Further edited to read "And when we have an American president who can't or doesn't read well, does anyone in OUR America who can and does know how to read really expect that the right-wing extremists and ideologues and demagogues who support George W. Bush sitting on the THRONE of OUR America are going to crack the cover of a book to see if there might be anything of interest in there?"

FAITH, BABY!

You got to have faith!

And there just ain't no faith in any of them, thar books!

And speaking of that, wasn't there a book some time ago entitled "Fahrenheit 451" about these people in OUR America whose job it was to hunt down people who actually had books in their possession, so that the books could be properly destroyed by burning them to ashes and cinders?

And is it still "history" when someone in the past writes about the practices that will take place in a future generation or time, such as OURS, where possession of an intellect is becoming a national crime here in OUR America, at least to the CONSERVATIVES like George H.(e) W.(hines) Bush, who detest intellectuals, precisely because they are intellectuals with the capacity for knowledge?

Or is that really just the ability to make rational analysis and predict future outcomes and probabilities based on a combined knowledge of history and human psychology?

Or is it witchcraft?

Maybe we ought to dial up http://whitehouse.gov and see if Scottie "BOY' McClellan has posted anything on that "faith-based" subject that can edify us old coots in here!

And then we would know!

AND SO .....

And here, I would like to leave a positive message, because life is good here in OUR America, as a result of HER PEOPLES, and that is that the Albany, New York Police Department Honor Guard will be in Washington, D.C., this weekend, for ceremonies involving fallen officers in the line of duty, and so, if anyone reading this will be there, in Washington, D.C., this weekend, and you happen to see one of these officers, well, say hello.

I think this Police Honor Guard from Albany, New York puts on a very fine impression of devotion to duty that is very fitting of the capital city of OUR state, up here, and I would like the candid world to know that fact.

SO!

Albany Police Honor Guard, have a safe trip down and back this weekend, and God Speed you home, safe and sound!

Whatever the times that we are in, in fact, these are the times that we are in, and in all truth, I find these to be quite exciting times to be alive, especially because of this internet, and the rapid communications ability that it gives us, to use as we will, for good or evil, however it may be.

As for me, I would rather be on the positive, constructive, pro-survival side of things, and so, the challenge is one of position, these days, because we are in a great state of flux, I think, poised on the end of one age, and poised on the brink of one that is emerging!

For us older folks, of course, depending upon how we have positioned ourselves, over time, these could be pretty traumatic times to be living in right now, as things seem to be moving very rapidly, on a lot of fronts, all at once, and so, the information overload in one's life just keeps increasing and increasing, at the same time as environmental stress is rising!

Do I have any answers?

Hell no, and I am not pretending to!

It's like having answers in the middle of a raging firefight!

What on earth are they good for, if they cause you to get dead in the search for them?

As for me, I'm pragmatizing, I guess you could call it, accepting that I have absolutely no control any more over my environment, so that the only sure thing that I have left to me is control over myself, despite the situation that I might find myself in at any given time!

My belief system, I guess you would call it, and from this following article, I am not alone in my own personal quest here, for the path in which my own personal life continues to go, down here on this earth of OURS:

"Christian Conference Weighs Challenges"

By BRIAN MURPHY, AP Religion Writer

Mon May 9, 2:50 PM ET

ATHENS, Greece - Christian leaders, theologians and religious activists from around the world gathered Monday for a meeting to assess some of the most serious challenges for the faith, such as growing rifts between churches and African congregations ravaged by AIDS.

The last time the World Council of Churches staged such a conference was in Brazil nine years ago, when the agenda was heavy with issues about preserving cultural identity and Christian missionary expansion in the former East Bloc.

Now — in one of the ancient sites of Christianity — the planned discussions highlight some new concerns, including growing rifts among Christians over issues such as same-sex unions, the role of gay pastors and women's contributions to worship.

Also high on the list: ways to control AIDS and HIV in Africa and promoting interfaith dialogue with mainstream Muslims to offset the influence of Islamic extremists.

"This conference has the feeling of a journey, not an arrival," said the Rev. Ruth Bottoms, a Baptist minister from Britain who is overseeing the weeklong series of workshops and speeches that officially opens Tuesday.

"We don't want to hide our differences."

The conference is expected to draw more than 500 participants representing nearly every corner of Christianity from evangelical movements to mainline Protestant groups to Orthodox and Roman Catholic envoys.

