Why do you still support Bush?

You are some fun, MM.

First, you tell me where you got the idea that someone was saying the world and western civilization as we know it is going to end because of Bush? Tsk, tsk, don't overblow what is legitimate criticism. It makes you a shouter.

And second, my dear friend, even as we speak, your right to privacy is disappearing before your very eyes. The NSA taps are just the tip of the iceberg. Been on an airplane lately? If so, some government agent can peruse your flight information, oh and all your financials too, your credit cards, bank loans, insurance policies all the stuff you might have thought was a little private.

Third, the Attorney General not only thinks torture is okay in some circumstances (whatever happened to cruel and unusual) but now says the right to a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security. Golly, do you think he will find a national security reason to crush press information and opposition. Nah.

Last but not least, and not the only other example I can cite: If the President of the United States decides tomorrow that it is within his powers to suspense habeas corpus due the circumstances of this war on terror, he can. He may not, he may go back to merely trying to disassemble Social Security, but if he did there wouldn't be thing one you or I could do about it.

That's not fearmongering, that's based on the CAPPS II law your guy shoved through the Republican Congress and the other is based on both statements his administration has made regarding prisoners and the actions his lawyers took trying to deny that right to an American citizen.
"In June 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US citizen held for more than two years in military custody without charge or trial as an "enemy combatant", was entitled to due process and habeas corpus review of his detention by the US courts. His case was remanded for further proceedings before the lower courts."Full history here.

Meanwhile, although OmsigDavid sees the opposite, the Democratic Party for the past seventy years has been the leader on the expansion of rights and freedoms. It is the Republicans who want to put Amendments into the Constitution which would for the first time since Prohibition RESTRICT the rights of Americans. Look at all the other amendments, they open up more freedoms, only the GOP sees that not how to govern.

Joe(can you hear me now, they can?)Nation

Joe(right on the mark)Nation speaks again!

Thank you, Joe.

The Bush apologists are blind, ignorant, and silly in their continued defense of a tyrant that's removing our rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I doubt they'll ever wake up from their stupor.

Bush and the christian right doesn't know anything about human ethics, humanity, or prevention of disease. Their ignorance know no bounds.



Merck cancer vaccine faces Christian-right scrutiny

By Julie SteenhuysenSun May 21, 12:14 PM ET

Merck & Co. Inc.'s vaccine to prevent the world's most prevalent sexually transmitted infection sailed through a panel of U.S. health experts, despite early fears of opposition from the Christian Right that it might lead to promiscuity and a false sense of security.

The drugmaker's efforts to educate Christian groups while touting the vaccine's top selling point -- prevention of cervical cancer -- helped win them over.

But Merck (NYSE:MRK - news) may ultimately find itself at loggerheads with those same groups as it seeks to make the vaccine mandatory for school admission, a step considered key for widespread acceptance and one that many of the groups oppose.

The vaccine, known as Gardasil, with an estimated $2 billion U.S. market potential, targets four types of sexually transmitted human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is believed to cause more than 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts.

"We don't think it should be made mandatory for school attendance," said Peter Sprigg, vice president of policy at the Family Research Council, who attended the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel meeting on Thursday.

That view is shared by evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family.

"We support the widespread availability of the vaccine, but we do oppose the mandatory vaccination for entry to public school," said Linda Klepacki, an analyst for sexual health for the group.

For Gardasil to be widely adopted, Merck must first win FDA approval. Then, it must garner widespread backing from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices -- a group that advises the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunization standards. Both Merck and analysts deem widespread backing likely.

States would then consider whether it should be included in the list of vaccinations required for school admission.

"This is a disease that is completely sexually transmitted," Klepacki said, unlike the mumps or measles, which can be transmitted by casual contact. "We believe that parents should have the final say on whether to vaccinate their children."

KEY PRODUCT FOR MERCK

Merck faces a host of product liability lawsuits over its withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx and imminent generic competition for its cholesterol drug Zocor, so the company has a lot riding on the success of Gardasil.

If the FDA follows the unanimous recommendation of its expert panel, which is widely expected, Merck will launch Gardasil in June.

That would give Merck at least a one-year advantage over GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK.L) , which is developing its own HPV vaccine called Cervarix.

Cervical cancer is the second-most-common cause of cancer deaths worldwide. There are nearly a half million diagnoses and 240,000 deaths each year, Merck said.

Glaxo has estimated the combined global market opportunity for the new vaccines would be $4 billion to $7 billion a year by 2010.

