Subtopic	Posts		Updated
	Archive 01	50		2001/09/12, 02:43 pm
	Archive 02	50		2001/09/21, 05:36 pm

I have never voted for a Republican. Most times I find the Democratic candidates so uninspired, that I vote for a 3rd party or I don't vote. I feel that political office, and especially the presidency, is a marketing beauty contest where the rules are based on not offending anyone, so as to create opposition. I voted for Gore because I did not like Bush's anti abortion, pro military, and pro establishment image. I feel that the Clinton sex scandal bullshit was a complete waste of time and money generated by the Republican senate leadership (Hyde etc.) cloaking themselves in the flag to appeal to voters.

When I stop to think about politicans who mattered I think of Lincoln, Churchill, and John Kennedy. I don't care if the later chased a lot of women. I remember several quotes from the above men where the jist of it was "there are no great men. from time to time an ordinary man is placed in a crisis where he reaches beyond himself and with the help of God for a brief time becomes a great man."

I hope this happens with Bush. I like what I see of Powell. In a way their job is easier than what some others have faced because they have a clear mandate and public backing like no other time in the last 60 years.

Gitano

Gitano,

My political leanings are much like yours...I did not vote for Bush and until September 11 he had lived down to my expectations....

But, your paraphrase about an ordinary man rising to the occasion in a crisis captures well Bush's performence to date...I have been particularly impressed with his deliberate attempts to build a coalition to oppose terrorism and with his methodical approach to moving troops into place & identifying specific targets rather than firing off a couple of missles aimed indiscriminately....

MEXICO LOOK OUT! BUSH IS GONNA GET YOU!

MEXICO CITY, Sept 22: Mr. Bush, please don't bomb Apatzingan. That essentially was the plea made by the mayor of a small Mexican town who evidently misheard Afghanistan as "Apatzingan".

"Mr President Bush, I swear by what I hold dearest, which is my political carreer, that Apatzingan never had any active or moral role in the bloody events at the twin towers and the Pentagon," Mayor Jorge Luis Castaneda said in a letter to the US leader.

The government-run Notimex news agency said Castaneda had already sent off the letter before aides told him Afghanistan, not Apatzingan was the likely target of US retaliatory strikes. "Well, I did send it off, just in case," Castaneda said.-AFP

Boycott Oracle Software!

Fuck You, Larry Ellison
San Jose Mercury | Submitted by: Soylent
In a major step towards a "Big Brother" state, Oracle Software has offered to sponsor National ID cards at no charge to the U.S. Government. "We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card", Larry Ellison stated on San Francisco TV. Note that this would not have stopped the WTC attacks as all terrorists were in the country legally. Apparently Ellison is willing to collaborate in taking away important civil liberties from U.S. citizens in order to promote his company. We recommend you don't buy any Oracle software, ever again.


THIS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. ONE MORE WAY FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO HARASS ORDINARY CITIZENS, WITHOUT DOING JACK SHIT TO STOP STUFF LIKE LAST WEEK'S ATTACKS.

Powerslave...thanks...I got a laugh out of your post, the first time in two weeks I have found anything to laught about! I needed that. Not as much as I need a chica con sangre caliente, but close...

EZY I did not make that up, it is on the wall street journal's website, and was reported by notimex. I assume this is some small shithole in the true back of beyond. It is fucking hilarious.

I was listening to the radio in San Diego and they were talking about this National ID card joke. It won't take long to find someone to switch cards or make counterfits. What I don't understand is why don't those Nazi polititians do it right and put the same system in that the dog pound uses to keep track of my mutt? Something like a LoJack implant. Then when the aliens have been in the country for 15 or 20 years they can petition the courts to have it turned off or removed. If the government wants to track people, all they need to do is apply for a search warrent to turn the system on and locate where the scum bags are located. Sounds like the Brave New World is alive and well in the 21st Century.

Diane Feinstein has said her staff is "in contact" with Oracle, probably to complain that it does not contain DNA info and retinal scans (both things she has proposed) This bitch was born 50 years late in the wrong country, she should have been a warden in a female concentration camp.

Agreed with you Powerslave. They could have prevented WTC without touching a hair of personal liberty and privacy. NOT ONE! All they had to do was TWO main things:

1) Make the cockpit cabin a fortress: turn it into a Brinks truck. The pilots can safely hide behind bullet-proof door and if they sees/hears trouble in the closed-circuit TV, with one touch of a button, can knock out everyone in the passenger cabin with some sort of sleeping gas.

2) For good measure send a couple of undercover air marshalls in every flight. If many feels uncomfortable with the idea of guns on airplane like I do, even if they're in the hand of authority, instead of air marshall put in "air bouncers", a couple of gorilla-type armed with truncheon.

This in addition to better baggage screening at the gate and a stricter verification for airport/airline employees should be sufficient.

Merenpapi, the airline pilot's union today proposed arming the pilots with pistols shooting fragmentation bullets, which would be quite unpleasant if they hit a terrorist but will not penetrate the airplane. I think that today it is probably safer to fly than it has been in years, and am busily booking cheap airfares for the next year.

I found the following article to be a well thought out discussion about US strategies for the war.

http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109252150.htm

While we're at it, why not put anti-aircraft missiles on top of all tall buildings?

I was wondering why we don't fly more drones
( decoys) over the suspect area, and when they are fired on use the location info to strike back.

can't be that difficult or expensive in the overall scheme of things.

