>> ^SDGundamX:
I'd say there are three big reasons why the US is still in Iraq. The first is that without someone there to monitor the situation, the country would devolve into utter chaos. You think it's the wild west right now, imagine what would happen if suddenly there was zero security and the various factions could have a go at each other unrestrained. Regardless of whether going in was right or wrong, I think leaving now would just result, in the end, in even more death.

- Who the hell cares what happens there now. they're not idiots, they'll figure it out. we can't even get our economy under control so who are we to offer help on a dime we don't have?
The second reason is that Americans really don't care one way or the other. They care just about enough to b tch about it on Internet forums and that's it. You don't see masses of people walking out of their jobs or going on hunger strikes until the President recalls the troops. American citizens could shut down the country tomorrow if they really wanted the troops home. But no, most citizens' commitment to the cause goes as far as complaining and hoping their elected officials do something. Hell, the illegal immigrants held bigger demonstrations protesting the new immigration bills than any US citizens ever have protesting the war.

- Are you kidding? walking out on our jobs? What's that gonna do? Put us further into debt that's what. And hunger strike? Wow, HAHAHA. That's rich. I'm sure we've all seen PLENTY of demonstrations. You can even find a few on the sift if you'd really like to. Furthermore, this describes little about what we're still doing there. It doesn't answer any questions other that "what are we doing about it?" (and it's a ridiculous answer at that).
The final reason Americans are still there... because even if they decided to leave right this very second it would take something like a year to actually ferry all the troops and equipment out. So at the very least the US will have some sort of presence there for the next year.

- Well let's get it started now

>> ^brain:
>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Why isn't this guy the democratic nominee? WTF dems?
You might find this interesting. His ideas apparently stray pretty far from the rest of the democratic party.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008


I'm going to call bullshit on that graph because it puts Gravel on the extreme economic right. In reality, he's to the left of Kucinich on economic issues:

"
Progressive Taxes - A fair Tax

Senator Gravel's Progressive Fair Tax proposal calls for eliminating the IRS and the income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax on new products and services. To compensate for the tax on necessities, such as food, lodging, transportation and clothing, there would be a "rebate" to reimburse taxpayers. This would be paid in a monthly check from the government to all citizens. The focus on taxing new goods would also help tackle the global climate change problem.

More information available:

* Gravel2008.us: Gravel's version of the Fair Tax
* YouTube: Senator Gravel speaking about the Fair Tax
* FairTax.org: The official Fair Tax site
* Wikipedia: Fair Tax
* YouTube: Brief description of the fair tax



Healthcare

Senator Gravel advocates a universal healthcare system that provides equal medical services to all citizens, paid for by a retail sales tax (a portion of the Progressive Fair tax). Citizens would pay nothing for health benefits.

More information available:

* YouTube: Senator Gravel outlines his health care plan
* YouTube: Senator Gravel speaks to the Health Care Forum"

>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Why isn't this guy the democratic nominee? WTF dems?

You might find this interesting. His ideas apparently stray pretty far from the rest of the democratic party.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008

>> ^garmachi:
We're like a cop that shoots a kid who refused to take his hands out of his pockets "just in case" only to find out he wasn't packin'.

It's more like a dirty cop who catches a drug dealer sitting on a huge cache of drugs, and the cop kills the dealer so he can take the drugs and sell them himself.

When he files the police report, he makes up a story about thinking the punk was carrying.

It's worse than that metaphor still though, because it wasn't just one guy involved on either side. We didn't just kill Saddam, we killed his entire family, turned his house into our command center (the Green Zone), kicked his entire political party out of government, disbanded the military, and let those recently fired soldiers steal most of the weapons they'd been issued.

Then we announce we're going to hold elections. The Sunni's threaten to boycot the election, but we hold one anyway. Now there's a Shi'ia government running Iraq, because no Sunni's voted. That leaves us with a ton of pissed off Sunni's, including those fired soldiers running around, fighting to get their country back. There's also Shi'ia dissidents who don't like how this new Shi'ia government is working with the U.S. so closely.