"The market isn't really going to develop quickly until state health departments start requiring it for school age children," A.G. Edwards analyst Al Rauch said, adding that the process would take two to five years.

Merck plans to support a school mandate.

"Obviously, we believe school requirements are a very positive intervention because they do help to increase access on a state-by-state level to vaccines, especially for something as important as cervical cancer," Merck spokeswoman Kelly Dougherty said.

She said Merck would give state health officials data and information about the vaccine -- the same approach it used to win initial backing from Christian groups.

The Family Research Council's Sprigg said Merck met extensively with his group to address concerns that the vaccine might encourage promiscuous behavior by providing a false sense of protection against sexually transmitted disease.

"From the material being reported thus far, we are being told that they have not found that effect," Sprigg said, adding, "We are monitoring this."

Dr. Gene Rudd of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, which also supports the vaccine but opposes school mandates, said he believes states could resolve the matter by building in some wiggle room.

"Our position is to have an easy opt out," he said. "Make it mandatory in the sense that it is generally accepted, but parents can opt out."

"TELL SOMEONE"

While Merck awaits FDA approval, it is getting the word out about Gardasil. The company started seeding the U.S. market last month with an informational advertising blitz stressing the link between HPV and cervical cancer.

Merck said it would continue its education efforts while regulatory agencies around the world review the product.

A U.S. television and print campaign, with the tagline "Tell Someone," makes no mention of the company or the vaccine, but Merck is now considering how to integrate the vaccine into its promotional materials, said Bev Lybrand, vice president of marketing.

She said the campaign was "born out of the finding that very little awareness exists among women about HPV and its consequences."

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London)

Perhaps those "fukin moron" Christians could ask those "rights & freedom-expanding Democrats" to protect their rights & freedoms as parents to say no to an STD vaccination as a prerequisite for kindergarten enrollment.

MM, no reporter is being charged with anything in the Plame case. You have the story wrong; noone is claiming that Novak didn't have the right to write his column.

Instead, those who gave him the information are being prosecuted; just as they should be.

However, what AG Gonzales has said:



Is exactly the opposite of what is going on in the Plame case. He is claiming that the first amendment does not in fact exist, that National Security is more important than rights. This is far more dangerous than anything Al Qaeda could possibly hope to do.

Whatever happened to 'give me liberty, or give me death?' Today's conservatives are a bunch of pussies compared to the men who founded our country. Their motto is apparently 'take my liberty, and save me from death, please!'

Cycloptichorn

It depends on if they are the same parents who aren't vaccinating their kids against measles, mumps, whooping cough and polio because if God wants their children to suffer those then it is God's will.

Joe(Please don't cough in my direction)Nation

You'll be thanking them the next time the Martians attack us.

I've said this before and I'll stick to it.

Kerry or Gore may have been the biggest f*ckups in the history of America. MAY have been. We don't know.

bush IS the biggest or certainly one of the biggest in the history of America. It's in all the papers.

I can admit that the last two presidential races were the Democrats to lose and by mealy mouthing, lying down and just allowing themselves to be outfoxed they lost them.

Why can't those on the right just admit that this last 6 years has been a series of monumental f*ckups and that our country is polarized, apathetic, weaker, broker and stupider than ever?

We now elect our presidents American Idol style. We send Elliott home and support Taylor.

Style over substance. We are Rome and you know what happened to them.

How typical this thread is.

"Why do you support Bush"

And it deteriorates IMMEDIATELY into why the typical lefties hate Bush. As if we haven't read about it since their last post. Like anyone cares.

This could have been interesting, but once again it becomes a Bush hate fest. Asherman gave a good answer, as he always does, and gets ignored.

You guys are boring me with your incessant whining.

well you can always go away. It's a quick and direct solution to your problem.

I'm sorry you ( meaning the bush supporters collectively) hate our (meaning those who despise bush collectively)incessant whining because I really enjoy watching your ( meaning the bush supporters collectively)incessant receiving of bush up your keister.

There's something twistedly comical about watching people continually humiliate themselves. Like watching the Three Stooges or catching the dog in the yard eating his own ****.

Just trying to make lemonade out of lemons here.

The rest of you political geenyus' please carry on.

Just positing parts of a email I received today from a friend in GA:

Q: I'm very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush.

Dean: Both mean learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don't feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David-he just didn't like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It's like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House.

And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there's no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It's almost as if we'd left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, "This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try." As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixons wildest dreams.