Some leaders, such as the late Pope John Paul II, made historic overtures to Orthodox churches to end a nearly 1,000-year estrangement over disputes centering on papal authority and, in recent years, the Vatican's reach in traditional Orthodox lands.

Some Protestant churches, meanwhile, have moved toward consolidation to counter shrinking congregations and resources.

But the conference may spend much of its energy on political and health problems outside doctrine.

Last month, the World Evangelical Alliance presented the U.N. Commission on Human Rights with an appeal claiming more than 200 million Christians worldwide are being denied religious liberty.

The document listed more than a dozen countries, including China and several nations in Africa and central Asia.

Members of the alliance, which represents conservative Protestant denominations, are expected at the conference, which is being held at a seaside venue about 18 miles northeast of Athens.

Also participating are top-level delegates from the Vatican, whose anti-condom stance may put it at odds with other religious leaders.

AIDS and HIV issues have become priorities for the WCC, a Geneva-based group with more than 350 member Christian churches.

The Vatican is not a full member, but collaborates on many WCC panels and initiatives.

"AIDS and HIV is a major human tragedy," said Alexander Belopopsky, a WCC spokesman.

The WCC also serves as one of the top forums for inter-religious dialogue and other ecumenical efforts.

But the conference is not expected to bring any landmark shifts.

Its chief goal, according to organizers, is to advance discussions on ways to reach greater common ground.

"This conference brings together the widest possible constituency," Bottoms said.

Other topics that could be raised at the conference include whether new Pope Benedict XVI will seek even more substantial contacts with other Christian churches, and ways to energize mainstream churches in the West facing shrinking congregations and competition from non-denominational movements.

In central Athens, about 500 supporters of a hard-line Orthodox movement staged a protest to denounce the conference and other initiatives, such as Greek government plans to build Athens' first mosque in more than 170 years.

The Greek Orthodox Movement for Salvation saw the WCC gathering as an affront to Orthodoxy's role as one of the most visible links to early Christian worship.

Banners read: "No to the pan-religious heretical congress" and "The Church is Orthodox: Every other church and religion are machinations of the devil."

end quotes

I don't worship no devils, myself, so, I guess they're not talking to me, above here!

SO?

I wonder who?

And here, America, I think that I am going to be doing what I do periodically, anyway, which is to just shift direction, because it is time to do so!

As one of America's disabled combat veterans, I have to stand up right now, in all seriousness, and salute George W. Bush for the efforts that he is making right now, on behalf of democracy, in a place like Georgia, where people, LIKE US, can now emerge from under some foreign yoke of tyranny, and live their lives, as God intended, or fate, or nothing at all, if God and fate offend you.

And it is good to hear George W. Bush finally speaking for himself, instead of through some spokesperson.

And so, for the moment, to me, at least, George W. Bush can now ride off into the sunset, largely with peace from me, because of this "GOOD-WILL AMBASSADOR" role that he is now playing, out there on the world stage right now, as a kind of POPE of peace, and I do not mean that in any other but a complementary fashion!

Do it every day, George, is what I say, because God only knows, it is a message this world is crying to hear, especially after these last four years of stress, and strife, and turmoil, out there in the world, and here at home, as well.

SO!

George, Vias Con Dios!

And keep the lights of freedom shining in the world, and that's not a bad legacy to leave behind at all!

No, sir, no way!

I just made this post over in my thread on the "Right to Dissent" in the JUDICIAL portion of this forum, and since it applies to where my thoughts are right now, I would like to re-post it in here, because I believe it is now the time to do so:

Last night, I was reading in a book that I am studying, entitled "The Glorious Cause, The American Revolution, 1763-1789", by Robert Middlekauff, about Thomas Jefferson, and what exactly was alleged to be on his mind, back in the days of the American Revolution, when he said in the American Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, when there were slaves in America who most certainly were not equal to the slave holders and overseers; and the Indians, of course, who were there to be eradicated, and so, could not have been given any Constitutional protection that would have gotten in the way of that eradication process!

Because of this reality, and it was, PEOPLE in OUR America dismiss the Declaration of Independence, therefore, as rank hypocrisy, AND IT IS NOT!

Not as I understand the mind of Jefferson, anyway, and the rich legacy that his intellect has left us here, in OUR America of this day, right now, where I am sitting at this computer talking about Thomas Jefferson, and his impact as a single human being, on the richness of OUR lives as not only Americans, but literally, the lives of people in every other nation on the face of this earth that craves democracy.

