Steve Schacher

Well, it's not from any bias, it's from my own judgement, unless we are now to remove the word judgement from the lexicon and replace it with bias. However, I was a bit tongue-in-cheek with my conspiracy theory, which is why I called it my conspiracy theory (which doesn't require evidence, as all good conspiracy theories don't). As far as fear-mongering goes, there is good cause for it. We were attacked by brutal people who don't mind taking civilians captive and beheading them. That indicates a foe who doesn't go by the past rules of engagement. Past administrations were faced with attacks as well, but chose to ignore them or treat them as police actions. Remember, there was the first WTC bombing, the embassy bombings, the barracks bombings, the USS Cole bombing. These events should have been considered acts of war, but weren't. And, it wasn't President Bush who turned the military on its own people in the first year of his administration (reportedly the motive for Timothy McVeigh's attack on the anniversary date a few years later), leading some to question his judgement. Let's not also forget the repeated claims in Congress and the White House in 1998 and on about bin Laden and Hussein. So, I think that it can be said that there was plenty of fear-mongering going on, just of a different kind. Regarding assassination, I'm not thinking the lone-gunman kind, I'm thinking the large-scale bomb kind. How close does an assassin have to get to a candidate with a suitcase nuke or dirty bomb? The thrust of the question was of crippling the USA civilly, if rumors of 20 bombs already here are true. What would happen to an election if, say, five majore cities were hit within a week of the election, or one of the candidates was injured in an attack? I've always thought that bin Laden was killed in the attack on Tora Bora. To be fair, I also thought that Hussein was killed in the shock-and-awe attack on the first night of the Iraq war, too. I still think that bin Laden is dead, if not from the attack then from his kidney ailment. One of the people filmed with him on the day after 9/11 surrendered today to Saudis. I wonder why? Probably, because he is 1) out of the loop, and 2) sick and useless. I bet the first question that he's asked is "When was the last time you personally met with bin Laden?" I suspect that his answer will be "At Tora Bora." My opinion of the polls right now is that they are soft. I believe that the polls will break out soon. My belief is that the Kerry support is weak and is only being propped up by a duplicitous media that can only do so much with biased reporting. I'm looking at indicators such as the turnout for the Fahrenheit 911 vs The Passion movies; the slight movement in African-American polling (17% feel that Bush deserves re-election, a startling number that should be at about 5%); the fact that much of the basis for media bashing is being slowly discredited, most recently the Wilson-Plame-Niger Yellowcake story and the "Bush Lied" stories. In short, I fully expect the elections to proceed as scheduled. I don't mind a little "devils advocate" planning for worst-case scenarios, though. That kind of stuff shouldn't be leaked, however, because it only feeds into partisan agendas even if the intentions are right.

Well, it's not from any bias, it's from my own judgement, unless we are now to remove the word judgement from the lexicon and replace it with bias. However, I was a bit tongue-in-cheek with my conspiracy theory, which is why I called it my conspiracy theory (which doesn't require evidence, as all good conspiracy theories don't). As far as fear-mongering goes, there is good cause for it. We were attacked by brutal people who don't mind taking civilians captive and beheading them. That indicates a foe who doesn't go by the past rules of engagement. Past administrations were faced with attacks as well, but chose to ignore them or treat them as police actions. Remember, there was the first WTC bombing, the embassy bombings, the barracks bombings, the USS Cole bombing. These events should have been considered acts of war, but weren't. And, it wasn't President Bush who turned the military on its own people in the first year of his administration (reportedly the motive for Timothy McVeigh's attack on the anniversary date a few years later), leading some to question his judgement. Let's not also forget the repeated claims in Congress and the White House in 1998 and on about bin Laden and Hussein. So, I think that it can be said that there was plenty of fear-mongering going on, just of a different kind. Regarding assassination, I'm not thinking the lone-gunman kind, I'm thinking the large-scale bomb kind. How close does an assassin have to get to a candidate with a suitcase nuke or dirty bomb? The thrust of the question was of crippling the USA civilly, if rumors of 20 bombs already here are true. What would happen to an election if, say, five majore cities were hit within a week of the election, or one of the candidates was injured in an attack? I've always thought that bin Laden was killed in the attack on Tora Bora. To be fair, I also thought that Hussein was killed in the shock-and-awe attack on the first night of the Iraq war, too. I still think that bin Laden is dead, if not from the attack then from his kidney ailment. One of the people filmed with him on the day after 9/11 surrendered today to Saudis. I wonder why? Probably, because he is 1) out of the loop, and 2) sick and useless. I bet the first question that he's asked is "When was the last time you personally met with bin Laden?" I suspect that his answer will be "At Tora Bora." My opinion of the polls right now is that they are soft. I believe that the polls will break out soon. My belief is that the Kerry support is weak and is only being propped up by a duplicitous media that can only do so much with biased reporting. I'm looking at indicators such as the turnout for the Fahrenheit 911 vs The Passion movies; the slight movement in African-American polling (17% feel that Bush deserves re-election, a startling number that should be at about 5%); the fact that much of the basis for media bashing is being slowly discredited, most recently the Wilson-Plame-Niger Yellowcake story and the "Bush Lied" stories. In short, I fully expect the elections to proceed as scheduled. I don't mind a little "devils advocate" planning for worst-case scenarios, though. That kind of stuff shouldn't be leaked, however, because it only feeds into partisan agendas even if the intentions are right.

