Michael Ramirez Editorial Cartoons
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. - Robert A. Heinlein -
"Al-Qaida is willing to attack anytime and anywhere they can do damage. They just need the opportunity," said Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian human-rights advocate who has tracked Egypt's decade-long fight against Islamist militancy.PittsburghLIVE.com
Kassem, former publisher of the English-language Cairo Times magazine, recently launched a daily Arabic-language newspaper, Al Masri Al Youm (The Egyptian Today), which endorses civil rights, globalization and peace on its editorial pages.
"I don't know if they (security officials) could have done more," he explained, "and now the damage has been done."
At least 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in Thursday night's attacks. Most victims were Israeli tourists visiting the Sinai resorts on a holiday weekend.
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"Yesterday at around 10 p.m., we heard a strong boom that sounded like loud thunder, and then 30 minutes later we saw what looked like two lighting bolts with the same boom of thunder," said Sherif El-Gumrawy, owner of the Basata resort, located between the sites of the attacks in Taba and Ras Al-Sheitan (Satan's Head).
"Terrorism has no nationality or religion -- a lot of Egyptians also died," El-Gumrawy said.
"They were women and children, civilians there on holiday," an Egyptian shopkeeper, identifying himself only as Ibrahim, said of the victims. "This is forbidden."
The family of a soldier serving overseas says their landlord told them to take down a small banner they put up in support of the man.
Isabel Seiler put the banner up two weeks ago after joining Blue Star Mothers, a support group for parents with children in the military.
The banner features one blue star, signifying her son, Christopher, who is in the Army.
Families have displayed such banners since World War I, and they stay up until their children return home safely.
But on Wednesday night, Isabel says her landlord told her to take the banner, along with a "Support the Troops" sign, down.
"I'm upset," she said. "I'm upset because I look at the other apartment units around us, and they have Kerry-Edwards signs in their windows. And I don't understand why I can't have a Blue Star banner, because it's supporting our troops.
Moderator: For Mr. Kerry: sir, may we assume from your answer then that you will place great importance on the mandates and approval of the UN, and will you make all US military action contingent upon UN approval?
Kerry: Hell no, I never said that! How dare you question my patriotism! It’s a very complex question, one that my Vietnam experience has left me well-prepared to deal with. Do you have any idea who I am, you pusillanimous serf?
Moderator: Um. Okay. For Mr. Bush: same question.
Bush: Fuck the UN. I dicked around with the UN once already, and you see what that got me: a buttload of WMDs hidden away in Syria and every terrorist and his sister’s cat’s grandmother loaded up on a pickup-truck convoy from ever’ got-damned pissant colony in the Third World and beyond to meet our boys at the Iraqi border with guns and bombs. Kofi Annan better not ever come around here askin’ me for shit, I’ll tell you that for nothin’.
Tomorrow’s MSM coverage: Ex-President Bush made a fool of himself last night by stumbling through bellicose platitude after bellicose platitude, as the dashing, tanned, articulate John Kerry sat back and let him eviscerate himself. It was pitiful.
But after Carter and Clinton, these blue-collar New Yawk hardasses felt deep down that if pressure wasn’t applied somehow, then nothing would be done, just like nothing had been done about all those other attacks that preceded—and, in fact laid the groundwork for—this one. If Gore had been President, to this day we’d still be engaged in talks—aka Kerry’s beloved “summit”—with the UN over what, if anything, to do about the Taliban. We might have launched a cruise missile or three, we might have arrested a couple of low-level AQ flunkies, and by now Gore would have moved on to the next domestic “crisis” requiring a quick and massive infusion of taxpayer money. You know it, I know it, anyone but the most dedicated Democrat knows it. And that dedicated Democrat probably knows it too—but he also knows he can’t afford to admit it.
There was a very real, palpable anger about Bush as he said what he said at Ground Zero, and I had been waiting more than a decade to hear those words and see that anger. So had you, and so had a lot of other people; we shared Bush’s anger, and we had long been angry about America’s credibility having been dragged through the post-Vietnam mud by every on-the-make Democrat with an agenda and a microphone. And in that one moment of clarity, Bush changed a lot of people’s minds about him. Some of them have since changed back, but I think that’s more a reflection on them than it is on him.
One often hears that Mr. Kerry is a flip-flopper, and there is much truth to that assertion, but there is one area in which Mr. Kerry has rarely wavered. At every opportunity, when faced with the prospect of using American force anywhere in the world, Mr. Kerry’s refrain has been constant: Retreat, withdraw, surrender.
That was his prescription in the 1960s and 1970s when America was involved in Vietnam. We couldn’t win. The North Vietnamese would never be beaten. It was a tragic mistake. Retreat. Withdraw. Surrender.
That was his prescription in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was facing down the Soviet Union on the issue of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, and John Kerry supported a "nuclear freeze". No matter that the Soviets were filling Eastern Europe with SS-20s. No matter that the KGB was directly and indirectly funding the nuclear freeze movement. Anything the Soviets objected to was too dangerous to try. Retreat. Withdraw. Surrender.