Compared to the times that we live in today, those times were brutal, indeed, and it went far beyond slavery, which was brutality and beastiality, personified.

The man who wrote "Amazing Grace" had been a captain on a slave ship, and it made him sick to his very soul!

Anyway, to me, an older American who has been aware of and in awe of Thomas Jefferson since I was 10, anyway, it is my belief that while Thomas Jefferson knew at the time the Declaration of Independence was being written that his words would be seen as being hypocritical, that he was really trusting in OUR love of liberty, to get beyond that, and to look insted to what he gave us, WHICH WAS A VEHICLE TOWARDS A MORE PERFECT UNION, 24/7!

AN UNDYING BEACON OF HOPE AND FREEDOM is what OUR Constitution is to me, and shall remain so, until the day that I die!

Or that is how I take it anyway, and as a disabled combat veteran, I can claim my right to my own interpretation of the United States Constitution, so long as I am always ready to be subjected to a challenge, and I am!

That is what this thread is all about, actually, to talk about the United States Constitution, and how it either still protects us today, or has started to fail to protect us today, in which case some type of citizen corrective action is needed, and that comes directly to me, from the United States Supreme Court, itself, in these words above, about "The United States Supreme Court has read the preamble as bearing witness to the fact that the Constitution emanated from the people and was not the act of sovereign and independent States!"

WE, all of us in here, ARE THE PEOPLE!

ALL OF US!

EQUALLY!

Elsewise, there can be no real LIBERTY, for anyone, when there is class distinction, and one class MUST be in perpetutity always subject to the whim of another, without recourse to justice!

I, America, a disabled combat veteran from the Viet Nam war, am with Thomas Jefferson in that statement, and when I volunteered for America's military, and took the oath to protect and defend the Constituion, I meant what I said, when I took that oath!

All of my actions afterwards, to this date, have been in accordance with that oath!

THIS APPEAL is in accordance with that oath, OR IT WOULD BE A WASTE OF MY TIME!

After all, WHY do something to simply lose?

It makes no sense!

Not when the stakes are this high, especially!

SO!

Please, stay tuned, the CONSTITUTION and laws that we are talking about in here, ARE YOURS!

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS ARE TONIGHT, AMERICA?

Should you?

To be continued ......

And good morning, once again, America, and the candid world, as well.

Another day has dawned, where I am, and so, once again, life proceeds forward, on whatever path it shall take for not only me, but for all of us, as well, today, and by tonight, well, perhaps we'll have an inkling of where that might have been.

But for now .......

As for me, I am practicing "going forth softly, amid the noise, haste and confusion", and that for me, as a disabled veteran, is my full-time job!

Practicing strategic non-interference and outright avoidance, whenever I can, especially when the days are so heavenly as they are up here when spring finally breaks, and the air smells so sweet!

Of course, I am out in the country, and so, it still does, the air, that is, smell "sweet", some days, anyway, and yesterday was one of those days!

SO!

What does any of that have to do with anything?

Who knows!

But I like the sweet-smelling spring air, and I thought I would share that thought with whomever felt like listening.

These days, I am involved in an intensive study of the United States Constitution, because in truth, after all these years, I am still curious as to the relation, IF ANY, between the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, which are two completely different documents, OR ARE THEY?

And I don't ask that as an idle question!

Of course, the Declaration of Independence was a singular document in the modern world, anyway, and so, it means what it means today, to whomever!

The Constitution, on the other hand, is either a piece of paper with some words on it, basically a "dead document" that froze time somewhere between 1776 and 1787, or it is a "LIVING, BREATHING ORGANIC LAW" that transcends time, and place, and continues, all these years after 1787, to provide US, the PEOPLE, with OUR liberties!

ONE!

Or the other, but not both, at the same time, and this really is a question for OUR times today, and tomarrow, and to me, a disabled veteran, this question about WHAT OUR CONSTITUTION is going to be for us tomarrow is an all-important question right now, AND WE, by and large, do not even know that the question is being raised, so busy are we with OUR own daily lives, here in OUR America!

As for me, of course, I am now older, and out of the hurley-burley, and hustle and bustle of daily "consumer-oriented" life, here in OUR America, and so, I guess, I am afforded a time in my own life in which to be a "slow thinker", which means someone who has time to ponder the question before snapping out an answer, because I really had to be someplace else five minutes ago, and don't really have the time to think, about anything!