The reason I wrote a book with the title "Worse than Watergate," and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon's Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush's abuses, and Cheney's-to me, it's a Bush/ Cheney Presidency-and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That's much more serious.

Q: Dying in Iraq?

Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they're dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we can torture during interrogations--I can"t even get their mentally. And when you read their briefs, they didn't get there mentally.

Q: The amazing thing about your book is that it was written before Cheney went up to lobby for torture, before the NSA scandal broke, and before the Valerie Plame thing.

Dean: They just keep walking into my title and adding additional chapters.

Q: Talk a little bit more about Dick Cheney. You call him "co-President" in your book.

Dean: I do. It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win at the Supreme Court. I've got some friends who were in there and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn't have a clue what's going on. Cheney's setting things up the way he wants. Hes designing a National Security Council that's more powerful than the statutory National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. And it was, and it is. She was the perfect foil for him because he can roll over her anytime he wants, and he does. Putting her over at State is even better: Keep her out on the road. The Cheney-Rumsfeld connection has really been driving the foreign policy since day one.

Q: Why do you think Bush divested so much of his power to Cheney?

Dean: Bush had expertise in one thing: How to run a Presidential campaign. He understands campaigns and Presidential politics. He has no interest or disposition or I think probably-he's not stupid, but he's not bright, he's not a rocket scientist-he isn't interested in policy.

Cheney is the opposite. He loves this stuff. He's a wonk. He gets into it, and he's had very strong feelings about issues that he's held for a long time.

He has been determined to expand Presidential power. I can't find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers.

Will Bush succeed in turning around his dismall poll numbers?

Elections Are Crux Of GOP's Strategy
Bush Aides Look to Midterm Vote as Way to Reverse Slide

By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 22, 2006; Page A01

Confronting the worst poll numbers seen in the West Wing since his father went down to defeat, President Bush and his team are focusing on the fall midterm elections as the best chance to salvage his presidency and are building a campaign strategy around tax cuts, immigration and national security.

Modern history offers no precedent of a president climbing from a hole as deep as the one Bush finds himself in, and White House strategists have concluded that no staff shake-up or other quick fix will alter their trajectory. In the sixth year of his tenure, they said, Bush cannot easily change the minds of voters whose impressions are fully formed.


President Bush, with new White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, right, has not seen a boost in polls despite a recent shake-up in staff by Bolten.
President Bush, with new White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, right, has not seen a boost in polls despite a recent shake-up in staff by Bolten.

And so short of some event outside their direct control -- such as a dramatic turnaround in Iraq or the capture of Osama bin Laden -- Bush advisers have turned to the election as the most important chance to rewrite the troubled narrative of his presidency and allow him to recover enough to govern his last two years, Republican strategists said. With that in mind, Bush last week called on the National Guard to help stop illegal immigrants, signed tax-cut legislation and headlined three party fundraisers.

If Republicans retain Congress in November, Bush advisers note, he could assert that for the third straight election, the party defied historical patterns and popular predictions. Bush, they said, could advance a fresh agenda in early 2007. But they acknowledge that a House takeover by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would foreshadow a contentious final two years fending off congressional subpoenas and hostile legislation.

"If she's not the speaker, then conceptually I think we've turned this thing around and he has two more years to get some things done," said Ron Kaufman, who was White House political director under George H.W. Bush and remains close to the former president. A Republican loss of the House, on the other hand, "makes the next two years that much more difficult."

Bush has turned his attention to the campaign. Six months before the election, he has made 36 fundraising appearances, more than at this point in 2002. He spoke at a party gala last week that broke off-year records for hard-money fundraising and later attended events in Virginia and Kentucky. Vice President Cheney has been even more active, making 62 fundraising appearances, including one in Nashville on Saturday, and he plans three more in California in the next couple of days.

I have always supported stem cell research.
The Bushes were rong about that.

In regard to the rest of your post:
u condemn smearing,
but most of your post appears to be a general SMEAR.
David

YES.
Arguably, we won it when Saddam fled from Bagdad,
but for sure we won it
when we killed his evil spawn
and put him in our jail.

It was only because W did not FEEL like it
that we did not did drag Saddam thru the streets of Bagdad,
wearing a colored clown suit.
We can still do that, for fun,
if W changes his mind.




We don 't need that,
any more than we needed total control of Japan
after the surrender.




We did not fite this war
to install peace in Iraq;
it had peace when Saddam was tyrant.



Everyone has the freedom
to think whatever he wants to think.
The war was a successful effort to ensure America 's safety
from Saddam 's vengeance,
not to win popularity points.