In the midst of the chaos, we get a new Sunni terrorist cell that decides to call itself Al Qaeda. It takes them a while before they really affiliate with the Osama bin Laden run Al Qaeda, but our government conflates the two almost immediately. Listening to them now, they say the war is about fighting the spread of Communism, oops, I mean Al Qaeda and islamic extremism. This too, is just a sales job. If they cared about that, all our focus would be on Afghanistan and Pakistan, not Iraq.

Bush and the neocons want to stay despite all this, purely so we can steal their oil, and create a military ally in the region who's government owes us, because we installed them.

WMD's, Al Qaeda, and 9/11 never really figured into the war in Iraq, they were just part of the sales job.

In my district there were only 3 for Kucinich

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Why isn't this guy the democratic nominee? WTF dems?
I agree. I blame Iowa for not even giving this guy a single delegate.

>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Why isn't this guy the democratic nominee? WTF dems?

I agree. I blame Iowa for not even giving this guy a single delegate.

I guess it's for the same reason Ron Paul isn't the republican nominee

>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Why isn't this guy the democratic nominee?

>> ^complacentnation:
I still don't understand why so many people hyped Ron Paul when Dennis Kucinich was way better. Especially in terms of free market. A 'freer' market in this country would mean corporations taking shit to the next level. The government should get out of our lives but should better regulate corporate conglomerates. Not having some sort of regulation on business is practically the same thing as economic imperialism!


Probably because they did research and you didn't. What Kucinich, like any regulationist, doesn't understand is that the problems are not rooted in capitalism, but government enabled collusive activity between politicians and business. This can only happen with greater government control of the market. Maybe not with upstanding people like Kucinich, but some politician at some point who is more corruptible. So long as the regulatory power is there, it's going to happen. The idea of regulation itself depends on the person regulating being supremely unselfish and morally upstanding, and that's simply not going to be the case 90% of the time. It also asserts that government officials are prescient intellectuals who can choose the best technologies better than a market outcome. Therefore it is idealistic to expect it to work despite well-intentioned meaning and origin. In the end, all it does is raise prices and stifle innovation. Take ethanol subsidies for example. The government took money from you, and gave it to big corn conglomerates under the pretense that it knew what the best tech was better than a market outcome (that's essentially what a subsidy is). The people are poorer and less able to afford or invest in better technologies, corn-related food and livestock goes up in cost negating fuel savings, pollution stays the same since it takes as much energy to create ethanol as you get from it. Total government fuck-up.

A lot of socialist democrats today in favor of ever bigger government, they falsely blame market greed for the original depression, the cost of oil, CEO wages. I hear it all the time. It is insane to believe the housing bubble, for example, was rooted in spontaneous evolution of man becoming more greedy in the year 2000. That is nonsense. What really happened was centralized control of interest rates, under the same idealist principles which you espouse, in the form of the Federal Reserve, lead to a human being (Greenspan) politically pressured to avoid a necessary correction/recession after the last Fed-created bubble bust in 2000. Rates were forced down to 1% for an entire year, well below where the market would have had them at the time. That created a demand for housing and kept everyone spending, but do you see how that demand was artificial? All the people on Wall Street, they didn't evolve. They've always been greedy, that's what they're there for, to invest in the best sectors and benefit at the same time that their investment is ultimately benefiting us in the form of better products and services that we, the consumer, demand. If a recession was allowed to happen, though, and rates were reflective of the truth, they wouldn't have been incentivized into all that speculative and unsustainable madness. Greenspan actually vocally encouraged that "growth" for years and naturally people gravitate towards optimism and wanting to think something that great will last forever. Naturally, that attracts these ponzi schemes and shady lenders into placed they were not so commonly found before. So the socialist plank of a central bank and central economic planning enables it, and yet capitalism is blamed. Meanwhile, people are talking about giving the arsonist even more firefighting duties. Huh? You can see why we libertarian people are beside ourselves.

