Ramblings and Opinons of an old man!
Simple site to log thoughts on current events and activity. Please feel free to give your comments.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea demanded Wednesday that the United States apologize for designating the communist state as an "outpost of tyranny" and it threatened to resume long-range missile tests.
However, the North also held out the possibility of returning to nuclear disarmament talks if Washington agrees to coexist with the communist country.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Gunmen in Baghdad shot and killed a judge working for the Iraqi special tribunal set up to try Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants, Interior Ministry officials said on Wednesday
LOS ANGELES - A British Airways jet continued on an 11-hour flight to London after losing one of its four engines shortly after taking off from Los Angeles International Airport, officials said.You can read the story here and see the video here.
Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman released this statement:
But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.
Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.
And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.
Senator Byrd's invocation of Hitler's Germany in discussing the duty of U.S. Senators to advise and provide consent on judicial nominees is reprehensible and beyond the pale. While members of the Senate are free to agree and disagree on the issues, this poisonous rhetoric only serves to illustrate the desperation and weakness of Senator Byrd's positionSenator Byrd also invoked Hollywood by saying "In 1939, one of the most famous American movies of all time, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," hit the box office". Well Senator Byrd the filibuster was originally designed to work like "Mr. Smith's" stand in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- which is no longer the case best described by Mr. Limbaugh:
The filibuster used to mean that you had to go to the floor and you had to stand there and you had to talk the whole time you were filibustering. It could be on anything. You could debate this. You know who holds the record for the longest filibuster without going to the bathroom? Strom Thurmond. I forget how many hours but it's like 16 or 18 hours he stood on the Senate floor and filibustered something without breaking. You can't break it.
But that's not a filibuster anymore. All somebody wants to filibuster has to do is say, "Hey, guess what? I'm filibustering yew," and, bam! Debate stops, and it needs 60 votes to stop it. There are no filibusters anymore.
African American Republicans in the state are calling for the resignation of Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean for comments they say are racially insensitive.
Mississippi Republican Executive Committee member Charles Evers said Dean should apologize and step down.
[...]
Evers stood among eight black Republican party members, making his comments at the Capitol Rotunda.
He said The former Democratic presidential candidate owes an apology to not only blacks but to America as well.
Charles evers said, "Ask the Democratic party do the same thing to Dean that Republicans and other Democrats did to Senator Lott. Ask him to step down, because he's the wrong man for the position." [Read more here]
Syrian opposition figures Tuesday hailed the fall of the Damascus-backed government in Beirut under the weight of mass street protests as a possible catalyst for democratic change in their own country.Let's hope it remains peaceful! (Hat tip: Instapundit.com)
[...]
"A Syrian withdrawal is inevitable. History is on the move and nobody can halt its progress," said Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay. He said Lebanon was now playing the role of "engine for change" in the region.
"I welcome this promising democratic change which will have a contagious effect on the Syrian hinterland and be of benefit for the Syrian and Lebanese peoples," said Amiralay.
"You've got to reject Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd," DLC CEO Al From said in an interview about how the Democratic Party should rebuild after 2004. From argued that the anti-war Moore and MoveOn have hurt the party on national security, the issue which he says the party needs to make "central to our cause." Rank-and-file Democrats "are more like us than MoveOn," which From called a group of "elites, people who sit in their basements all the time and play on their computers." [Story here](Hat tip: David Limbaugh)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hundreds of protesters waving Lebanese flags returned to central Beirut Tuesday to demand Syria leave Lebanon as the United States and France offered to help the country hold free elections.
LONDON (Reuters) - Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates will be awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth Wednesday for his outstanding contribution to enterprise.
Gates, the world's wealthiest man, will receive the award from the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
He will become a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an honor that dates back to 1917, although monarchs have been creating knights for hundreds of years.
BERKELEY, Calif. - Berkeley students aren't getting written homework assignments because teachers are refusing to grade work on their own time after two years with no pay raise.
So far, a black history event had to be canceled and parents had to staff a middle-school science fair because teachers are sticking strictly to the hours they're contracted to work
As thousands of Arabs demonstrated for freedom and democracy in Beirut and Cairo last week, and the desperate dictators of Syria and Egypt squirmed under domestic and international pressure, it was hard not to wonder whether the regional transformation that the Bush administration hoped would be touched off by its invasion of Iraq is, however tentatively, beginning to happen.
Those who have declared the war an irretrievable catastrophe have been gloating for at least a year over the supposed puncturing of what they portray as President Bush's fanciful illusion that democracy would take root in Iraq and spread through the region. They may yet be proved right. But how, then, to explain the tens of thousands who marched through Beirut last Monday carrying red and white roses and scarves -- the colors of what they call the "independence intifada" -- and calling for "freedom, independence and sovereignty" from neighboring Syria? Or the hundreds of Egyptian protesters who gathered that same day at Cairo University, in defiance of thousands of police officers, to chant the slogan of "kifaya," or "enough," at 76-year-old President Hosni Mubarak? [Read more here]
Some of Dan Rather's best-known CBS colleagues say they don't watch the embattled anchor's "CBS Nightly News."
"He's not as easy to watch as [Peter] Jennings or [Tom] Brokaw," said "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace in this week's The New Yorker magazine.
"He's uptight and occasionally contrived. ... It's his style, and it's been a very effective style. God knows, I believe him. But I don't find him as satisfying to watch," Wallace said.
Legendary anchor Walter Cronkite, who recommended Rather for a job years ago, told the magazine he preferred watching Brokaw - who retired last year - because Rather looked like he was "showboating" - playing the part of a reporter on TV. [Story here]
The idea that the Democrats would just sulk on the side and basically put them in a situation where they only succeed if the country fails--that, to me, is as dumb as the day is long.Glad to see a man that only months ago was saying that victory in Iraq was impossible is now echoing some of the same opinions conservatives have.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In the deadliest single insurgent attack of the Iraq war, a suicide car bombing killed 125 people Monday in Hilla where police recruits were waiting to get physicals, Iraqi government and health officials said.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami, under popular pressure after the assassination of an ex-prime minister, said Monday his government was resigning.More news here.
"Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead," Karami told parliament in Beirut.
And concluding his backyard speech with a litany of Democratic values, he [Howard Dean] added: "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." [Article here]On the brighter side; "hate talk" like this will continue to drive support for the Republican candidates… I have stated before that I truly believe we [United States] need at a minimum a two party political system - however, the democrats are destroying themselves from within and I predicted will continue loosing seats rendering their opinions moot; IMO this would be bad for the country, but they will not learn.
