Never in the history of the US has the US flag ever been hated or loved more.

And this should bother me because...

Never in the history of the US has the US flag ever been hated or loved more.

And this should bother me because...

it's a statement. I really don't care if you love it or hate it, as my original post suggested.

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Never in the history of the US has the US flag ever been hated or loved more.

I would just settle for something in the middle like "respected."

Agreed.

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The Simpson/Regan/Fox travesty

EUGENE ROBINSON
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 17, 2006

O.J. Simpson's forthcoming book, “If I Did It,” could launch a profitable new series for publisher Judith Regan and her parent company, Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Let me suggest that she follow up with another snuff book, maybe “If I Shot My Wife in the Head” by Robert Blake, and then diversify into non-capital crimes with “If I Molested All Those Kids” by Michael Jackson.

Anyone who thinks I'm kidding probably clings to the illusion that Regan and the Fox television network have a morsel, a crumb, a mote, an iota of residual shame in what's left of their souls. Sorry, but the evidence shows otherwise.

Of course, many people thought the evidence showed that Simpson was guilty. But Johnnie Cochran isn't around anymore, so maybe Regan and Fox will be showered with the opprobrium they deserve for letting the Juice do this booty-shaking end zone dance on the graves of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Suppose you were put on trial for butchering your ex-wife and her lover in a blood-soaked frenzy – not that you'd ever do such a thing, of course, but going hypothetical is all the rage – and a brilliant lawyer managed to get you acquitted, despite copious evidence of your guilt. Wouldn't you withdraw permanently into quiet obscurity? Whether your life was a burning hell of remorse or a sunny stroll up manicured fairways, wouldn't you want to live it out of the public eye? Maybe, say, raise horses in deepest Paraguay?

Instead, Simpson has interrupted his lonely, relentless search for “the real killer” to write and promote a new book, “If I Did It,” that reportedly gives a detailed, gory, ostensibly fictional account of the murders he says he didn't commit.

I'm sure he needs the money. It's not as if he's going to be invited into the “Monday Night Football” booth anytime soon, or offered a cameo in the next Ben Stiller movie. But this abomination goes beyond exploitation of a brutal crime for financial gain. This is pathological.

Only a narcissist of the first order would be compelled to revisit the scene of the crime and walk us through the butchery, knowing that no one would take his use of “if” or “would have” as anything but a mocking formality – knowing that everyone would read the book as a true confession of his sins. Only a textbook narcissist would have such a warped need to bask once again in the limelight.

Memo to the Juice: Please go away. And take Regan with you. A former “reporter” for the National Enquirer, Regan became a sensation in the publishing world by satisfying humanity's bottomless appetite for slickly packaged trash. Her imprint, ReganBooks, is a division of HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. “If I Did It” will be featured on Fox, also owned by Murdoch, for two nights later this month (after NBC, to its credit, turned Regan down). Fox plans to air a two-night “interview” in which Regan converses with Simpson about his contribution to literature and his theoretical prowess as a psycho killer. It is no coincidence that the “interview” comes amid the November sweeps period, when ratings translate into cold cash.

For those keeping score, that's money for Simpson from the book, money for Regan from the book, and lots of money for Murdoch, both from the book and the expected big TV ratings.

It has been reported that Regan paid Simpson $3.5 million for “If I Did It,” though she declines to reveal how much she shelled out. Whatever the amount, how does Simpson hope to keep and spend that money without having to surrender it to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, who won a $33.5 million judgment against him in civil court but have yet to collect? I have to assume that Murdoch's lawyers are too smart to engineer some dodge, like paying the money to a third party or wiring it to an offshore account. I also have to assume that somehow, whatever machinations are necessary, the Juice intends to get paid.

The saddest aspect of this travesty is that Regan knows the book will sell and Fox knows the Simpson “interview” will score huge ratings. They have studied our weaknesses and calculated that sensation always trumps honor.

Please join me in not buying the book or watching the Fox infomercial. We'll feel cleaner for it.

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me@rescam.org

Blame U.S. failures on the Iraqis

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

November 17, 2006

“A republic, if you can keep it.”
– Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, in answer to “What have we got?”

We have given the Iraqis a republic, and they do not appear able to keep it.

Americans flatter themselves that they are the root of all planetary evil. Nukes in North Korea? Poverty in Bolivia? Sectarian violence in Iraq? Breasts are beaten and fingers pointed as we try to somehow locate the root cause in America.

Our discourse on Iraq has followed the same pattern. Where did we go wrong? Too few troops? Too arrogant an occupation? Or too soft? Take your pick.

I have my own theories. In retrospect, I think we made several serious mistakes – not shooting looters, not installing an Iraqi exile government right away, and not taking out Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army in its infancy in 2004 – that greatly compromised the occupation. Nonetheless, the root problem lies with Iraqis and their political culture.

Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government.

The first was relatively easy. But Iraq's first truly democratic government turned out to be hopelessly feeble and fractured, little more than a collection of ministries handed over to various parties, militias and strongmen.