High Bias "Mainstream" reporters aren't just liberal-- They're fanatical, by BY ORSON SCOTT CARD. This contains some nice examples, with explanation, of how bias works in reporting. quote:When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future. Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing? Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer. It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage). I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News. So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News. But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger. So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news? One recent morning--the Sunday before Memorial Day--I picked up the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the wire services. In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror." Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right? Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point. The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it. This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically. Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs." Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media. The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt. Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why? First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids. Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness. In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it. But let me go on. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word terrorist. Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story). Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America. That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on? This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us. Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In the Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Mr. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news." In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him. After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"? Mr. Tillard is first quoted as saying that "Cosby 'could absolutely have' gone even further," and though slavery and Jim Crow had hurt African-Americans, "at the end of the day, we have got to turn the tide." But then Mr. Tillard is quoted as explaining that the real danger of Mr. Cosby's remarks is that white people (i.e., racists) will "seize upon that and try to castigate the African-American community. The conservatives and liberals are far too quick to seize upon a statement and say to the rest of us, 'See, see, it's not us, it's you.' What they have not wanted to acknowledge is that there are still legacies of slavery." How is this biased? In this editorial-masquerading-as-news, Ms. Hajela is providing us with a "clincher" that tells us what we are supposed to learn from all this: that it would be a bad thing for Americans to let the racists off the hook by telling blacks that they are causing some of their own problems. Harmless? Sure. In fact, I agree with Ms. Hajela's editorial. But it was in the news pages, and it was not news, and it was not impartial. It was shaped and designed solely to cause readers to reach a certain opinion. Nobody was quoted as saying, "Cosby was absolutely right, it's ridiculous to keep complaining about things that are completely under our own control. We can teach our children to learn standard English and get a good education. We can teach our children not to become criminals, and can hold them responsible for their actions when they do commit crimes, instead of blaming racism." Ultimately, both the "pro" and "con" quotes said the same thing: Mr. Cosby had a point, but he shouldn't say it openly because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Very PC. Don't we all feel better now? Then there's the half-page tie-in to the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," with the headline "Could It Really Happen?" The answer, buried deep in the story, is that of course it couldn't. Geochemist Wallace Broecker, who is the most-quoted source, is paraphrased only in the final paragraph as saying "Hollywood's idea of 'abrupt' is much swifter than nature's, however. Climate shifts unfold over years and decades--not in two reels, said Broecker." This is as vague a way of saying "What this movie actually shows is scientific nonsense" as you could possibly imagine. The bulk of the article--especially the crucial first paragraphs and the large-type inset, which are all that most people ever read--say quite a different thing. In answer to the question "could the climate really go bonkers, just like that?" the answer in the article was "Maybe. That was the consensus among researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leading center for climate studies." The next paragraph includes a quote from the observatory's director, G. Michael Purdy: "This is not fantasy. It's happened before. It's well documented." Which quote will leave the clearest impression in the readers' minds? The fact is, what Mr. Purdy was saying was "not fantasy" and has "happened