Obama '08?

Sorry, but the right is less able to be objective than the left.

BTW, has anyone noticed that you can always tell who is right of center in any work environment because they are always shooting off their mouths? Leftists are more cautious and respectful in presenting their opinions.

OD? My father, a tool and die grinder, spoke of OD all the time. What do "outside diameters" have to do with this discussion?

Conservatives quit the Dem party and joined the Republican one.

Another unfounded, sweeping generalization that defies fact and experience, and again provided by one who is a near perfect counterexample of her own propositionl.

Here's what you need to get through your self righteous skull:

Targeting North Korea

By Gregory Elich

...


The North Koreans had ample cause to fear such aggressive posturing, based on bitter memories of their last experience with the U.S. military during the 1950-3 Korean War.

In the first year of that war, on November 5, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the destruction of "every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village" in an area stretching from the Yalu River to the battle line. The first city to be leveled was Sinuiju, and napalm soon began to be employed during bombing raids against civilians. Over 2,300 gallons of napalm were dropped on Pyongyang in one raid alone, in July 1952.

Mass fire bombings systematically wiped out one town after another,

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS

and U.S. planes also targeted power stations and irrigation dams that supported rice fields. As irrigation dams were destroyed, villages downstream were swept away in the resulting floods, inflicting enormous death and destruction.

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS

At various times during the war, the U.S. even considered use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Hungarian correspondent Tibor Meray witnessed the "destruction and horrible things committed by the American forces. Everything which moved in North Korea was a military target, peasants in the fields were often machine gunned by pilots" motivated by what seemed to him amusement.

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS

Meray saw "complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital" of North Korea. There were "no more cities in North Korea," he reported. Every city Meray passed through "was a collection of chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that was all."

General William Dean, taken prisoner during the war, remembered being amazed at the sight of the city of Huichon. "The city I’d seen before – two storied buildings, a prominent main street – wasn’t there anymore," while "most of the towns were just rubble or snowy open spaces where buildings had been." All of these towns, he said, "once full of people, were unoccupied shells. The villagers lived in entirely new temporary villages, hidden in canyons."


Executions of civilians occurred on a mass scale, both by American troops and by U.S.-installed South Korean President Syngman Rhee’s forces. As U.S. soldiers were pushed out of North Korea by advancing Chinese and North Korean troops, they deliberately destroyed everything in their path. The war diary of the 24th Infantry Division relates, "Razing of villages along our withdrawal routes and destruction of food staples became the order of the day."

ADMITTED WAR CRIMES - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS

A Chinese soldier remembers that virtually no house was left standing and that the region was filled with homeless people during the winter of 1950-1 when temperatures dropped to 40 below zero.


According to General Curtis LeMay, "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both," and "we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes."

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS - the war criminal of WWII, Curtis Lemay was pressed into service to continue his war crimes against North Korean civilians. In the eyes of the American government and the military establishment, he performed admirably.

What say you, Cy, FailuresArt, MM, Okie, Ican, Firefly, do you consider him to have lived up to the high standards set by others in their military incursions into poor defenseless countries?

During the war, North Korean responded to such terror tactics by building underground factories and housing on a large scale. (12) North Korean concerns over U.S. threats are routinely dismissed as over-sensitivity, but such a view can only be sustained by ignorance of the history of the Korean War.

The North Koreans haven’t forgotten the experience, building many post-war factories and military facilities underground. It should be pointed out that such underground facilities fall into the second category of targets the Bush Administration identifies as justifying the use of nuclear weapons: targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack.

same old same old WAR CRIMES - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS[/color]


The thing about this, if and when you have the honesty and the guts to read the whole article is the duplicity that is so much a part of American policy. The UN is just a voice, a blunt weapon employed by the USA to disseminate its propaganda, to completely confuse its own citizenry; how do y'all feel about being that used that abused, that deceived by your own government on that massive a scale.

