Wrong. Real news is Conflict in Georgia. Sorry for being blunt, but even if US forces did invade Iran, on a global scale it probably would not nearly equate to all the shit that just might happen with the rapidly escalating situation in the Caucasus. That's not to diminish the importance of the former, though. Both situations are... well, bad.

>> ^Memorare:
the real news is the impending naval blockade of Iran.
George II still has plenty of time to usher in the apocalypse.

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>> ^Tulgar:
I have no real idea about US politics, but maybe McCain is proving that you can do and say anything completely stupid and still get elected? Its like he is trying to prove that the voting public is completely stupid. Also, is that overt sponsorship of McCain (buttons etc) by Exxon new? Obviously corporate $ has supported politics for a long time, but has it ever been that direct?? I mean, who the hell would want to wear a pin that said, 'ExxonMcCain'? sheesh, surely that must turn the stomachs of even ardent Republicans?


The "ExxonMcCain" phrase was created by those who do not support McCain. Anyone wearing that is clearly supporting Obama, and I guarantee ExxonMobil had nothing to do with it, and in fact are probably trying to sue.

>> ^Tulgar:
I have no real idea about US politics, but maybe McCain is proving that you can do and say anything completely stupid and still get elected? Its like he is trying to prove that the voting public is completely stupid. Also, is that overt sponsorship of McCain (buttons etc) by Exxon new? Obviously corporate $ has supported politics for a long time, but has it ever been that direct?? I mean, who the hell would want to wear a pin that said, 'ExxonMcCain'? sheesh, surely that must turn the stomachs of even ardent Republicans?


Tulgar, this is an overt jab at the McCain energy plan by the Democrats, not an official sponsorship on the Republican side.

nobody is "nitpicking" about the stuttering. responding calmly under pressure is not a "nit".

i have noticed that criticism of obama automatically gets interpreted as support for mccain. why not disagree with them both? they are both politicians, politicians have a 98% suck rate.

ahhhhh but you have the two party system which means you vote for the guy you think is least shit. clever system that... kinda makes anyone with real change on their agenda look... well... kooky. kucinich anyone? nah, thought not. he's "unelectable" right? so carry on choosing between your two liars.

notice how none of them talk about changing the two party gravytrain that has kept them all in nice suits for so many years.

I noticed your quote on an expert. The joke I heard once was that an expert:

ex is a has been
spert is a drip under pressure

I think answering a question usefully under pressure and without stuttering is one of the job requirements.

Allow me to introduce you to our current president.

awww poor obama had to answer a retarded question live on camera?

he's running for PRES EEE DENT, you know?

I think answering a question usefully under pressure and without stuttering is one of the job requirements. Fuck, it's a job requirement for working in Burger King ffs.

It's not easy to answer in that situation? Err... yes it is, you just pause, and calmly deliver your answer. you have the microphone. what's the problem. maybe you can't think of anything to say and you are too worried that the people pulling your strings will get upset by your answer so you say something bland and raise a few rounds of applause and get the hell out of there, eh?

by the way, i know some people are retarded and think that criticising Obama is like automatically supporting McCain, but for the record I think they are both unconvincing public speakers and wouldn't vote for either of them, seeing as "public speaking" is about all i want a president to do. but fuck it i live in lithuania. thanks for the F16s.

The following is from a Newsweek article read by Sen. Byrd (D, WV) during a congressional hearing on September 20, 2002:

The last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave him a cordial handshake. The date was almost 20 years ago, Dec. 20, 1983; an official Iraqi television crew recorded the historic moment.

The once and future Defense secretary, at the time a private citizen, had been sent by President Ronald Reagan to Baghdad as a special envoy. Saddam Hussein, armed with a pistol on his hip, seemed "vigorous and confident," according to a now declassified State Department cable obtained by Newsweek. Rumsfeld "conveyed the President's greetings and expressed his pleasure at being in Baghdad," wrote the notetaker. Then the two men got down to business, talking about the need to improve relations between their two countries.

Like most foreign-policy insiders, Rumsfeld was aware that Saddam was a murderous thug who supported terrorists and was trying to build a nuclear weapon. (The Israelis had already bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak.) But at the time, America's big worry was Iran, not Iraq. The Reagan administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the shah (and taken hostage American diplomats for 444 days in 1979-81) would overrun the Middle East and its vital oilfields. On the--theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Reaganites were seeking to support Iraq in a long and bloody war against Iran. The meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next five years, until Iran finally capitulated, the United States backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of munitions...

The history of America's relations with Saddam is one of the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again, America turned a blind eye to Saddam's predations, saw him as the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him. No single policymaker or administration deserves blame for creating, or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their decisions seemed reasonable at the time. Even so, there are moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s, America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons...

The war against Iran was going badly by 1982. Iran's "human wave attacks" threatened to overrun Saddam's armies. Washington decided to give Iraq a helping hand.

After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal--American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for "video surveillance applications"; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacterial cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.

The United States almost certainly knew from its own satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits were Saddam's own forces.

The United States was much more concerned with protecting Iraqi oil from attacks by Iran as it was shipped through the Persian Gulf. In 1987, an Iraqi Exocet missile hit an American destroyer, the USS Stark, in the Persian Gulf, killing 37 crewmen. Incredibly, the United States excused Iraq for making an unintentional mistake and instead used the incident to accuse Iran of escalating the war in the gulf. The American tilt to Iraq became more pronounced. U.S. commandos began blowing up Iranian oil platforms and attacking Iranian patrol boats. In 1988, an American warship in the gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing 290 civilians. Within a few weeks, Iran, exhausted and fearing American intervention, gave up its war with Iraq.

