No More Tyrants, Please
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LGF: No more tyrants, please
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| However mixed or misguided our intentions were in launching this war, we are attempting, at considerable cost to ourselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.
Despite the numbers of Iraqi dead and the travesty of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgents know that we did not come to their country to rape their women or to kill innocent civilians. Every thinking person in the Muslim world understands that if our goal had been to kill Iraqis and steal their oil, millions of Iraqis would now be dead and their oil would be flowing. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on Earth, we should still expect tomorrow's paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself to bits for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women and children. The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances... ...Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism. |
| Clifford Arnebeck won’t let it go. He can’t let it go. Not, he says, while America refuses to recognize that John F. Kerry was elected president Nov. 2.
Arnebeck, a Democratic lawyer here and co-chairman of a self-styled national populist alliance, is petitioning the state’s highest court to throw out official results that favor President Bush and instead hand Ohio’s 20 electoral votes — and thus the White House — to Kerry. Or, at least, order a revote. The bid appears quixotic, to put it politely, as Bush has been officially declared the winner by 119,000 votes and Arnebeck is arguing before a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in Ohio. Nor is the Massachusetts senator helping him out, said Arnebeck. "I can’t for the life of me understand why Kerry isn’t fighting harder for this. Maybe it’s some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you’re not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck said, referring to the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members... |
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I just subscribed for LA Times for 2$ a week for A YEAR. This was after I had tried to cancel my subscrtiption ..." --reader S. "I subscribed to a full 52 weeks of Saturday and Sunday delivery to the LA Times for a $5 add-on to my Wired magazine renewal---and I didn't have to give my phone number ... " --reader C. |
| 518,000 Rush Limbaugh
469,000 Ann Coulter 368,000 Hugh Hewitt 254,000 Walter Williams 204,000 Sean Hannity 189,000 Thomas Friedman 177,000 Bill Bennett 77,000 E.J. Dionne 40,100 Alan Colmes 32,000 Thomas Oliphant (includes Tom Oliphant) |
How many similar labs exist around the world? |
...A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25 percent did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500, 42 percent could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century, and 31 percent thought Reconstruction came after World War II... ...Americans as donors and taxpayers have been exceedingly generous to our universities. Given our universities' gross betrayal of trust, Americans should rethink their generosity as well as rethink who serves on boards of trustees that, in dereliction of duty, permit universities to become hotbeds of political activism and academic fraud... |
| * OUTSIDER. Bush is an alien inside the Beltway. His election was the equivalent of getting a green card to work in Washington. He's not part of the social whirl. Nor has he made many close friends on Capitol Hill or around town. What separates him from the Washington crowd? More than anything else, it's religion... It's not a part-time, Sunday-only thing. Leave Washington and you frequently encounter people who say of the president, "He's one of us." You don't hear that in Washington. A Texas friend recently sent the president a copy of Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy. Bush read most of it and asked Sharansky to meet with him at the White House. Bush praised Sharansky for his years as a dissident in the Soviet Union. To which Sharansky replied, "Now you are the chief dissident of the world."
* PRESS-BASHER. Bush has not made peace with the press, far from it. He views most reporters as political opponents eager to pepper him with gotcha questions. In Colombia last month, he appeared before reporters with President Alvaro Uribe. Bush didn't like the first question about a scuffle two days earlier involving the Secret Service. "This is a question?" he said, and gave a curt answer. Uribe said, "Do you want to get in one more [question]?" Bush said, "That's plenty. No. Thank you," ending the press conference prematurely... |
| 7/24/2004
Warmup: 30 minutes biking 1) Three sets of Hindu pushups 2) Three sets of diamond (close-grip) pushups - super-set by moving to knees when exhausted 3) Three sets of pullups 4) Five sets of curls using chin-up bar - basically, a very short form a of a chin concentrating only on biceps |
| 12/06/2004
Warmup: 20 minutes biking 1) 125 Hindu squats 2) Set of 16-18 dive-bomber pushups, then set of 10-12 3) Set of 20-24 elevated pushups (feet on exerball, hands on floor with 1-second pause at bottom), then set of 15-18 4) Four sets of Michigan dips (brief pause at bottom and top) 5) Three sets of lat pulldowns 6) Four sets of hammer curls |
That small detail is the Iranian purchase of "huge amounts" of a metal used in the construction of nuclear weapons: Watchdog ‘bowed to pressure from Iran’ on bomb materials.
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