Whats up with Bush?!!??

[demonsvx]

Im confused about our president King George II. He's trying too hard to get the Patriot Act aka "Police States of America" reinstated before it expires. I was watching CSPAN on some of it last night and im like WTF?? Wire taps,what books we check out of a library, lockdowns on our schools where we cant get to our children! ETC. WHAT THE HELL!! This is nuts. If this keeps up the Constitution and Bill of Rights mean diddly squat. Im so sick of these government figures dictating what we can and cant do. Hell they are supposed to work and act on our beliefs and wants not the other way around. Here in tennessee we have lost all our health care for the poor and most of our jobs are overseas now. I hope that Jeb Bush does not run in 2008 as I have enough of the family that "does such great things for America"
WHATEVER

[Shadow248]

Originally Posted by demonsvx

Im confused about our president King George II. He's trying too hard to get the Patriot Act aka "Police States of America" reinstated before it expires. I was watching CSPAN on some of it last night and im like WTF?? Wire taps,what books we check out of a library, lockdowns on our schools where we cant get to our children! ETC. WHAT THE HELL!! This is nuts. If this keeps up the Constitution and Bill of Rights mean diddly squat. Im so sick of these government figures dictating what we can and cant do. Hell they are supposed to work and act on our beliefs and wants not the other way around. Here in tennessee we have lost all our health care for the poor and most of our jobs are overseas now. I hope that Jeb Bush does not run in 2008 as I have enough of the family that "does such great things for America"
WHATEVER

But i'm sure you were right there with the first to whine about the government's failures leading up to 9/11. You can't have it all buddy. Our super comfortable, invincible way of life is a thing of the past. We now must consider the same dangers that everyone else does. Sorry if that inconveniences you. You want the government to do something to keep a repeat of 9/11 from happening. Now they do it, and you complain...am I getting warm?

[Noir]

Originally Posted by Shadow248

But i'm sure you were right there with the first to whine about the government's failures leading up to 9/11. You can't have it all buddy. Our super comfortable, uninvincible way of life is a thing of the past. We now must consider the same dangers that everyone else does. Sorry if that inconveniences you. You want the government to do something to keep a repeat of 9/11 from happening. Now they do it, and you complain...am I getting warm?

I never whined about the failures leading up to 9/11. Give me the old life back when I could carry my SpyderCo on flights. I would have killed me a few terrorists right after I heard the flight attendents scream like a bad Steven Seagal movie.

[ensteele]

Originally Posted by Noir

I never whined about the failures leading up to 9/11. Give me the old life back when I could carry my SpyderCo on flights. I would have killed me a few terrorists right after I heard the flight attendents scream like a bad Steven Seagal movie.

Whatever.

[Landshark]

Originally Posted by Noir

I never whined about the failures leading up to 9/11. Give me the old life back when I could carry my SpyderCo on flights. I would have killed me a few terrorists right after I heard the flight attendents scream like a bad Steven Seagal movie.

i'll take their terrorist box cutters vs. my snapped temper and "kill-you-with-the-torn-off seatback-tray" anyday.


bring it on, Al-Qaeda - mess with my teh flight and you'll get to your "13 virgins" quicker than you thought........but they'll all look like Rosie O'Donnell.

[Phast SVX]

i was watching BBC the other day and realized that the real "anti-americans" were in our own coutry. If you beleive that democratics will keep us out of war, solve all our problems with the poor, then you are sadly mistaken. Democrats started our entrence in WWII, by cutting off a country in need of natural resourses using "dimplomacy" as an aid.
If you watch the BBC news you will not see any of teh bull**** the united states media spits out(and makes up as we have seen lately) but you will learn about some of the good that the president and congress is doing. The democratic party(which cant at the time figure out what they are doing wrong reguarding the last election resuslts of loosing to an unpopular republican president) spends all of their time catering to those that appeal to "after the fact" issues on everything. NO **** everything is easier to look at and say what you would do differnt the next time. everyone knows thats not how life works. If you want to get some more votes in the next election, maybe you should try to stress what IS important to you value wise, not what your opinion on what the other guy is doing wrong.