before" is Manhattan being covered in ice. That was during the Ice Age. It didn't happen in one big storm. And it wasn't caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Furthermore, any institution calling itself an "earth observatory" has a built-in bias. They want to wrap themselves in the much more fact-based science of astronomy, but this isn't an observatory as most of us understand it, it's a group of scientists who have gathered together specifically because they already are true believers in a certain set of viewpoints about the human impact on the environment. And the large-type inset absolutely treats global warming as a fact (it is still only a suspicion, by rational standards) and ends with this statement, attributed to no one: "Scientists believe this is probably due to man-made 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere." Which scientists? Are there scientists who disagree? These matters are not even addressed. The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda. Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing whether human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing or preventing disaster, mostly because we don't yet understand the causes of the natural cycles that lead to ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. So at this point, there is zero scientific basis for action. There is only the quasireligious premise that any human change to nature is dangerous and bad. Therefore, if human activities produce gases that might cause a disaster, then we can't afford to wait until the connection is actually proven. We must stop emitting those gases right now. What they don't tell you is that the only way they are proposing to stop emitting those gases is to have such a drastic change in the activities of Western civilization that it might well lead to devastating impoverishment, and probably to famine and a catastrophic drop in the human population. But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe." This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.) The fact is that Mr. Broecker is an important scientist, and his model of the "conveyor belt" of warm water in the Atlantic provides a plausible explanation for how ice-age climate changes might happen and why they seem to be restricted to the northern hemisphere, at least in the most recent ice-age events. But the article in the paper was not science or even respectable science reporting. It was designed as propaganda to convince readers that smart people all agree that global warming can cause an ice age like the one depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," unless we make the radical changes required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that true believers claim (but cannot prove) would prevent this disaster. If the evidence of global warming were a report of burglars operating in your neighborhood, there's enough of it to cause you to check that your doors and windows are locked--but the true believers want you to respond by boarding up your house and moving to another state. In every case of bias I just cited, the writers would almost certainly be outraged at my accusation that they were doing anything other than reporting the facts as clearly and fairly as possible. It doesn't occur to them that they are biased because they live in a box filled with people who share exactly the same bias. But that's how we human beings create our working definition of sanity--someone who shares the same worldview as his neighbors is "sane," and those who don't are crazy. The left-wing news media live in a tiny village of people who all think (or pretend to think) exactly alike. Therefore, to them any reporter or media outlet that rejects their premises must be insane or dishonest, and instead of seeking to refute them with actual evidence, they merely call them names and accuse them of venal motives. The fact remains that on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get television reportage that gives us at least two sides of every important issue. On all the other TV news outlets--and "mainstream" newspapers--we mostly get coverage that is hopelessly biased. The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane. Keep in mind that I found these egregious examples of bias in a single issue of a single newspaper, randomly chosen. I could do the same thing with any national news broadcast or with any paper in America except the occasional paper that still has a toehold on reality. I wrote this essay for a newspaper that is also biased. The only difference--and it's all the difference in the world--is that the Rhinoceros Times admits that it's a conservative paper and reports events through conservative eyes. Likewise for this Web site. Fox News Channel, on the other hand, claims to have only one bias--it is definitely pro-American--and it presents all the facts and every viewpoint and leaves the decision up to the viewer. Imagine if these news stories had been written from that perspective. They would be barely recognizable--and some of them would not have been written at all. What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.