And so, for the moment, anyway, I am going to continue along this historical line of thought in here, because my purpose in having this thread is in part to have an on-going dialogue WITH AMERICA, and the candid world, that is educational, and enlightening, at the same time!

I am not by nature a "bitcher", or "complainer", and my own preferred mode of existence would be to live where "never is heard, a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day", as an old cowboy song from the days of my own youth used to say, but that was then ......

And this is now!

Sometimes, perhaps all the time, life calls on us, as individuals, to stand up, and be counted for something, and since I am in here, inside, tapping away on these computer keys right now, talking about OUR Constitution, as opposed to being outside, breathing in the sweet spring air one more day, I guess I have given away where I am with that equation, and so, it is true!

Yes, America, I do believe that I have some purpose in speaking these words as this vaporous or etherial or virtual presence in here, or else, these words wouldn't be posted in here in the first place, as they come more through me, than from me, and they are for posterity:

"To the people of the future, this is who we were back then, and while we were not perfect, perhaps, we did believe in goodness, and so, we persevered in that direction, and so, this is what you have inherited, in your lifetime, from the fruits of OUR labors, in OURS!"

LIFE, in OUR America!

Live, late-breaking!

SO!

Please!

Don't touch that dial, we'll be right back, and soon!

In 1969, March, to be exact, my own personal life was to be altered forever, for me, by a literal instant of time, when the warhead of an RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade went off right behind my head in Viet Nam, and left me quite seriously wounded with rocket warhead fragments embedded in my neck, near my spine!

In that time, and since that time, of course, I have had a lot of time in which to consider what life in the real slow lane is all about, well, because I am in the real slow lane!

Being a disabled person in here, of course, is easy!

There is no limited access for disabled persons in here, because in here, we are ethereal, and hence, our disabilities cannot follow us in here, unless we let them!

And I choose not to do so, and so ....

SO?

Why do I mention that I am a disabled veteran?

Well, that's easy!

Because I am!

And that shapes who I am in here, the perspectives that I personally have, especially as to the Constitution, which is supposed to protect the weak from the powerful!

If, of course, you are one of the powerful, then likely you don't see things about the Constitution from my perspective, because you are at the other end of a spectrum from me.

And this is really what this discussion in here right now about the Constitution is all about - WHERE DID IT COME FROM, and how does it operate to protect us, the weak in OUR America, from the strong?

Or does it?

And if it doesn't, then does it need fixing?

Or should it be left exactly as it was the moment of its final drafting, back in 1787?

A question for OUR times!

SO!

Please!

Stay tuned.

It came to me last night, as I continue my study of the United States Constitution, that there is a much different relationship between the original 13 colonies and OUR federal government, than there is for all the rest of the states in the United States, and I got to wondering about that, to be truthful, how that might unite us, versus how that actually serves to divide us, as to our various interests as citizens of the separate states, each presumably with its own Constitution that might alter in some essential ways the protections afforded to the various states by the United States Constitution, was was ratified TEN YEARS AFTER New York State's own Constitution was adopted by the people of this state.

For ten years, New York State was in essence its own "sovereign nation", confederated with the other twelve colonies through the Articles of Confederation, but independent in all ways, from them, except in the common cause of winning this fledgling nation's independence from England.

Thus, in 1787, the United States Constitution was deemed as taking away from New York State sovereign power that it held as an independent "nation" on the face of this earth, after the Declaration of Independence, and during the American Revolution, and so, two of New York State's delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia walked out, which effectively left New York State's citizens without representation in that body!

SO!

All these years later, what does that mean?

IS the United States Constitution really inoperative in New York State, as some say, because New York State was really a sovereign and independent nation ten years before the present federal frame of government came into being?

Or was that independent nation of New York really absorbed into the federal system in 1787, when the United States Constitution was ratified?

We up here are presently facing these questions, of course, BECAUSE of a federal lawsuit that I am discussing over in the JUDICIAL part of this forum, where the operation, or inoperation, of the United States Constitution in the State of New York is directly at issue, right now, today.

And what an education this has been for us!

And so, from time to time, I am going to continue to discuss aspects of this matter in here, as they do, to me, affect whether we here in OUR America can ever really have any common grounds, when we are dealing with each other across state boundaries where we might not all be equal, in the eyes of the law!

Europe

"Bush: ‘Georgia has come a long way’ - President says ex-Soviet republic an inspiring new democracy"

Jim Watson / AFP - Getty Images
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, right, holds up President Bush's hand in front of a crowd at Freedom Square in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, on Tuesday.