using the economic state, after a 10 year bubble of inflated valuation on tech stocks(there have been 7 such bear tech bubles since 1847 reguarding an introduction to a new technological advance) and then a sharp correction to real prices and values is not going to fool anyone. you cannot have a peak in the economic cylce withouth a trough(which, using real prices, is still high if you invested before the tech bubble in 83)
I am not someoen who takes life lighly. I devote atleast 4 hours a week to a food pantry in my town,and i live in as libral a city as you can come by. But i can not for the life of me figure out why peopel think that life is as easy for government officals on what to do as reading a book and doing waht it says . If your going to point a finger in the direction of the government you better sure as hell have more reason then what your father told you for doing it. for goodness sakes you cant make your own life work flawlessly(i cant atleast) why do you expect an entire country to be perfect? our country(and my grand father's death) has kept the entire world from harm at some point or another. Show some ****ing respect and if you have a problem with it do all of us a favor. Do something, dont just talk like some frat kid at a wop party.
well i need to sleep, thats enough
phil

[Landshark]

Originally Posted by Phast SVX

i was watching BBC the other day and realized that the real "anti-americans" were in our own coutry. If you beleive that democratics will keep us out of war, solve all our problems with the poor, then you are sadly mistaken. Democrats started our entrence in WWII, by cutting off a country in need of natural resourses using "dimplomacy" as an aid.
If you watch the BBC news you will not see any of teh bull**** the united states media spits out(and makes up as we have seen lately) but you will learn about some of the good that the president and congress is doing. The democratic party(which cant at the time figure out what they are doing wrong reguarding the last election resuslts of loosing to an unpopular republican president) spends all of their time catering to those that appeal to "after the fact" issues on everything. NO **** everything is easier to look at and say what you would do differnt the next time. everyone knows thats not how life works. If you want to get some more votes in the next election, maybe you should try to stress what IS important to you value wise, not what your opinion on what the other guy is doing wrong.

using the economic state, after a 10 year bubble of inflated valuation on tech stocks(there have been 7 such bear tech bubles since 1847 reguarding an introduction to a new technological advance) and then a sharp correction to real prices and values is not going to fool anyone. you cannot have a peak in the economic cylce withouth a trough(which, using real prices, is still high if you invested before the tech bubble in 83)
I am not someoen who takes life lighly. I devote atleast 4 hours a week to a food pantry in my town,and i live in as libral a city as you can come by. But i can not for the life of me figure out why peopel think that life is as easy for government officals on what to do as reading a book and doing waht it says . If your going to point a finger in the direction of the government you better sure as hell have more reason then what your father told you for doing it. for goodness sakes you cant make your own life work flawlessly(i cant atleast) why do you expect an entire country to be perfect? our country(and my grand father's death) has kept the entire world from harm at some point or another. Show some ****ing respect and if you have a problem with it do all of us a favor. Do something, dont just talk like some frat kid at a wop party.
well i need to sleep, thats enough
phil

the p***ification of America needs to stop . we need to end this "politically correct" B.S., and not worry about if convicted terrorists get their Quaran handled properly. our grandfathers did not willingly go to die in war to protect our freedom, so that we could worry about not offending anybody.

[UberRoo]

If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
Don't vote, it only encourages them.

I'm weary of this topic in general, so I don't particularly want to get involved in a 9-11 conversation. Somehow though, it neatly couples so many core issues that it's hard to resist turning the crank a little more.

I think everyone on both sides of the many issues can agree that gross mismanagement by our government existed prior to 9-11 and continues to exist - probably to a greater extent - today. (That, or for the conspiracy theorists out there, it's possible that behind the scenes it all makes perfect sense.)