Thank you!! Thank you!! I was looking for this yesterday ever since seeing the clip on Special Report last night. I only glanced at the address, but couldn't find it. It was hysterical.

Thank you!! Thank you!! I was looking for this yesterday ever since seeing the clip on Special Report last night. I only glanced at the address, but couldn't find it. It was hysterical.

This is the same speculation that occurred in 1997-1998 when the President Clinton signed executive orders transferring power to FEMA (under Janet Reno's Justice Department) should a disaster occur. Back then, it was under the guise of a calamity due to Y2K. Still, the same conspiracy theories of an "October Surprise" resulted, but never happened. An interesting question left unanswered still is, what would happen if there were a MAJOR attack -- not an Amtrack explosion that kills 150 people, but, say, simultaneous explosions of dirty bombs in NYC, LA, SF, DC, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, etc.? Or, what would happen if one of the candidates were assassinated just weeks before the election? The last time we saw something like that was in 1968 when Robert Kennedy was killed. With Kennedy, though, he was still only a primary candidate. The actual party nominee had not been chosen yet. Now, for my own conspiracy theory, I would suggest that if we do wind up postponing the election, it will be at the request of the Democrats, moreso because their candidate is losing badly in the polls and want to buy more time than because of a Bush power-grab.

This is the same speculation that occurred in 1997-1998 when the President Clinton signed executive orders transferring power to FEMA (under Janet Reno's Justice Department) should a disaster occur. Back then, it was under the guise of a calamity due to Y2K. Still, the same conspiracy theories of an "October Surprise" resulted, but never happened. An interesting question left unanswered still is, what would happen if there were a MAJOR attack -- not an Amtrack explosion that kills 150 people, but, say, simultaneous explosions of dirty bombs in NYC, LA, SF, DC, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, etc.? Or, what would happen if one of the candidates were assassinated just weeks before the election? The last time we saw something like that was in 1968 when Robert Kennedy was killed. With Kennedy, though, he was still only a primary candidate. The actual party nominee had not been chosen yet. Now, for my own conspiracy theory, I would suggest that if we do wind up postponing the election, it will be at the request of the Democrats, moreso because their candidate is losing badly in the polls and want to buy more time than because of a Bush power-grab.

The tearjerker, by Mark Steyn. quote:'We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does. I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp). Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister. Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm". You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him. In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent. Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him." Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he is the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college. Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turned-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu." Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat? Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc. Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour. "She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, 'I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me." The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects. The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks. In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers. Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans. For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate. It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness. Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous. In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times. Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.

The tearjerker, by Mark Steyn. quote:'We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does. I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp). Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister. Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm". You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him. In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent. Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him." Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he is the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college. Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turned-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu." Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat? Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc. Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour. "She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, 'I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me." The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects. The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks. In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers. Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans. For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate. It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness. Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous. In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times. Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.

It think it will matter in subtle ways. The media is just now starting to report on Edwards' past. Since both Kerry and Edwards are multi-multi-millionaires, their fortunes will be scrutinized. We already know how Kerry married into his fortune. We also know that the Kerry's don't want to release their tax returns, especially now that the estimate of Teresa's wealth has been doubled from $500MM to $1 Billion. Kerry is also trying to run on the populist platform of being for "the little guy," and is hoping to leverage Edwards' message of "two Americas." Which brings us to Edwards. Edwards ran on a platform of coming from poor roots (his father was a mill-worker, as he keeps reminding us). However, Edwards made his fortune on the tobacco settlement and on cerebral palsy malpractice suits when he was a trial lawyer, earning $24MM in just four years. The attack against Edwards will be that he is responsible for (or at least representative of) what is wrong with health care in this country, and why poor people can't get access to good medical treatment. The attack will be that nuisance malpractice suits based on junk science are 1) driving up health care costs because of malpractice insurance, and 2) driving away doctors who won't pay or can't afford high malpractice insurance, leaving the poor with no alternatives. This will put Kerry/Edwards in an uncomfortable position of defending Edwards past actions while also explaining how it has not hurt health care overall. They will also have to tiptoe around the trial lawyer lobby, which is solidly in the Democrat camp.

It think it will matter in subtle ways. The media is just now starting to report on Edwards' past. Since both Kerry and Edwards are multi-multi-millionaires, their fortunes will be scrutinized. We already know how Kerry married into his fortune. We also know that the Kerry's don't want to release their tax returns, especially now that the estimate of Teresa's wealth has been doubled from $500MM to $1 Billion. Kerry is also trying to run on the populist platform of being for "the little guy," and is hoping to leverage Edwards' message of "two Americas." Which brings us to Edwards. Edwards ran on a platform of coming from poor roots (his father was a mill-worker, as he keeps reminding us). However, Edwards made his fortune on the tobacco settlement and on cerebral palsy malpractice suits when he was a trial lawyer, earning $24MM in just four years. The attack against Edwards will be that he is responsible for (or at least representative of) what is wrong with health care in this country, and why poor people can't get access to good medical treatment. The attack will be that nuisance malpractice suits based on junk science are 1) driving up health care costs because of malpractice insurance, and 2) driving away doctors who won't pay or can't afford high malpractice insurance, leaving the poor with no alternatives. This will put Kerry/Edwards in an uncomfortable position of defending Edwards past actions while also explaining how it has not hurt health care overall. They will also have to tiptoe around the trial lawyer lobby, which is solidly in the Democrat camp.