The problem is not, as we endlessly argue about, the number of American troops. Or of Iraqi troops. The problem is the allegiance of the Iraqi troops. Some serve the abstraction called Iraq. But many swear fealty to political parties, religious sects or militia leaders.

Are the Arabs intrinsically incapable of democracy, as the “realists” imply? True, there are political, historical, even religious reasons why Arabs are less prepared for democracy than, say, East Asians and Latin Americans who successfully democratized over the last several decades. But the problem here is Iraq's particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Saddam's totalitarianism.

What was left in its wake was a social desert, a dearth of the trust and goodwill and sheer human capital required for democratic governance. All that was left for the individual Iraqi to attach himself to was the mosque or clan or militia. At this earliest stage of democratic development, Iraqi national consciousness is as yet too weak and the culture of compromise too undeveloped to produce an effective government enjoying broad allegiance.

Last month, American soldiers captured a Mahdi army death squad leader in Baghdad – only to be forced to turn him loose on order of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Two weeks ago, we were ordered, again by al-Maliki, to take down the barricades we had established around Sadr City in search of another notorious death squad leader and a missing American soldier.

This is no way to conduct a war. The al-Maliki government is a failure. It is beholden to a coalition dominated by two Shiite religious parties, each armed and ambitious, at odds with each other and with the ultimate aim of a stable, modern, democratic regime.

Is this America's fault? No. It is a result of Iraq's first democratic election. The United States was not going to replace Saddam with another tyrant. We were trying to plant democracy in the heart of the Middle East as the one conceivable antidote to extremism and terror – and, in a country that is nearly two-thirds Shiite, that inevitably meant Shiite domination. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shiites would have enough sense of nation and sense of compromise to govern rather than rule. The answer is now clear: United in a dominating coalition, they do not.

Fortunately, however, the ruling Shiites do not have much internal cohesion. Just last month, two of the major Shiite religious parties that underpin the al-Maliki government engaged in savage combat against each other in Amara.

There is a glimmer of hope in this breakdown of the Shiite front. The unitary Shiite government having been proved such a failure, we should be encouraging the full breakup of the Shiite front in pursuit of a new coalition based on cross-sectarian alliances: the more moderate Shiite elements (secular and religious but excluding the poisonous al-Sadr), the Kurds, and those Sunnis who recognize their minority status but are willing to accept an important, generously offered place at the table.

Such a coalition was almost created after the latest Iraqi elections. It needs to be attempted again. One can tinker with American tactics or troop levels from today until doomsday. But unless the Iraqis can put together a government of unitary purpose and resolute action, the simple objective of this war – to leave behind a self-sustaining democratic government – is not attainable.

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me@rescam.org

Fighting the terrorist within

By Geoffrey M. Wahl; a professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, is president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

November 17, 2006

Fighting cancer bears a striking resemblance to our fight against terrorism. Cancer strikes just as randomly and unpredictably, and it causes suffering, death and great personal loss to family, friends and loved ones left behind.

Tragically, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks killed more than 2,900 people on that fateful day. On any one day, cancer kills more than 1,500 people in the United States alone – about one death per minute, or more than 564,000 Americans each year. To put this into perspective, that's about half the entire population of San Diego, and more than the entire populations of Long Beach and Las Vegas. Tragedy is too soft a word to describe this kind of devastation.

To address the war on terrorism, the nation has committed ever-increasing resources to security, surveillance and weaponry for the military. To win the war against the terrorist within known as cancer, wouldn't it be prudent to invest more of our resources to prevent cancer, and to develop effective detection methods and treatments for the 200 diseases we collectively call cancer?

As Congress prepares the nation's budget for fiscal year 2007, it is proposing to provide increased resources to fight the war on terrorism. By contrast, our lawmakers plan to cut $40 million from the National Cancer Institute. This is the wrong time to reduce our commitment to the war on cancer.

We are at a critical moment in the history of cancer research. This is a time of exciting research opportunities that hold promise for significant advances in the prevention and cure of cancer. Recent discoveries in science and technology have dramatically increased our understanding of the biological events that lead to cancer. This knowledge is ushering in a new era of “personalized medicine,” allowing us to identify people at risk for cancer long before the disease has a chance to form and to prevent the disease before it starts. We are now developing “smart” drugs that target an individual's tumor cells. These new drugs limit collateral damage to normal cells, which is the primary source of the often-intolerable side effects of standard chemotherapy.

The just released Annual Report to the Nation on Cancer, 1975-2003, reported that our risk of dying from cancer continued to drop, maintaining a trend that began in the early 1990s. Death rates have decreased for 11 of the 15 most common cancers, while cancer incidence rates remained stable. Overall, five-year cancer survival rates have also shown marked improvement, having increased from 50 percent to 66 percent (and to more than 75 percent for children) since 1971.

From an economic perspective, the federal investment in cancer research over the past 35 years amounted to about $69.3 billion, roughly $8.50 per American each year. This relatively modest sum spawned a vast new biotechnology industry that has contributed enormously to economic growth in this country. Today, there are nearly 4,000 biotechnology companies employing more than 200,000 people – in California alone, where the industry originated, there are more than 800 such companies. The growth in revenues from the biotechnology sector has been impressive, increasing from $8 billion in 1992 to more than $46 billion in 2004.