It's amazing how there's virtually no little difference between the USA and Nazi Germany when it comes to disseminating propaganda.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
~Adolph Hitler

Crimes Are Crimes - No Matter Who Does Them

In the past few weeks, it has become common knowledge that Barack Obama has openly ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, because he is suspected of participating in plots by Al Qaeda. Al-Awlaki denies these charges. No matter. Without trial or other judicial proceeding, the administration has simply put him on the to-be-killed list.

During this same period, a video leaked by whistleblowers in the military showing U.S. troops firing on an unarmed party of Iraqis in 2007, including two journalists, and then firing on those who attempted to rescue them – including two children – became public. As ugly as this video of the killing of 12 Iraqis was, the chatter recorded from the helicopter cockpit was even more chilling and monstrous. Yet the Pentagon said that there would be no charges against these soldiers; and the media focused on absolving them of blame – “they were under stress,” the story went, “and after all our brave men and women must be supported.” Meanwhile, those who leaked and publicized the video came under government surveillance and are targeted as “national security” threats.

Also during this period, the Pentagon acknowledged, after denials, a massacre near the city of Gardez, Afghanistan, on February 12, 2010, in which 5 people were killed, including two pregnant women, leaving 16 children motherless. The U.S. military first said the two men killed were insurgents, and the women, victims of a family “honor killing.” The Afghan government has accepted the eyewitness reports that U.S. Special Forces killed the men, (a police officer and lawyer) and the women, and then dug their own bullets out of the women’s bodies to destroy evidence. Top U.S. military officials have now admitted that U.S. soldiers killed the family in their house.

Just weeks earlier, a story broken in Harper’s by Scott Horton carried news that three supposed suicides of detainees in Guantánamo in 2006 were not actual suicides, but homicides carried out by American personnel. This passed almost without comment.

In some respects, this is worse than Bush. First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of “terrorism,” merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Second, Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of “preventive detention." Third, the Obama administration, in expanding the use of unmanned drone attacks, argues that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use such lethal force and extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war.

Such measures by Bush were widely considered by liberals and progressives to be outrages and were roundly, and correctly, protested. But those acts which may have been construed (wishfully or not) as anomalies under the Bush regime, have now been consecrated into “standard operating procedure” by Obama, who claims, as did Bush, executive privilege and state secrecy in defending the crime of aggressive war.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who are responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to waterboarding and other forms of torture, thereby making their actions acceptable for him or any future president, Democrat or Republican.

We must end the complicity of silence and say loud and clear:

The things that were crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama.

Outrages under Bush are outrages under Obama.

All this MUST STOP.

And all this MUST BE RESISTED by anyone who claims a shred of conscience or integrity

http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php/features-mainmenu-220/the-war-of-terror/6280-crimes-are-crimes-no-matter-who-does-them

Miller Francis, former writer for Rolling Stone, sent this quote from Bertolt Brecht to explain why he donated:

"Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons."

Good afternoon, all.
The disparity between the most recent Rasmussen poll and the Gallup poll regarding President Obama's approval ratings is striking. I was partially responsible for our using Rasmussen here even though it is perceived by many to have a Republican I explained why and I would just as soon not revisit that issue. Suffice it to say that some of his most recent polls on a variety of issues seem to be beyond the pale.
Anyway, I went digging around for data on Presidential approval ratings and discovered data for the last 13 Presidents from FDR through Obama.
I found stuff from Gallup - which is the only pollster going back that far. There are a lot of footnotes regarding how reliable comparisons are.
But we won't let a bunch of footnotes get in our way for...
POP QUIZ!
Of the 13 Presidents, who do you think had:
(1) The HIGHEST approval rating at some time in his term(s)?

(2) The LOWEST approval rating at some time in his term(s)?

(3) The LARGEST spread - highest minus lowest approval in his term(s)?

(4) The SMALLEST spread - highest minus lowest approval in his term(s)?

(5) The HIGHEST disapproval rating at some time in his term(s)?

You can guess or do research. Results at 6 pm ET.