Here's a right-wing bomb, tossed out by conservative bomb-thrower Ann Coulter. In Desperate Move, Kerry Adopts Puppy quote:I guess with John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running mate, he really does want to stand up for all Americans, from those worth only $60 million to those worth in excess of $800 million. In one of the many stratagems Democrats have developed to avoid telling people what they believe, all Edwards wants to talk about is his cracker-barrel humble origins story. We're supposed to swoon over his "life story," as the flacks say, which apparently consists of the amazing fact that ... his father was a millworker! That's right up there with "Clinton's stepdad was a drunk" and "Ted Kennedy's dad was a womanizing bootlegger" on my inspirational life-stories meter. In fact, I'm immediately renouncing my university degrees and going to work for the post office just to give my future children a shot at having a "life story," should they decide to run for president someday. What is so amazing about Edwards' father being a millworker? That's at least an honorable occupation -- as opposed to being a trial lawyer. True, Edwards made more money than his father did. I assume strippers make more money than their alcoholic fathers who abandoned them did, too. This isn't a story of progress; it's a story of devolution. Despite the overwrought claims of Edwards' dazzling legal skills, winning jury verdicts in personal injury cases has nothing to do with legal talent and everything to do with getting the right cases -- unless "talent" is taken to mean "having absolutely no shame." Edwards specialized in babies with cerebral palsy whom he claimed would have been spared the affliction if only the doctors had immediately performed Caesarean sections. As a result of such lawsuits, there are now more than four times as many Caesarean sections as there were in 1970. But curiously, there has been no change in the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy. As The New York Times reported: "Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins." All those Caesareans have, however, increased the mother's risk of death, hemorrhage, infection, pulmonary embolism and Mendelson's syndrome. In addition, the "little guys" Edwards claims to represent are having a lot more trouble finding doctors to deliver their babies these days as obstetricians leave the practice rather than pay malpractice insurance in excess of $100,000 a year. In one of Edwards' silver-tongued arguments to the jury on behalf of a girl born with cerebral palsy, he claimed he was channeling the unborn baby girl, Jennifer Campbell, who was speaking to the jurors through him: "She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5:30, she said, 'I need out.'" She's saying, "My lawyer needs a new Jaguar ... " "She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now -- I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you." Well, tell her to pipe down, would you? I'm trying to hear the evidence in a malpractice lawsuit. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to read this without laughing. What is this guy, a tent-show preacher? An off-the-strip Las Vegas lounge psychic couldn't get away with this routine. Is Edwards able to channel any children right before an abortionist's fork is plunged into their tiny skulls? Why can't he hear those babies saying, "Let me live! Stop spraying this saline solution all over me!" Edwards must experience interference in channeling the voices of babies about to be aborted. Their liberal mothers' hands seem to muffle those voices. And may we ask what the pre-born Jennifer Campbell thinks about war with Iraq? North Korea? Marginal tax rates? If Miss Cleo here is going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, I think the voters are entitled to know that. While making himself fabulously rich by taking a one-third cut of his multimillion-dollar verdicts coaxed out of juries with junk science and maudlin performances, Edwards has the audacity to claim, "I was more than just their lawyer; I cared about them. Their cause was my cause." If he cared so deeply, how about keeping just 10 percent of the multimillion-dollar jury awards, rather than a third? In fact, as long as these Democrats are so eager to raise the taxes of "the rich," how about a 90 percent tax on contingency fees? For someone who didn't care about the money, it's interesting that Edwards avoided cases in which the baby died during delivery. Evidently, jury awards average only about $500,000 when the babies die, and there is no disabled child to parade before the jury. Edwards was one of the leading opponents of a bill in the North Carolina Legislature that would have established a fund for all babies born with cerebral palsy. So instead of all disabled babies in North Carolina being compensated equitably, only a few will win the jury lottery -- one-third of which will go to trial lawyers like Edwards, who insists he doesn't care about the money. Despite the now-disproved junk science theory about C-sections preventing cerebral palsy that Edwards peddled in the channeling case, the jury awarded Edwards' client a record-breaking $6.5 million. This is the essence of the modern Democratic Party, polished to perfection by Bill Clinton: They are willing to insult the intelligence of 49 percent of the people if they think they can fool 51 percent of the people. So while Michael Moore, Al Franken, George Soros, Crazy Al Gore and the rest of the characters from the climactic devil-worshipping scene in "Rosemary's Baby" provide the muscle for the Kerry campaign, Kerry picks a pretty-boy milquetoast as his running mate, narrowly edging out a puppy for the spot. Just don't ask the Democrats what they believe. Edwards' father was a millworker, and that's all you need to know.