ANYWAY, we have succeeded
in winning the war need no longer remain there.
David

All you do is whine that people hate Bush, a projection of your own hate towards your political opponents.

People still think Saddam was a threat to Americans and the US when all evidence shows otherwise. Their brains are fried, I tell you!

I can guarantee you 100%, with NO doubt what-so-ever, that Saddam is not NOW a threat. Could you say that in 2001?

Yes, most of the people on this planet said Saddam was not a threat. Only Bush and right-wing-nuts pushed the rhetoric about Saddam's WMDs.

Once they were not found, Bush changed his justifcation for his illegal attack against Iraq to "to bring democracy to the Middle East."

Have you seen the chaos in Iraq? More and more people are getting killed every day. Bush's incompetence in everything he does is common knowledge. Americans are finally waking up to that fact; the majority - like 71 percent - do not approve of what Bush has done or is doing.

Wake up and smell the coffee; this guy is dangerous to the US and the world.

Lessons For Libs
George Will (5-22-06)

Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal — not "progressive" — nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel.

Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label "progressive" as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, "The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism in 1948, 1968 and, he hopes, 2008.

His project of curing liberalism's amnesia begins by revisiting Jan. 4, 1947, when liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard to found Americans for Democratic Action. It became their instrument for rescuing the Democratic Party from Henry Wallace and his fellow traveling followers who, locating the cause of the Cold War in American faults, were precursors of Michael Moore and his ilk among today's "progressives."

Among the heroes of liberalism's civil war of 60 years ago was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who today is 88. He stigmatized the Wallace supporters' anti-anti-communism as "doughface-ism." Beinart explains: "The original doughfaces were 'Northern men with Southern principles' — Northerners who opposed slavery, but who could not bring themselves to support the Civil War." Today's doughfaces are "progressives" who flinch from the fact that, as Beinart says, "America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first."

Liberalism's civil war seemed won after Henry Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy failed to prevent President Truman's 1948 election. But the war broke out again in the Democratic Party's crack-up over Vietnam in 1968. Then, Beinart says, a "new liberalism" emerged that "questioned whether America had much to offer the world." Four years later the party nominated George McGovern, who had been a delegate to the 1948 Progressive Party convention that nominated Wallace. McGovern's trumpet sounded retreat: "Come home, America."

Since then, Beinart argues, liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America's missions at home and abroad. It has been said that whereas the right-wing isolationists in the 1930s believed that America was too good for the world, left-wing isolationists in the 1960s believed that the world was too good for America. After Vietnam, Beinart says, liberal foreign policy was "defined more by fear of American imperialism than fear of totalitarianism."

Beinart briskly says "I was wrong" in supporting the invasion of Iraq. Wrong about Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Wrong in being "too quick to give up on containment." Wrong about the administration's competence to cope with the war's aftermath. ("Staffers tasked with postwar reconstruction were told to bring two suits. They would be home by the end of summer.") Denouncing conservatives for waging a "war of hubris and impatience," Beinart says that "George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project. He has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak." Because "the more proactive America wanted to be, the stronger international institutions had to become."

It is odd that some conservatives are eager to promote the semantic vanity of the phrase "values voters." And it is odder still that the media are cooperating with those conservatives.

But while excoriating the Bush administration for perhaps "creating exactly the condition the conservatives have long feared: An America without the will to fight," Beinart's most important contribution is to confront the doughface liberals who rejoice about the weakening of that will. Reading liberals who seem to think they "have no enemies more threatening, or more illiberal, than George W. Bush," Beinart worries that Deaniac liberals are taking over the Democratic Party much as McGovernite liberals did after 1968. He discerns the "patronizing quality" of many liberals' support for John Kerry in 2004: They "weren't supporting Kerry because he had served in Vietnam. They were supporting him because they believed other , more hawkish, voters would support him because he had served in Vietnam."

Beinart worries that "the elections of 2006 and 2008 could resemble the elections of 1974 and 1976, when foreign policy exhaustion, and Republican scandal, propelled Democrats to big gains." If so, those gains will be "a false dawn." The country will eventually turn right because, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."

Ronald Reagan said he did not want to return to the past but to the past's way of facing the future. As does Beinart, who locates the pertinent past in 1947.

Yer fulla **** if you believe or think that.



Iraqi's killing Iraqi's... nothing new there. I've smelled your coffee C.I., and I think you are buying it in the wrong aisle. Get out of the fertilizer section.