What I'm really curious about is what really happened on those planes? Yes, a box knife is a very nasty little thing, but I would think that the prospect of certain doom might be enough to motivate Joe Traveler to take on a hijacker. Were no black boxes ever recovered from any of those flights? Does no one know what happened? I've heard endless speculation. I completely understand and agree with the sentiment about the good ol' days before a LeatherMan was a weapon of terror. I think however, that there was a reason why passengers on those planes didn't act as we all would have in hindsight. Had I been faced with death as my only alternative, I would have taken them on with a bag of peanuts and a spork. It seems probable that the passengers didn't suspect that their hijackers were on a suicide mission. Very clever of the hijackers, actually.

Regardless, I was reading something the other day about people who "go postal." The truth about these people who go on wild rampages is that they don't actually 'snap' as we commonly believe they do. Most of these folks have problems that have been festering for years and when they finally begin to manifest, usually a great deal of plotting and planning happens before they storm into wherever and start bumping people off. These are not crimes of opportunity. Gun control laws, as the most immediate example, have no effect on these people much like they have no effect on many other types criminals. I introduced this particular subject because it appears that these people have a lot in common with a conventional terrorist.

What occurred to me as I was learning about all this, was that if even only one other person had been armed in any of the several cases I read about, each event could have been greatly curtailed if not completely avoided. The same conclusion could easily be drawn about the airplanes involved in the 9-11 incident, and yet we're doing nothing to empower, let alone encourage people to take matters into their own hands and fix the situation. The laws actually seem to exacerbate it. I'm not aware of any compelling evidence that past safety measures were effective, so I'm doubtful that expanding the past, failed safety measures will have any effect. (Other than by making the direct and indirect costs of flying prohibitive and thus, even if the rate of incident were to go up, there would still be a net reduction overall.) Evidence that the laws cause problems seems more compelling than that they actually do any good. "The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble ... there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness." --- Mark Twain

It's not a very pleasant thought, especially when applied to one's self, but it can be argued that there is a price on human life. The military factors this in when they decide to launch a multimillion-dollar cruise missile that can only be used once, or send in some men who only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to train that may [or may not] be usable after the mission. It would be possible to save more lives if we were willing to spend the money and reduce the quality of our lifestyles. Fifty percent of fatal automobile injuries are from head trauma. Impact-absorbing jersey barriers for example, would certainly reduce injuries, but at a considerable cost. The wearing of helmets in cars would save many, many lives. The price on those lives? The vanity of those who don't want their hair messed up. If the value of a human life is really that low, then the cost of our nation's enhanced security is fantastically higher than the actual value in human lives that might be lost as a result of reduced security. Does anybody else see this, or am I just completely off my rocker?

Even if my math is wrong in respect to the value of human life, this still smells suspiciously like a ploy for the government to justify it's own existence. If you create a problem, or at least the perception of a problem, people will want it solved and they will applaud if it is solved or if at least they believe that it has been solved. I'm not an anarchist, and I've no illusions about the doctrine, but sometimes it has it's appeal. I think an annual decimation of government over the course of a generation would be a step in the right direction. "...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more." --- Mark Twain

I can't really say that I'd been terribly critical of our government before 9-11, nor can I say I'm terribly critical of our government now. Conspiracies notwithstanding, even in hindsight I can't criticize too strongly the government's handling of certain affairs prior to 9-11. It's in the nature of government to eventually become a monster. "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them [public offices], a rottenness begins in his conduct." --- Thomas Jefferson Quite frankly, it's no small miracle that our government functions at all. None of this is to say however, that our government is not due criticism, and a great deal of it. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing." --- Thomas Jefferson It's crucial that we relentlessly challenge our government to be better, lest it become worse!


A strange thought occurred to me as I mulled over the previous couple posts. We seem to sleep better at night if we're not just killing the enemy outright. It's as if we need to suffer too, just to prove that we believe in our cause. "Yeah, we killed a lot of them, but they killed us too." Bombing an enemy camp in the middle of the night from a safe distance while sipping hot cocoa and watching the blip move across a radar screen seems rather dastardly, but the reality is that it's much more humane for both parties than sending troops to duke it out. I guess we just need our enemies to be tangible for our own comfort before we kill them.