Here's a right-wing bomb, tossed out by conservative bomb-thrower Ann Coulter. In Desperate Move, Kerry Adopts Puppy quote:I guess with John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running mate, he really does want to stand up for all Americans, from those worth only $60 million to those worth in excess of $800 million. In one of the many stratagems Democrats have developed to avoid telling people what they believe, all Edwards wants to talk about is his cracker-barrel humble origins story. We're supposed to swoon over his "life story," as the flacks say, which apparently consists of the amazing fact that ... his father was a millworker! That's right up there with "Clinton's stepdad was a drunk" and "Ted Kennedy's dad was a womanizing bootlegger" on my inspirational life-stories meter. In fact, I'm immediately renouncing my university degrees and going to work for the post office just to give my future children a shot at having a "life story," should they decide to run for president someday. What is so amazing about Edwards' father being a millworker? That's at least an honorable occupation -- as opposed to being a trial lawyer. True, Edwards made more money than his father did. I assume strippers make more money than their alcoholic fathers who abandoned them did, too. This isn't a story of progress; it's a story of devolution. Despite the overwrought claims of Edwards' dazzling legal skills, winning jury verdicts in personal injury cases has nothing to do with legal talent and everything to do with getting the right cases -- unless "talent" is taken to mean "having absolutely no shame." Edwards specialized in babies with cerebral palsy whom he claimed would have been spared the affliction if only the doctors had immediately performed Caesarean sections. As a result of such lawsuits, there are now more than four times as many Caesarean sections as there were in 1970. But curiously, there has been no change in the rate of babies born with cerebral palsy. As The New York Times reported: "Studies indicate that in most cases, the disorder is caused by fetal brain injury long before labor begins." All those Caesareans have, however, increased the mother's risk of death, hemorrhage, infection, pulmonary embolism and Mendelson's syndrome. In addition, the "little guys" Edwards claims to represent are having a lot more trouble finding doctors to deliver their babies these days as obstetricians leave the practice rather than pay malpractice insurance in excess of $100,000 a year. In one of Edwards' silver-tongued arguments to the jury on behalf of a girl born with cerebral palsy, he claimed he was channeling the unborn baby girl, Jennifer Campbell, who was speaking to the jurors through him: "She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5:30, she said, 'I need out.'" She's saying, "My lawyer needs a new Jaguar ... " "She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now -- I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you." Well, tell her to pipe down, would you? I'm trying to hear the evidence in a malpractice lawsuit. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to read this without laughing. What is this guy, a tent-show preacher? An off-the-strip Las Vegas lounge psychic couldn't get away with this routine. Is Edwards able to channel any children right before an abortionist's fork is plunged into their tiny skulls? Why can't he hear those babies saying, "Let me live! Stop spraying this saline solution all over me!" Edwards must experience interference in channeling the voices of babies about to be aborted. Their liberal mothers' hands seem to muffle those voices. And may we ask what the pre-born Jennifer Campbell thinks about war with Iraq? North Korea? Marginal tax rates? If Miss Cleo here is going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, I think the voters are entitled to know that. While making himself fabulously rich by taking a one-third cut of his multimillion-dollar verdicts coaxed out of juries with junk science and maudlin performances, Edwards has the audacity to claim, "I was more than just their lawyer; I cared about them. Their cause was my cause." If he cared so deeply, how about keeping just 10 percent of the multimillion-dollar jury awards, rather than a third? In fact, as long as these Democrats are so eager to raise the taxes of "the rich," how about a 90 percent tax on contingency fees? For someone who didn't care about the money, it's interesting that Edwards avoided cases in which the baby died during delivery. Evidently, jury awards average only about $500,000 when the babies die, and there is no disabled child to parade before the jury. Edwards was one of the leading opponents of a bill in the North Carolina Legislature that would have established a fund for all babies born with cerebral palsy. So instead of all disabled babies in North Carolina being compensated equitably, only a few will win the jury lottery -- one-third of which will go to trial lawyers like Edwards, who insists he doesn't care about the money. Despite the now-disproved junk science theory about C-sections preventing cerebral palsy that Edwards peddled in the channeling case, the jury awarded Edwards' client a record-breaking $6.5 million. This is the essence of the modern Democratic Party, polished to perfection by Bill Clinton: They are willing to insult the intelligence of 49 percent of the people if they think they can fool 51 percent of the people. So while Michael Moore, Al Franken, George Soros, Crazy Al Gore and the rest of the characters from the climactic devil-worshipping scene in "Rosemary's Baby" provide the muscle for the Kerry campaign, Kerry picks a pretty-boy milquetoast as his running mate, narrowly edging out a puppy for the spot. Just don't ask the Democrats what they believe. Edwards' father was a millworker, and that's all you need to know.

