S. Army from Port Huron, Michigan, who was wounded in the War in Iraq. In December 2005, while recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Sparling received what he thought was a Christmas card, which turned out to be anonymous hate mail expressing the wish that Sparling would die. Sparling underwent multiple surgeries to treat his wounds. Media coverage of the story triggered an outpouring of over 20,000 cards and gifts to wounded soldiers at Walter Reed.

The comode issue is that the comodes in prisons, per the demands of the Moslem prsioners, are facing the wrong way in relationship to the directions the prisioners want to pray.

Naturally they demand that the British tax payer have the comodes positioned to suit Sharia law.

The MN case is simple. Some of, perhaps all, of the Moslem taxi drivers are refusing to carry passengers with alcohol or dogs. Now cabs are common carriers and all should operate under the same rules. But the Moslems are demanding they be excepted because of Sharia law.

At what point do you think we should say:

America has only allowed U.S. entry to 466 Iraqis since the beginning of this war -- while the UN reports that nearly 3.4 million have fled Iraq to escape the violence and are refugees practically everywhere except the United States.
...

Baghdad in January 2007 has still not reached the point of Saigon in April 1975. If the Ford administration could quickly save 130,000 people amid the tidal wave of a full-scale military defeat, surely the Bush administration can save 20,000, or more, from Iraq.

...in 2006, the U.S. provided $400,000 to support U.N. refugee resettlement efforts, a figure it proposes to increase to $500,000 this year. (If you divide $500,000 by the 3.4 million Iraqi refugees, you get a commitment of about 14 cents per refugee.

...
America is spending 14 cents per refugee in this war of choice?

This kind of bugetary ugliness is exactly what makes sure we lose the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East.

PARIS: Former U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton said in an interview published in France that the United States has "no strategic interest" in a united Iraq.
...
"We did a disservice to Iraqis by depriving them of political leaders," Bolton was quoted as saying, adding that the Coalition Provisional Authority that initially ran Iraq allowed terrorists to regroup. Bolton was speaking in English, and the interview was published in French. An English-language copy of the interview was not available.

Bolton suggested in the interview that the United States shouldn't necessarily keep Iraq from splitting up.

Four years after the United States invaded Iraq, in part to transform the Middle East, Iran is ascendant, many in the region view the Americans in retreat, and Arab countries, their own feelings of weakness accentuated, are awash in sharpening sectarian currents that many blame the United States for exacerbating.
...
"The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East," said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic. "There is one thing important about the ascendance of Iran here. It does not reflect a real change in Iranian capabilities, economic or political. It's more a reflection of the failures on the part of the U.S. and its Arab allies in the region."

Added Eyal Zisser, head of the Middle Eastern and African Studies Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel: "After the whole investment in democracy in the region, the West is losing, and Iran is winning."

"paranoid, arrogant, and now, thankfully, frightened Vice President of the United States."

NYT, January 30, 2007
Europe Resists U.S. Push to Curb Iran Ties

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 -- European governments are resisting Bush administration demands that they curtail support for exports to Iran and that they block transactions and freeze assets of some Iranian companies, officials on both sides say. The resistance threatens to open a new rift between Europe and the United States over Iran.
...
Several European officials said in interviews that they believe that the United States and Saudi Arabia have an unwritten deal to keep oil production up, and prices down, to further squeeze Iran, which is dependent on oil for its economic solvency. No official has confirmed that such a deal exists.

At the end of the day you have no solid position, thinking that everything is negotiable and that surely we can reason with the radicals.

Yet we when I ask you what you are willing to negotiate away you have no answer.

You better think of a couple. Because if we pull out of Iraq and become isolated that is exactly what we will be doing in a few years.

How do I know this? Because it is already started.
You have agreed that the Moslem cab drivers don't have to follow the rules and laws that conflict with their religious law, and that England must make special provision for their Moslem prisoners.

This is the under-the-wire hate speech/propaganda that Ive been refering to when I refer to the underlying bigotry (and, I believe, crypto racism)
that pokerputz has been getting away with here for the last few years.

You don't claim to be morally superior, just intellectually. Hmmm. Nice claim. As a member of the Left I believe you must support the demonstrations that supposedly are aimed at getting us out of Iraq because people are getting killed.

That has to be a moral position in your mind, and the minds of those who protested.

So you say that everything is not negotiable. Okay. If you don't believe that, what is your motives for opposing the WOT? We are being attacked. The options are surrender, negotiate or fight. Can I put you down for surrender?

This is not a matter of criminal justice. We have real organizations planning and implementing attacks on the US and western Europe in general.

Since you claim to be intellectually superior I wonder why you claim to not be able to read or hear what the radical Moslems are doing. Based on that, I find your claim spurious.

Once we have established the precedent that the cab drivers don't have to follow the rules, what's next?  As to the result, I am hopeful they will be soundly rebuffed. But based on the inability of the Left to see the problem this could bring, I am far from certain.

BTW - What civil right is violated when a Moslem cab driver is told that he must follow the same rules as all cab drivers?

If you tell me that his civil rights are being violated, then I will tell you that since the rules he doesn't have to follow are rules established by government, then you must agree that a school district has the right to establish a school for whites only.

Or that an airline pilot can ignore the FAA rules regarding drinking and flying.

All in all DA, you remain stuck in the belief that all is equal and nothing is better than the other. Wonderful for setting around the campfire and singing, but when you are dealing with people who will kill you just because you are not Moslem and might oppose them, I think a more rigorous examination of how we should respond to them is in order.

What's wrong with this guy, other than being a nut case. And why is he heading the World Bank?

 Molly Ivins passed away this afternoon at her home.  We send our condolences to family and friends, and a whole lot of love to Molly.

In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by "truly impressive amounts of beer," landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.

She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town "that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David."

 But the paper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, "If his I.Q. slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day," many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech "probably sounded better in the original German."

worth a read

On Tuesday, the administration stepped up its inflammatory rhetoric.  US officials said Iranians may have trained attackers who killed five Americans in Karbala on January 20.  They also implicated the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by Moktada al-Sadr.  It's very interesting that the New York Times characterized the focus on Iran and the Mahdi Army as "convenient from the point of view of the Bush administration."

Investigators were stumped at how the attackers, who wore American-style uniforms, secured forged US identity cards and American-style M-4 rifles, and used stun grenades like those used only by US forces.  They are also confounded at the way the attackers' convoy of S.U.V.'s gave the impression that it was American and slipped through Iraqi checkpoints.  Wednesday's article in the Times cites a theory that "a Western mercenary group" may have been involved.  In the past the US government used the CIA to covertly overthrow governments, such as Iran's in 1953 and Chile's in 1973.  Could mercenaries now be doing the Bush administration's dirty work?