• 'Beacon of liberty'

May 10: President Bush hails the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia as an inspiration to fledgling democracies.

The Associated Press
Updated: 10:04 a.m. ET May 10, 2005

TBILISI, Georgia - President Bush, before a cheering crowd of tens of thousands of people, said Tuesday that the former Soviet republic of Georgia is proving to the world that determined people can rise up and claim their freedom from oppressive rulers.

“Your courage is inspiring democratic reformers and sending a message that echoes across the world: Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth,” Bush said in speech from the Freedom Square that symbolizes the city’s democratic pursuits.

“You gathered here armed with nothing but roses and the power of your convictions and you claimed your liberty. and because you acted, Georgia is today both sovereign and free and a beacon of liberty for this region and the world.”

Crowd gives warm reception

Bush spoke to a massive crowd that filled Freedom Square — known as Lenin Square during Soviet rule — and spilled out into the roads that feed into the plaza.

The buildings around the square were freshly painted for Bush’s visit, the first from a U.S. president, and hundreds of people dressed in red, white and blue stood in a human formation of the U.S. flag, with another group forming the red and white Georgian flag.

“When Georgians gathered here 16 years ago, this square had a different name,” Bush said.

“Under Lenin’s steely gaze, thousands of Georgians prayed and sang and demanded their independence."

"The Soviet Army crushed that day of protest, but they could not crust the spirit of the Georgian people.”

He hoped the speech would balance his presence a day earlier at a World War II victory celebration in Moscow’s Red Square and close his four-nation trip on a high note.

Bush offers backing on key issues

Bush declined to support the bid of two separatist regions — Abkhazia and South Ossetia — to gain independence from Georgia, instead lending his backing to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s plan to give the areas some autonomy but keep them within the country.

“He wants the country to remain intact,” Bush said.

In a gesture to Moscow, Bush urged Saakashvili to use peaceful means to settle the dispute and said he’d be willing to make a phone call or two to help resolve the conflict if his assistance is requested.

“I’m confident that the government of Georgia has got a good strategy to move forward to resolve the disputes,” Bush said.

But he added: “The United States cannot impose a solution nor would you want us to.”

The president said he talked in Moscow earlier this week with Putin about Georgia’s demand for the closure of two Russian bases in this country.

The long-simmering dispute over the bases has strained relations between Georgia and its giant neighbor.

He noted that Russia has agreed to leave and expressed confidence that a timetable can be agreed upon.

“I think that’s a commitment that’s important for the people of Georgia to hear,” Bush said.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said it could take up to four years to build the barracks, garages and other infrastructure in Russia to handle the servicemen and materiel that would be withdrawn from Georgia.

Saakashvili, who did not attend Monday’s Victory in Europe Day celebration in Red Square over the base issue, wants the troops sent back to Russia more quickly.

Looking West

Bush gave a public boost to Saakashvili’s desire to see his country turn further West by joining organizations such as NATO.

“The Rose Revolution was a powerful moment in modern history,” Bush said.

“It not only inspired the people of Georgia, it inspired others around the world that want to live in a free society."

“I think we’ll look back at this moment in history and marvel at the courage of a people who have said ‘I want generations to grow up in a hopeful world.’"

"And so, Mr. President, thank you for setting such a good example — you and your people.”

Bush said the Georgian leader realizes that much work remains to ensure an independent judiciary, rule of law and a free media “so that no one will ever be able to overturn democracy.”

“He (Saakashvili) was complaining about the media, which is a good sign,” the president said.

“It means you’re free."

"I sometimes complain about ours, but not too publicly of course.”

Bush and his wife, Laura, received an extraordinary welcome Monday night in the Georgian capital.

The motorcade route was filled with cheering Georgians.

Hundreds of performers in colorful costumes whirled, leapt, stomped and danced through traditional routines staged in a narrow, cobblestone street in the city’s Old Town section.

Buildings had been freshly painted and roads newly paved.

Fireworks erupted above ancient churches.

The president smiled, clapped and even shook his hips.

Despite the effusive welcome, however, Bush is delivering his speech behind bulletproof glass — a security measure prompted by ongoing fights in the separatist regions, military campaigns against terrorists in the Pankisi Gorge and the recent abductions of foreigners.