While Nicaragua was becoming a Soviet client state, with thousands of Red Army "military advisors" in the country, Kerry was jetting down to Managua for hugs and photo ops with Commandante Ortega. No, he counseled, we shouldn’t be trying to overthrow the Sandinistas. We should be trying to come to a peaceful accomodation with them. We should retreat, withdraw, surrender.
When the weapons systems that Reagan wanted to rebuild the military after a decade’s decline in the aftermath of Vietnam, Kerry was always on hand to vote against them. It was too bellicose, it cost too much money, it would make the Soviets too edgy. At nearly every turn, his counsel was the same. Retreat. Withdraw. Surrender.
In 1991, during the first Gulf War, that was his prescription as well. Let the Arab League take care of it. Let the UN Sanctions work. Let somebody else deal with Saddam. Retreat. Withdraw. Surrender.
And now that we’re embroiled there once again, he sings the same refrain, loud as ever. It’s a quagmire. Our troops are dying for a mistake, fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Elect me, and I’ll bring all our boys home. Because, I’ll do what I always do when faced with the prospect of using force to secure our safety and our interests...
Retreat. Withdraw. Surrender.
Constitution be damned. Leftists want to see some changes –– usually in the worst way. To the radical chic, individual achievement, liberty, self-government, self-determination, freedom of thought, and objective law are all hopelessly outdated and crudely primitive. They believe that American leadership is wrong and that global co-operation is the true path to peace and prosperity.
Kerry is running to finish the work he began in the early 1970s. For the Left, withdrawing from Iraq and the rest of the Middle East will mark a significant departure from world leadership. Forfeiting Iraq will complete what Vietnam started.
However, the measure, which passed by a vote of 205-194, was not expected to become law because of strong opposition in the Senate. It is part of a larger bill that passed by voice vote and would create 58 new judgeships across the nation.
Opponents said the legislation's certain death in the Senate was evidence that Republicans were more interested, in the words of Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., in providing "campaign-season cannon fodder" to their political base than passing a bill that would relieve overburdened federal courts.
Most of the 21 California Republicans in the House initially opposed the measure, and their votes would have insured its defeat. But at least 10 Californians changed their votes to "yes" after huddling on the House floor, while five Republicans maintained their opposition.
"We don't want to create a hyper-liberal court in California" by putting the court's more conservative judges in the two new circuits, said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., among the vote-switchers.
Lawmakers were reassured that the new 9th Circuit would be given seven new judgeships to dilute, in effect, what they see as its liberal leanings, Rohrabacher said.
The bill is S. 878.
Rove Rove Rove your voteOy!
Harshly ‘till they scream
Hatefully hatefully hatefully hatefully
Life is just an unending opportunity to maximize global inequities and convert the resources of the third world into profits for a thin stratum of our plutocracy and meaningless diversionary consumer products for a bloated spoonfed sheeple whose obsequience and inability to apprehend our true agenda ensures the perpetuation of injustice
A LEAKED report has exposed the extent of alleged corruption in the United Nations’ oil-for-food scheme in Iraq, identifying up to 200 individuals and companies that made profits running into hundreds of millions of pounds from it.After you're done picking your jaw up off the floor, read on, if you dare: Times Online - Sunday Times
The report largely implicates France and Russia, whom Saddam Hussein targeted as he sought support on the UN Security Council before the Iraq war. Both countries were influential voices against UN-backed action.
Mr. Carlson says he wishes his former colleague would let the story go. She clearly cared too much about "her" story of George W. Bush slacking in the National Guard. After it aired, CBS proudly proclaimed she had been working on it for five years. Mr. Rather has acknowledged that Mr. Burkett did not approach CBS News with the memos. Rather, Ms. Mapes approached him about whether he could find documents challenging Mr. Bush's military service. He quickly obliged. Ms. Mapes clearly wanted the memos to be real, and she and the CBS executives overseeing it rushed the story on air only four days after receiving all the documents--despite flashing red-lights from the document examiners they consulted.John Fund on Mary Mapes.
Mr. Carlson says that among its other sins, CBS simply didn't realize that most people don't care if Mr. Bush missed a physical while the Vietnam War was winding down more than 30 years ago. As one prominent journalist recently put it: "In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns." The man who spoke those words--at a time when John Kerry was under attack by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--was Dan Rather.
"The most gay commercial strip in D.C. is going to be wiped out, and [Mr. Williams] doesn't say anything about that," said Mr. Siegel, who is an Advisory Neighborhood Commission member for the area. "It's like a fly swatter coming down and — boom — we are gone."The Washington Times: Metropolitan - October 04, 2004
Sandy Berger, former White House National Security Advisor and key foreign policy and security advisor to Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry, hinted Wednesday that should Kerry win the U.S. presidential election in November, it was possible that the decision to reduce U.S. troops in Korea would be reconsidered.
Berger indicated once again the need for direct talks between the U.S. and North Korea to solve the North Korean nuclear issue, stressing that sitting face-to-face with North Korea was not surrender. On the contrary, he said the U.S. could take a strong position.
He said the two biggest challenges in Northeast Asia were North Korea and Taiwan, and the next U.S. president would have to focus on eliminating North Korea's nuclear weapons development project and make clear to China that the use of arms against Taiwan would not be tolerated.