quote:Anyway, I'm not a card carrying Rebulican but I can't with a clear conscience say that - from what I know - that Bush lied about the war. I just think he is purely uninformed and, well, clueless?To make it personal for a moment, you could say that Bush's CIA was like your Take 2. Both organizations treated their leader improperly, and left the leader holding the crap in the end.

quote:Anyway, I'm not a card carrying Rebulican but I can't with a clear conscience say that - from what I know - that Bush lied about the war. I just think he is purely uninformed and, well, clueless?To make it personal for a moment, you could say that Bush's CIA was like your Take 2. Both organizations treated their leader improperly, and left the leader holding the crap in the end.

quote:Thought you might want to take a look at this Project ECHELONThat's old news. If you're not aware of it, also check out its twin project Carnivore.

quote:Thought you might want to take a look at this Project ECHELONThat's old news. If you're not aware of it, also check out its twin project Carnivore.

Ah, the sweet smell of success...

From the mouths of Left-leaning news organizations... From CNN in 1999 - Bin Laden reportedly leaves Afghanistan, whereabouts unknown: quote:Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday. Bin Laden's whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified. The report of his departure comes just days after the Taliban Islamic militia, which rules most of Afghanistan, took away his satellite telephone and banned bin Laden from speaking to the media. Taliban authorities in the militia's southern stronghold of Kandahar refused to either confirm or deny reports that bin Laden had left the country. The Taliban have called bin Laden their honored guest, a friend who helped the Afghan resistance fight invading Soviet soldiers in the 1980s. The Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad, Saeed-ur-Rehman Haqqani, said he had not been told of bin Laden's departure, "but if it has happened, it will be a good thing." Saddam Hussein offered asylum Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.From The Guardian UK in 1999 - Saddam link to Bin Laden: Terror chief 'offered asylum' in Iraq? US says dealings step up danger of chemical weapons attacks quote:Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.If only they would research their own archives before writing their current stories...

From the mouths of Left-leaning news organizations... From CNN in 1999 - Bin Laden reportedly leaves Afghanistan, whereabouts unknown: quote:Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday. Bin Laden's whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified. The report of his departure comes just days after the Taliban Islamic militia, which rules most of Afghanistan, took away his satellite telephone and banned bin Laden from speaking to the media. Taliban authorities in the militia's southern stronghold of Kandahar refused to either confirm or deny reports that bin Laden had left the country. The Taliban have called bin Laden their honored guest, a friend who helped the Afghan resistance fight invading Soviet soldiers in the 1980s. The Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad, Saeed-ur-Rehman Haqqani, said he had not been told of bin Laden's departure, "but if it has happened, it will be a good thing." Saddam Hussein offered asylum Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.From The Guardian UK in 1999 - Saddam link to Bin Laden: Terror chief 'offered asylum' in Iraq? US says dealings step up danger of chemical weapons attacks quote:Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.If only they would research their own archives before writing their current stories...

quote:THIS is an organization of people which has declared AMERICA an ENEMY. An Enemy to ALL muslims,and which have dedicated their lives(unto death)to FREE the middle east from our control and influence. America isn't the problem; extreme Islamic fundamentalism is the problem. How do you explain the Muslim incursion into Kashmir and the resulting Pakistan-India conflict, or the Al Qaeda spin-off Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines fighting the Christians there, or the terrorists of Chechnya? What's the Middle East connection to those hostilities?

quote:THIS is an organization of people which has declared AMERICA an ENEMY. An Enemy to ALL muslims,and which have dedicated their lives(unto death)to FREE the middle east from our control and influence. America isn't the problem; extreme Islamic fundamentalism is the problem. How do you explain the Muslim incursion into Kashmir and the resulting Pakistan-India conflict, or the Al Qaeda spin-off Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines fighting the Christians there, or the terrorists of Chechnya? What's the Middle East connection to those hostilities?