And as I said above, I am glad to hear George W. Bush making all of these various statements about DEMOCRACY, and the answer as to why that is, is easy to discern - BECAUSE IT MAKES OUR OWN CAUSE FOR TRUE DEMOCRACY HERE IN OUR AMERICA that much stronger, when you think about it, since we do not have true democracy here in OUR America right now, which is one of the issues that is under discussion in here, these days.

And whether or not George W. Bush is really sincere is immaterial, since it is the import of the words actually spoken by Mr. Bush as American president that are important, and not his sincerity in saying the words, at least in my opinion, since if George W. Bush is speaking out for democracy in the world, the more he says will make it that much harder for his own party here in OUR America to deny us democracy, and to me, that is a victory for us!

SO!

Please keep speaking out, Mr. Bush!

Your encouragement to us, here in OUR America, to keep actively seeking OUR own liberties and democracy is very much necessary, to keep people motivated in that direction, and appreciated, since it lets us old folks in here know that we are on the right path, for sure!

And meanwhile, back on the home front, gross ineptness and incompetence in OUR government under the tutelage of Mr. George W. Bush and his pack of REPUBLICANS still seems to reign supreme, which is all the more reason for us old folks in here to continue to press for much needed reforms, here in OUR own government, as George W. Bush is encouraging all these other beleaguered peoples of the world to do:

Terrorism & Security

"Counterfeit badges pose ‘serious’ security risk - Fakes include FBI, Secret Service, DEA and Air Marshal badges"

By Brock N. Meeks
Chief Washington correspondent
MSNBC

Updated: 5:31 p.m. ET May 11, 2005

Tuesday’s success story about government agents seizing counterfeit badges has turned into Wednesday’s nightmare.

An unknown number of those badges are now in the hands of criminals, according to federal officials.

Earlier this week agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security seized more than 1,300 “high-quality counterfeit” badges from 35 different federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, according to a statement ICE released Wednesday.

Among the fakes nabbed by ICE are those resembling badges of the FBI, the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the New York Police Department and even the Federal Air Marshal Service, the agency assigned to protect commercial air travel.

And that’s the good news.

The bad news:

“This seizure has serious Homeland Security and public safety implications, given that these counterfeit badges may have been intended for use by criminals and others with no legal authority to carry law enforcement badges,” ICE said in a statement.

And ICE has no idea how many of those fake badges may already be in the hands of criminals.

“We’re examining that closely,” said Manny Van Pelt, an ICE spokesman.

“It is obviously a serious security issue.”

ICE is asking the public to be on the alert and to report anyone “displaying, using or distributing” phony badges.

But such warnings beg the question: how does one know when a badge or credential is bogus?

“Typically, you won’t see both [badge and printed credential] together” if the person is using a fake badge, Van Pelt, said, noting that an impostor will likely be using either the credentials or the badge.

And the badge number should match that printed on the credential, he said.

In the post-9/11 era, concerns about the use of counterfeit badges, uniforms and credentials have taken on a new urgency.

There is even a well-worn urban myth about the security risk posed by the theft of thousands of UPS driver uniforms.

And just last month New York City hospitals were warned by the Department of Homeland Security to be on the lookout for people posing as inspectors.

“These said individuals were attempting to gain public health service information from hospital personnel, and behaved in a manner inconsistent with legitimate inspection professionals,” the DHS bulletin said.

For the general public it is nearly impossible to tell a fake badge or credential from the real thing.

To make matters worse, many federal agents are still carrying what are technically obsolete credentials.

This is owing to the fact that so many of these federal law enforcement agencies merged into new entities when the Department of Homeland Security was created on March 1, 2003.

Indeed, even ICE’s own agents—most of which come from the old Customs and INS branches--haven’t received their new credentials, Van Pelt acknowledged.

“We’re literally going to turn a corner on this thing shortly,” Van Pelt said, indicating that the new credentials should be issued soon.

end quotes

My God, WHAT A PACK OF BUFFOONS!

And people in America think we are safe?

HAH!

Well, America!

Here we are once again, and so it goes!

Each day, of course, is its own day, and each day brings to each of us, here in OUR America, and the world, as well, what it will, sometimes because we wanted it that way, and sometimes, just because .......

And we will never know, in advance, because ......

SO?

What then do we do?

Some years ago, when I was younger, after Viet Nam, I spent some time in the mountains in Wyoming, a place that I dearly love, and while I will not tout myself as a "cowboy", in some senses of that word, for a while, I was, at least long enough to know that if you are up on the back of a bucking horse when he is bucking, essentially, you either stay in the saddle, or you get bucked off into the dust, or sagebrush, if you are unlucky, and that is that!