Saddam was feeling cocky. With the support of the West, he had defeated the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. America favored him as a regional pillar; European and American corporations were vying for contracts with Iraq. He was visited by congressional delegations led by Sens. Bob Dole of Kansas and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who were eager to promote American farm and business interests. But Saddam's megalomania was on the rise, and he overplayed his hand. In 1990, a U.S. Customs sting operation snared several Iraqi agents who were trying to buy electronic equipment used to make triggers for nuclear bombs. Not long after, Saddam gained the world's attention by threatening "to burn Israel to the ground." At the Pentagon, analysts began to warn that Saddam was a growing menace, especially after he tried to buy some American-made high-tech furnaces useful for making nuclear-bomb parts. Yet other officials in Congress and in the Bush administration continued to see him as a useful, if distasteful, regional strongman. The State Department was equivocating with Saddam right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

Mr. President, I referred to this Newsweek article yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Specifically, during the hearing, I asked Secretary Rumsfeld:

"Mr. Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war? Are we in fact now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sewn?"

The Secretary quickly and flatly denied any knowledge but said he would review Pentagon records.

I suggest that the administration speed up that review. My concerns and the concerns of others have grown.

A letter from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, which I shall submit for the Record, shows very clearly that the United States is, in fact, preparing to reap what it has sewn. A letter written in 1995 by former CDC Director David Satcher to former Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr., points out that the U.S. Government provided nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in 1985--samples that included the plague, botulism, and anthrax, among other deadly diseases.

According to the letter from Dr. Satcher to former Senator Donald Riegle, many of the materials were hand carried by an Iraqi scientist to Iraq after he had spent 3 months training in the CDC laboratory.

The Armed Services Committee is requesting information from the Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense on the history of the United States, providing the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. I recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services also be included in that request.

The American people do not need obfuscation and denial. The American people need the truth. The American people need to know whether the United States is in large part responsible for the very Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which the administration now seeks to destroy.

We may very well have created the monster that we seek to eliminate. The Senate deserves to know the whole story. The American people deserve answers to the whole story.

Ah, this is a classic, snoozie! Love it! There are several things that are very worthwhile in this video:

1. Watching Shelly Winters dump a drink on Oliver Reed, first and foremost. Not that I approve of bad manners on this order, but I also don't approve of chauvinism. Still, it's funny to watch her act impulsive like that.
2. Watching Oliver Reed's stereotypical British reserve. Regardless of how I feel about his opinions, I have to hand it to him - he was completely unfazed by Shelly's action. If the British taught the whole world one thing that is worthwhile to this day, it's the concept of grace under pressure. (Yes, I know Hemingway, an American, wrote stories whose exemplars embodied this concept to the point that the whole term "grace under pressure" was invented, but I still believe it was the English who inspired this concept.)
3. Watching Johnny do what Johnny does best - keep things rolling, in a humorous fashion. Johnny could have been the original Jerry Springer had he wanted that. This little episode could have provided ample fodder for it. Yet he didn't, because Johnny was a class act for his entire career.

By the time Johnny ended his career some people said he was boring or not edgy enough. Screw them. I like edgy stuff too, but not Jerry Springer. That isn't edgy; it's just a fucking circus. Johnny knew how to entertain without being mean-spirited or voyeuristic. He is missed to this day by me.

^actually, Milgram is the name of the psychologist who administered the shock/learning experiment in 1961. This experiment has been compared to the Milgram experiment because of its exposure of human behavioral conformity under pressure from authority despite preexisting morality or other natural tendencies.

Really good interview. *promote

It's true. The essence of patriotism and love for America is standing up for her democracy and for your beliefs, not mindlessly agreeing with the President. As soon as we all buckle under pressure from power and give up fighting, we've given up on the dream of the founding fathers.

From the original Youtube description:

Feb 23, 1980.

In the New Hampshire primary, a single symbolic act dramatized the debut of Reagan's new image as a candidate and the demise of Bush's presidential hopes. It occurred during what was scheduled to be a two-person debate between Bush and Reagan in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Feburary 23, the Saturday before balloting. As it turned out, Bush crumpled under pressure orchestrated by Reagan's camp.

Initially, both Reagan and Bush had seen advantages in a two-person debate sponsored by a local newspaper. When the FEC ruled that newspaper sponsorship of the debate amounted to an illegal campaign contribution and when Bush refused to pay half of the debate's cost, Reagan agreed to underwrite it himself.

Reagan then moved to include the other five contenders - a move that identified him both as a candidate and a unifier. When the other candidates showed up on stage, Bush froze.

As Reagan made his case for inclusion of the other candidates, the moderator ordered Reagan's mike turned off. Reagan responded, "I'm paying for this microphone, Mr. Green." The fact that the moderator's name was Breen seemed to matter little. The crowd cheered. When neither newspaper hosting the debate nor Bush would accede to the inclusion of the others, the other candidates left the stage. Reagan's prospects had been boosted, Bush's buried. Reagan carried New Hampshire 50% to Bush's 23%.

(Excerpted from "Packaging The Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign" by Kathleen Hall Jamieson)

Try throwing under pressure?

"... There's no such thing as a good gun. There's no such thing as a bad gun. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good person is no danger to anyone except the bad guys. ..."

Cults: Saying No Under Pressure (1991)Narrator-you should like that therealblankman

He wrote and directed Antony and Cleopatra (1972).....if that had been Robert De Niro???.....He'd a cast a black woman in Cleo's roll.....When, oh when, are they going to make a Cleopatra film with a Nubian??? WHEN!!!!??? DAMN DIRTY HAIRLESS APES!!

The Last Man on Earth is Not Alone......