From my favorite columnist Mark Steyn, here's his take on the movie (he's a conservative columnist and a movie critic): The importance of being Michael Moore quote:Excited about Fahrenheit 9/11? It's the Palme d'Or-winning and soon-to-be Oscar-winning documentary from average blue-collar multi-millionaire Michael Moore, and it opens in Britain next week. I saw it over the weekend on my side of the Atlantic, with an audience comprised wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates. I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo Bush is. They split their sides during the patriotic ballad ÔÇô eagles soaring, etc ÔÇô composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister US Attorney-General. Moore reveals ÔÇô and if you feel that knowing the plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph ÔÇô that Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I hadn't heard that before, had you? Once Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For example, he's very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar. He's also very mocking of the absurdities of post-9/11 airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding in order to demonstrate the liquid wasn't anything incendiary. As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Bush would have a hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn't like to point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by reading yours truly. I mentioned the breast-milk incident in this very space on August 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back to Saudi in a Spectator column from November 2002, and I've been urging the dismantling of the kingdom ÔÇô Washington's out-of-control Frankensaud monster ÔÇô for almost three years now, since within a month of 9/11. So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade in arms. But the trouble with Fahrenheit 9/11 is that you don't come away thinking about the Saudis or America's useless bureaucracy, you come away laughing at Bush. And, if feeling snobbishly superior to the President isn't your bag, what's left is an incoherent bore. Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run US policy. Because of Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush, the Taliban got toppled. Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan. But by now Moore's moved on to pointing out that Bush's Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline. But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis. "Connecting the dots" is all very well, but not when you've got more dots in your picture than Seurat. Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California ÔÇô these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!" The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection". The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning. So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 ÔÇô ie, the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings. Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real ******* for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an ******* as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush. I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so na├»ve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis Bush. Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a headdress and he looks like King Fahd's brother. All I'm saying is connect the dots.

From my favorite columnist Mark Steyn, here's his take on the movie (he's a conservative columnist and a movie critic): The importance of being Michael Moore quote:Excited about Fahrenheit 9/11? It's the Palme d'Or-winning and soon-to-be Oscar-winning documentary from average blue-collar multi-millionaire Michael Moore, and it opens in Britain next week. I saw it over the weekend on my side of the Atlantic, with an audience comprised wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates. I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo Bush is. They split their sides during the patriotic ballad ÔÇô eagles soaring, etc ÔÇô composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister US Attorney-General. Moore reveals ÔÇô and if you feel that knowing the plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph ÔÇô that Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I hadn't heard that before, had you? Once Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For example, he's very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar. He's also very mocking of the absurdities of post-9/11 airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding in order to demonstrate the liquid wasn't anything incendiary. As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Bush would have a hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn't like to point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by reading yours truly. I mentioned the breast-milk incident in this very space on August 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back to Saudi in a Spectator column from November 2002, and I've been urging the dismantling of the kingdom ÔÇô Washington's out-of-control Frankensaud monster ÔÇô for almost three years now, since within a month of 9/11. So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade in arms. But the trouble with Fahrenheit 9/11 is that you don't come away thinking about the Saudis or America's useless bureaucracy, you come away laughing at Bush. And, if feeling snobbishly superior to the President isn't your bag, what's left is an incoherent bore. Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run US policy. Because of Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush, the Taliban got toppled. Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan. But by now Moore's moved on to pointing out that Bush's Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline. But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis. "Connecting the dots" is all very well, but not when you've got more dots in your picture than Seurat. Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California ÔÇô these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!" The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection". The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning. So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 ÔÇô ie, the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings. Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real ******* for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an ******* as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush. I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so na├»ve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis Bush. Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a headdress and he looks like King Fahd's brother. All I'm saying is connect the dots.

quote:I just hope our troops leave sometime before I die.Wouldn't it be something if our troops left Iraq before the left Kosovo? You do realize that we still have troops in Germany since WWII, and that was 60 years ago. We still have troops in South Korea, and that was 50 years ago. Where's the outrage over that? Actually, we're talking about pulling our troops out of Germany now, and that's becoming the source of outrage. It turns out that Germany fears the loss to their economy of our 100,000 soldiers spending their incomes in German shops and restaurants. Go figure...