No problem, RadHazG. Media is part of what I do and to show it's flawed I've got to know where they got it wrong, this just happens to be one of those subjects the media is badly failing on. The warrantless wiretaps was another. If it's a FISA debate it's domestic, period. The only function of the FISA court was to deal with those foreign calls when they come home to a US person who has a right to expect a reasonable degree of privacy. Foriegn wiretaps never have needed a warrant. Program was so illegal that even Ashcroft threatened to resign if they didn't fix it. Never had a thing to do with stopping or needing approval to listen to foreigners or terrorists, that was just talking points to confuse the issue.

J-Rova might have a point though. Might not as well. In most cases the President has a right to pardon and such but what about if he pardons to protect someone who commits a crime in their own administration? Even Nixon didn't pardon Halderman, Colson and Liddy. When done to coverup or to stop an investigation into crimes in your own administration, then we just might be crossing a line into obstruction of justice.

I've got to agree about past abuse as well though. Clinton pardoned his brother and that crossed a big line too, some others were questionable as well. The nation NEEDS to start to understand that the law is as much precedent as what's printed on the books. Let someone bend the rules and defend it once and now it's easier for the other side to bend it too, for their reasons rather than yours. We're quickly becoming a nation not of laws but of partisan favoritism and it'll ruin us. If we don't figure out who we really want to be as a nation I'm afraid we're at about the end of the road. Both sides need to stop defending their abuses, it's bad precedent and precedent isn't partisan. One abuse sure as hell will lead to the next.

That may be, but it's the coverup, not the crime. A lot of interesting (corrupt, illegal) stuff is coming up about the Justice Department.

I should confess to having a very great deal of trust in science, scientific inquiry and evidence based medicine but its probably because I do science and I know scientists and so I'm comfortable with these things as a matter of course; I feel my trust has been duly earned. So your criticism of all the cards not being on the table for the average medical consumer may be right in that the average person is not equipped (nor should they be expected to be so equipped) to understand the exceptionally technically dense material of, for instance, the publication detailing the exact mechanism of action in the case of this particular vaccine which is called "Prophylactic quadrivalent human papillomavirus (types 6, 11, 16, and 18) L1 virus-like particle vaccine in young women: a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled multicentre Phase II efficacy trial.". I'm not sure how to solve that problem, as most people seem to care little for hard science to say nothing of the years of study required to understand a paper like that.

I really do think though, that drug companies, the government, medical associations, and hospitals (in that ascending order of trustworthyness with drug companies at the very bottom of the scale) are for the most part very open in the literature about the underlying mechanism, theory, screening and manufacture of the medicines they create. As I mentioned before it has been unequivocally shown that pharma giants will lie to keep unsafe drugs on the market and that is outrageously despicable in the extreme but I have to say that our governmental oversight of these corporations in the form of the FDA, Health Canada and Britains MHRA is fairly good, bad drugs are pulled quickly, coverups are punished (not harshly enough but that's another story) and regulation is pretty strict. The bad old thalidomide days, thankfully appear to be mostly over (back then double blind testing of drugs didn't even exist!) due directly to this oversight safety.

If its not already obvious, I REALLY want this vaccine and would gladly shell out the $350 for it in exchange for never having to worry about getting nasty gross genital warts and a vastly reduced risk of naughty bits cancer (HPV causes a large portion of anal and penile cancers) but no one will give it to me because its only been approved for use in females and it would be an off label use. And why would that be? Because Merck could get the vaccine to market faster and make money quicker if they tested only on females to begin with in order to prove efficacy in its largest target market. Like I said, I'm no huge fan of these companies either but a reasoned, dispassionate and ballanced view toward thier actions overall is what's most judicious I feel.

I sifted this a while back, but something happened to it. A government coverup maybe?
Our own Farhad2000 filmed this on his Christmas holiday.


This was the original post:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Hovering-C-13-in-Canada

Sounds like a government coverup - note that we didn't see the wreckage of the plane in the aftermath. It could've been anything.

Foley has been doing this stuff for 10 years. Everyone, especially the religious base is disgusted by this pedopahnt coverup. Keep covering up and trying to deflect blame..show that Accountability is an empty marketing slogan.
The Chat Transcripts say it all, and republicans can't keep their keep their lies straight. A royal screwup just like everything else this administration has done.

It's quite easy to talk about all of this after the fact. But, if you think back, everybody was still thinking "crash" up until the second plane hit.

Contacts ARE made, this is standard. Wether it is a 747 crashing because of engine failure or other.

And, commenting on the reaction of Bush (which, I am NOT a supporter of. I just had the second guessing psychobable that seems to come out. Bush is NOT the coordinator of FAA/NORAD/FEMA/NSA/Secret Service, or anything other than the situation he is currently in, he is simply the elected leader. Otherwise, the whole US government would fall apart every night when he went to sleep.

Would they have rather had him run out of the elementary school screaming?

That would have helped the whole "terror" thing, now wouldn't it?

The simple truth is, there were actions going on. People were being mobilized. Agencies were doing their jobs.

A lot of this conspiricy garbage is as if, anytime someone cleared their throat, that it was proof of some sort of coverup. Now, everyone goes out and looks for the times people cleared their throats.

(And, everyone seems to forget that even Democrats clear their throats.)

Ok, so the idea that Kennedy might have been shot by someone else, is quite understandable. However, to believe something along the lines of which these conspiricy theorists are asking us to believe, is way over the top.

Need I remind that, although there is a Republican President, it does not mean that every government worker, every civilian contractor, and anyone else involved in Aviation/Security/World Trade/Communications/Defense is now somehow part of the Republican party.

Most of the things that are spouted off are not even backed up with anything. I mean, seriously, how many cousins does Bush HAVE?

It is normal for people to take events and investigate, question, and try to understand. But I bet you can find these sort of ties with pretty much any event in current history, if you tried. It does not make the conclusions drawn, any more truthfull.

Everyone talkes about the "controlled demolition" garbage. We have lots of information regarding that. Now, how much information do we have regarding near fully loaded aircraft striking skyscrapers and the aftermath thereof? Well... unless you have a ton of information showing me how they should have fallen otherwise... I still can't make the same connection.

I can show you THOUSANDS of buildings, burned and destroyed, in which they didn't land all over a five mile radius. What else would you expect?

Oh, so they fell from the top down? As apposed to what?

I understand the hatred of Bush. There are ENOUGH things the he has done in public eye, to hate him over. Let's not start looking completely insane while we try to vilify him.

For all of the conspiracy theorists, what about the fact that the government would have no way of controlling what the dozens, if not hundreds, of bystanders would have witnessed? The fact is, dozens of eyewitnesses DID say they saw what appeared to be a large commercial airliner strike the Pentagon. No cover story and subsequent coverup effort, no matter how ellaborate, is going to change what people saw with their own eyes.