Greed drives innovation so long as competition is preserved and government grants no special privileges. If you accept that competition and the fear of competition leads to prices getting bid down in an effort to win the consumer of that product or service, then the last thing you want is government getting involved to erode it with managed trade like NAFTA, health care bills like the HMO act, no-bid contracts, taxpayer subsidies, etc, etc. Government is itself a monopoly, comprised largely of lawyers and very manipulative individuals who engage in some of the most outstanding and convincing propaganda you'll ever see, all the while colluding with their businessmen campaign financiers to return the favor and cause all the problems you hate so much but are utterly unwilling to blame on government enablement itself.

I still don't understand why so many people hyped Ron Paul when Dennis Kucinich was way better. Especially in terms of free market. A 'freer' market in this country would mean corporations taking shit to the next level. The government should get out of our lives but should better regulate corporate conglomerates. Not having some sort of regulation on business is practically the same thing as economic imperialism!

Ron Paul's no enemy of corporations. Libertarians say "trust the free market" to a far greater extent than the neocons do.

We should've all rallied around Dennis Kucinich, he'd have held this corporate world's feet to the fire.

At least, when he wasn't gettin' it on with his super-hot wife.

Oh my God! Its Dennis Kucinich!

deedub81 wrote:

I thought almost every politician did that.

Unfortunately most of them do because unfortunately that is what gets most of them elected. There are a few though that are consistent in what they stand for such as Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel.

It's just too bad the majority of voters go with the person that tells them what they want to hear instead of the person that tells them what they need to her.

They successfully shut out Mike Gravel from the Democrat party... now they are focusing on shutting out Dennis Kucinich. The only two candidates in the democrat party with genuine integrity that refuse to pander and are not members of the CFR are being excluded.

America is being spoon fed illegitemate partisan same old politics.

It might be a good time for a RevoLution.

I saw a UFO when I was about 7. It was in the sky, and it looked like the top of a banana fattened, with tiny, spindly legs. It was the color of concrete.

Does this make me insane? I definitely saw something, although my brain may have embellished it a little. Why are we even arguing about this? Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO. So did Jimmy Carter. So did Ronald Wilson Reagan. This issue is completely irrelevant to the election.

i cannot vouch for these books, but I would say there IS information out there pertaining to chemtrails.

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Chemtrails Confirmed
by W Thomas
Book Description
Chemtrails are reported all around the planet and this is the first research record to verify what Airline Pilots, Police Officers, U.S. Marines, Air Traffic Controllers and Tanker Crews are reporting. This book will reveal the scientist who are working n the project, Congressman who oversaw "America's exotic weapons" project and the details so you can understand the Chemtrail project

About the Author
William Thomas is an independent journalist. His previous works include Scorched Earth: The Military's War Against the Enviroment and Bringing the War Home, a book which shows the suppression of the inoculations of troops in the first Gulf war and the diseased troops brining home the diseases to their family and friends.

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Contrails, Chemtrails & Artificial Clouds
by Dave Dahl

The author, a Navy veteran and former university teacher, carefully explains how these toxic stratospheric clouds absorb and re-emit solar energy, warming the stratosphere; and greenhouse gases introduced by jets into the upper atmosphere cause additional heat to be trapped, preventing its escape into space and ultimately warming the Earth, altering our climate. His presentation is objective, informative and makes excellent use of aerial photography, charts and graphs. This science in chewable bite size paragraphs and bullet points is an outstanding introduction for anyone interested in advocating on behalf of cleaner air and slowing global warming (and that should be all of us). It gives readers an excellent overview, glossary of terms and an extensive listing of web sites that are additional recourses.

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“H. R. 2977 of the 107th Congress (1st Session)” introduced by Dennis Kucinich on October 2, 2001 titled, "Space Preservation Act of 2001." In section, "B" of this bill you will find the term, "chemtrails" listed under exotic weapons systems.

"The term `exotic weapons systems' includes weapons designed to damage space or natural ecosystems (such as the ionosphere and upper atmosphere) or climate, weather, and tectonic systems with the purpose of inducing damage or destruction upon a target population or region on earth or in space." (Bill H.R. 2997 of the 107th Congress - Space Preservation Act of 2001)

Additionally, The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques clearly states that, "each state party undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques."

"As used in Article I, the term "environmental modification techniques" refers to any technique for changing -- through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes -- the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space." (Article 2 of The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques)



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