Reduced federal budgets for cancer research translate into reduced funding for promising new research ideas and a lack of career opportunities for young scientists. Over the past seven years, the success rate on grant proposals to test new ideas has fallen from 32 percent to less than 10 percent. Further significant funding lapses would discourage and force current and future generations of young researchers to look elsewhere for career opportunities. The loss of an entire generation of researchers would be a devastating setback to this rapidly evolving field, and an unacceptable loss for everyone touched by cancer.

With the passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971, President Nixon and the nation made historic commitment to wage a war against cancer. To finish that war, we need to make funding for cancer research a national priority.

Jonas Salk once said that a true measure of one's life is our legacy, and whether we will be judged by the future as “wise ancestors.” For our generation, we should be asking ourselves how much it's worth to end the fear from cancer – the terrorist within. Doing so would save millions of lives, reduce suffering, and save the nation billions of dollars in health care costs. Surely, our children and all future generations to come will judge this to be a worthy and wise legacy.

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me@rescam.org

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Account frozen...

Wag the dog :o)

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LOL, Misfit... That one is just too funny!

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https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

#Texit

Don't blame me, I voted for Johnson(L) in 2016.

Truth is dangerous... especially when it challenges those in power.

Testing 1 2 3...

>>>What I DO have a problem with is refusing to accept the culture of the U.S.

The United States has a unique culture?

Whoa knightmare, The US is an amalgam of cultures-

When Spanish is all you hear around you

I suggest you learn it- Or

You just wont know what anybody's talking about...cc

If memory serves me..... Spanish will be the most spoken language in the US by like the year 2030.

Learning from Bobby Kennedy

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

November 22, 2006

Filmmaker Emilio Estevez has said he made “Bobby” – a film about the day that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated – to introduce this unique and powerful figure to a new generation of Americans.

Glad to hear it. As a fan of RFK, I've thought for some time that an introduction was in order – and for more than one generation, in fact. Today's college freshmen were born in the late 1980s, and likely remember only two presidents: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The memory of my generation goes back a bit further, to Richard Nixon, whose resignation interrupted the cartoon hour and taught us that politicians were fallible – a lesson we're still learning.

Both of these generations would benefit from being exposed to the story of an inspirational leader who grabbed hold of the public's imagination in the 1960s and is still remembered fondly today.

They'd learn that Kennedy was both tough and compassionate – someone who, as attorney general, crusaded against the influence of organized crime in labor unions but who, as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, called upon the nation to deliver social and economic justice to the downtrodden and disconnected. They'd learn that, according to most biographers, Kennedy valued courage above all other human attributes and that he believed that those who were given much by society had a duty to give back. And they'd learn that Kennedy had, at the time of his assassination in 1968, become impatient with liberalism and the welfare state and begun – through his support of enterprise zones in urban neighborhoods – to search for new solutions to the persistent ailments of crime, illiteracy and poverty.

Think about what young people are witnessing today. Nearly four decades after that dark night in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, the Democratic Party to which Kennedy belonged is still searching for new solutions and fresh ideas and often coming up a few yards short.

So much so that the new majorities in the House and Senate have reached back to the 1930s and listed as one of their first priorities in the coming session the raising of the minimum wage. A bill proposed by RFK's brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, would raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour over a two-year period.

It's a perfectly reasonable idea. Forty hours per week at $5.15 per hour amounts to just $10,712 per year. The richest country on Earth can do better than that.

But what's troubling isn't the economics, but the politics. Rather than get a handle on where we go in the next century with issues such as globalization, Democrats are refighting the battles of the last century such as the minimum wage.

Say, maybe young people aren't the only ones who could use a refresher course on Robert Kennedy. The Democrats of today could learn a thing or two from someone many of them consider a hero.

On war: By the time he ran for president, Kennedy had become a vocal critic of the conflict in Vietnam, even though it was his older brother – President John F. Kennedy – who stepped up the presence of U.S. military advisers in Southeast Asia. Bobby didn't make excuses about being misled by bad intelligence or an administration bent on war. He admitted his initial support for the war and called it what it was: a mistake.

On sacrifice: In one oft-cited encounter, Kennedy was challenged by a college student who wanted to know who was going to pay for the growing number of social programs for the poor. Kennedy shouted back, “You are!” It's hard to imagine that today he'd help torpedo a debate about the future of Social Security out of fear that it might alienate senior citizens.

On risk: In March 1968, Kennedy traveled to Central California to support United Farm Workers President César ChÁvez as the labor leader broke a lengthy fast to draw attention to the plight of farm workers. Kennedy did so despite the conventional wisdom that farm workers didn't vote, and that growers could be powerful enemies. It's hard to conceive of Kennedy ducking immigration reform because he was afraid that his party might lose a newfound congressional majority.

You bet that Democrats have to learn from one of their own. Not that they make the best students. Many of them act as if you can't tell them anything, and that was back when they were losing elections. Imagine how much more stubborn they'll be now that they've regained their congressional majorities.

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me@rescam.org

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Reality Internet Personality