Human lives are the currency of war. Whether reluctant or eager, each penny spends the same.

[Royal Tiger]

As a law enforcement professional and a military reservist, it has been my experience (11 years+) that only criminals cry about rights being violated. If the FBI has nothing better to do then look up what web sites I visit, go ahead. Get a grip and grow up.

[demonsvx]

First Im not a criminal, I believe our rights are in trouble. Second I see this as a way of control and using a system to make us beleive the government can protect us .

[UberRoo]

They wouldn't be criminals if it weren't for the laws. There's a strong case to abolish illegal drug laws, The Prohibition being the best example of how these laws don't work as intended. "Me thinks thou doth protest too much." So much truth to that, but I suppose Rosa Parks was a criminal too? There are plenty of witch hunts where many people are persecuted without just cause or sometimes any cause at all. I think had it not been for several decades of cultural diversity and sensitivity education, we'd be experiencing McCarthyism at it's finest with Muslim trials much like the communist trials of our much-too-recent history. The shorter our memory becomes, the faster history repeats itself.

[Matthewmongan]

Originally Posted by PA_SVX

As a law enforcement professional and a military reservist, it has been my experience (11 years+) that only criminals cry about rights being violated. If the FBI has nothing better to do then look up what web sites I visit, go ahead. Get a grip and grow up.

rights are meaningless. what matters is what is just. of someone were to say "what your doing is unjust" it would have more reaning than "your violating my rights". were the men who wrote the constitution criminals? not from our point of view.

i think its odd when you ask a political scientist with expertiese on the middle east what needs to be done. everyone i have talked to says you cant force democricy on a populace. its counter productive and will only lead to more death (look at whats going on right now) if bush had any ability to reason at a high school level my friends wouldnt be over their dieing for this white trash's crusade.

you want to find the terrorist start looking in the white house.

[Matthewmongan]

Originally Posted by demonsvx

First Im not a criminal, I believe our rights are in trouble. Second I see this as a way of control and using a system to make us beleive the government can protect us .

if we change our way of life and limit our freedom we let the terrorist win.

[drivemusicnow]

I do find it ironic that the people (conservatives) who argue that we should accept what the gov't tells us and does are also the ones that claim to be "true Americans".

This is a bit wierd for me, seeing as how our country was based on an opposite principle.


Going with the "wearing helmets in cars" idea. what would you say if the government required you to wear a helmet? I'd like some opinions...

Think about it..

What about the "click it or Ticket" law. Its the same thing. SAME exact thing. What is the thought process behind laws like this?

As a law enforcement professional and a military reservist, it has been my experience (11 years+) that only criminals cry about rights being violated. If the FBI has nothing better to do then look up what web sites I visit, go ahead. Get a grip and grow up.

Okay, so if i walk in your house, rifle through your ****, check every website you've ever visited, find some random website that is in arabic, and arrest and detain you for a month, then release you and say, whoops, you're not a terrorist... you'd be cool with this? you could have been a terrorist though. or maybe you were a commie... we weren't sure...

[Royal Tiger]

You are victim of your own faulty logic. #1 that's not what is being done, nor does any Patriot Act allow that either. #2 I said look up, as if there were some big tracking program that kept tabs on what evrybody is doing. #3 you take paranois to the extreme to justify your weak position. #4 That the media feeds similiar paranoia should tell you something #5 the terrorist in the white house comment is stupid and juvenile, please rise above this. #6 I am in favor of everybody in America having a bar code on the arm so you could zap it with a supermarket gun and have the person's name, date of birth, address, social security number, criminal record, etc... No more John Does, no more @$$hole criminals playing games and you know what? I'd get one on my arm in a minute. #7 as for rights being violated, it's the criminal who does the violating. Remeber the Seattle world bank riots? Officers were sued by those nut jobs over excessive force. I read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in full. Being allowed to Riot isn't in there, so whatever you allowed to happen to you by being in a riot instead of leaving when told to due so 30 times by Police is on you.