Pasathai,

So, a drone accidentally flies into a building in some village, goes kaput, and we bomb the village into oblivion on the basis of losing the drone.

Am I seeing conspiracies where none exist?


An arab takes over control of a 767, utters a prayer, and deliberately crashes the airplane, killing all aboard.


November, 1999. Air Egypt.

Is there a connection with 9/11? Was it inspiration, or test?

Last week, I caught the tail end of a news interview involving a terrorist "expert". He said that we should have seen it coming because anniversary dates are meaningful to criminals bent on sending a political or religious message, ala McVeigh at Okla. City on the Waco anniversary.

According to this expert, 9/11 was the five year anniversary of a certain event meaningful to bin Laden and his supporters. I'm not postive but I gathered that he was referring to when the Talaban gained control.

Perhaps, someone more knowledgable on world politics than me (doesn't take much) knows what occurred on 9/11/96 that would make that date significant to these zealots.

I think it was the anniversary of the sentencing of the guy who tried to blow up the WTC in '93. Remember the creepy blind guy?

Actually, I believe 9/11 is the anniversary of the signing of one of the Camp David Accords.

Explorer: aren't you talking about the flight where the assigned pilot crashed the plane somewhere near Nova Scotia? That was NOT a hijacking as you implied ("arab takes control of a 767"). Inspiration, perhaps.

RickFeliz, I agree with you and believe it is very doubtful that we will see a classic use of massive military might in Afghanistan. Whatever the tone our government is setting in terms of being at war, they are still involved in a helluva lot of diplomacy and muscle flexing while they figure out just exactly how we are going to achieve our objectives. The focus is still worldwide criminal dragnets, coalition building, isolating the Taliban diplomatically, and even generating fear, desertion and rebellion among the Taliban rank and file (an army heavy with "soldiers" kidnapped into service). I wouldn't be surprised to see the re-armed and reunited Northern Coalition carry the battle against the Taliban (of course with U.S. air support), while our special forces comb the mountains digging out Bin Laden and his "forces".

There will also be a phase, whether it comes sooner or later, when we will wage conventional battle against non-capitulating sponser states (e.g. Iraq, Libya, Syria). Seems like the massive deployment will go more for that purpose than the delicate operations that everyone seems to think is the only way to go in Afghanistan.

Just saw a clip on CNN of a Taliban freak in Afganistan beating a woman with a stick because she showed her face in public. They also hang people in public and leave the bodies hanging for all to view. This also was in the video.

It's also against Taliban law to teach females to read.

Too bad we didn't side with the Russians in the 80s.

I've calmed down and no longer advocate nuking Kabul. It would be much more rational to capture these maggots, chop of their dicks and let them bleed to death.

Explorer8939



So, a drone accidentally flies into a building in some village, goes kaput,
and we bomb the village into oblivion on the basis of losing the drone.


Not quite what I was trying to point out.

I hear on the news that one ( or more) of our servelence drones was shot down a while back.

I would think with the feedback from the drone, gps info ect. they would be able to fugure out where the firepower came from. at the least it would be worth investigating.

I don't think too many villagers would be able to shoot down a drone.

Lets hope while we are wating to decide what action to take they ( the bad guys) don't use the time wisely.

ONE YEAR AGO

I woke up very early that morning because I couldn't sleep (a rare occurrence for me!). Since I had time on my hands before work, I sat in meditation for a few minutes, and then rather uncharacteristically decided to check out the news on the internet.

Oddly the report, "Both Twin Towers Destroyed", or some such, popped up as I perused the other news items. I didn't give it much of a thought (I was still tired), and figured that the wind or something had blown down antennas, or something trivial like that.

When I finally clicked on the link, I saw the devastation, and turned on my television. First, I called my brother, who had also, it turned out, had arisen early. (We had spent a week together with family in NYC for a wedding three weeks earlier, and snapped an odd picture--Twin Brothers In Front of the Twin Towers). Then I called my parents, then tried to call everybody I was close to in NYC....

The day was surreal. I spoke to lots of people, some who ended up losing friends and relatives... Some who were oddly unmoved by the events... Some, from the middle east, who were worried that they would become the object of scorn... Some children, who were terrified, in part because of the news, and in part because of their parents' reactions...

That night, some friends from NYC area gathered in La Jolla to process the days events. We were simultaneously totally exhausted and wide awake. We were unsure of what would come next, and were still worried our missing friends... I felt ready for peace and ready for battle--whatever that meant. You only live once.

I knew one person that was killed in the WTC. Didn't know him well, but once had lunch with him in San Diego. He managed a mutual fund called the Alger Fund.

His brother was interviewed on CNNFN this morning.

Funny, how sad I feel thinking about this guy and his family who I barely knew.

I guess it just puts a face on the tragedy.

Need to go South. I wonder what the line will be like tonight?

That morning I woke up and decided to switch on CNN for morning news. I usually don't watch TV in the morning, so this was unusual. As I turned it on, they broke into coverage of the first plane crash into tower one. I watched the entire event unfold after that. I am the IT director for my company, so I changed all of our automated greetings for our 10 offices to reflect that we would be closed for the day due to the terrorist attacks on America. I still have that voice-recording from last year saved, it was weird when I listened to it the other day.

One of the many events that I remember of a year ago was the church service in DC after the attack that all the gov officials attended.

The Marine Corps band (I think) played very solemnly The Battle Hymn of the Republic, I thought it was fantastic. Perfect choice.

Let's keep rolling.

wanna debate?