And so, that is pretty much how I go through life, taking what comes to me as what I must face that moment, and for me, that works!

My mind is not on where I was last year, although I retain that "awareness", and it is not on where I will be next month, or next year, it is on where the "saddle" is, and where my posterior is at any given time with respect to that "saddle", and so it goes.

And that "view" affects how I see not only life, but this "thing" called the United States Constitution, and this other thing of "CONSERVATISM" that is seemingly sweeping this country right now, like a tsunami, itself.

I suppose that in a lot of ways, I myself am a traditional American, which would cause me to be labeled a "conservative", but that is just a label!

If a "conservative" was a cowboy, and his horse started bucking, what would he do?

Determine that because the horse was not bucking five minutes ago, and that it is his horse, which should not be bucking, BECAUSE A CONSERVATIVE WOULD NEVER OWN A BUCKING HORSE IN THE FIRST PLACE, that the horse was not in fact bucking, when in fact, all the specatotors, can see that it is really bucking?

When I was in Viet Nam, I saw people die of what I will call "unbelief", or perhaps disbelief, that they just had been seriously wounded, and were on their way to dying, UNLESS RIGHT NOW, they came to grips with reality, and tried to change it, BY AN EXERCISE OF THEIR WILL ALONE!

My best friend died in Viet Nam, in that sort of fashion, actually, after having been very seriously wounded when an ambush was "sprung" on our infantry company right where he happened to be at that time.

He laid there, without an arm and a leg, with sucking chest wounds, for quite a while, actually, bleeding to death, and then, he was gone, and I wonder to this day if he was ever really able to comprehend that as nice a person as he was, and he was one of the most decent people that I have ever had the grace to meet on this earth of ours, that regardless, he had just been killed by the gross incompetence of OUR infantry company commander, who had fumbled the company right into one of the best ambushes that I have ever seen!

Me, on the other hand, being a sceptic, survived wounds from another ambush, BECAUSE I KNEW that I was very seriously hurt, and I DID NOT BELIEVE THAT ANYONE WAS GOING TO DO A THING ABOUT THAT, if I could not.

And so, my best friend is a name on a wall down there in Washington, D.C., and I am here, remembering him, because I am not a "believer" by nature, while he was!

Funny how it goes, actually!

I looked up to this friend of mine for his simple faith in life, and the goodness of people, and in the end, that faith in the common sense of this infantry captain got him blown to bits.

And this person maybe should have known better, but who can say?

As for me, when I feel that saddle suddenly accelerating upwards into my posterior regions, my thought is that I am now on a bucking horse, unless me and the horse are being "raptured" up together, which is a second possibility, I guess, and so, I act accordingly, which is to stay in the saddle, either way, until I know that once again, the horse's hooves are back down on the ground, or that we are securely in heaven, and so ....

To be continued!

Stay tuned.

Another very moving tale, Livyjr.

I believe that it is a good thing to have faith. But that faith must not be misplaced. If you put your life in someone's hands, those hands had better be reliable.

OUR nation may have made the same mistake as your friend. We are being led through dangerous territory by one of the most incompetent bunch of weasels on the planet. And they don't care if we get ambushed - - they've got theirs, so the hell with us.

And here, jeffmoskin, is why I continue this thread, so that we can hear thoughts like yours expressed, and have therefore, an opportunity, to have to consider them, which I always find quite enlightening, to hear what others are thinking about these times that we all find ourselves in!

That is the truest purpose of this thread, to be a modern Livy tale, if you will, for posterity, whoever, and whereever and whenever that may be.

To the people of the future, this is what we, your forebears in liberty, were thinking on this very day, at this very minute, and this is why that was!

SO!

Make of this what you will, but make of it from as full a record as is possible.

As an American who is older than I, jeffmoskin has seen and experienced more life than I have, in certain ways, and so, I take the time to listen to his words, in order to discern his meaning.

And while our usage of "verbiage" may vary, weasels, for instance, which is a west coast term, I have to agree with jeffmoskin's sentiment, in my own east coast way!

I think America is poised at some brink that I cannot yet define with enough verbal accuracy as to make it readily comprehensible, but NEVER have I seen America in the hands of such grossly negligent incompetents, from the dog catcher right on up and through the Pentagon and right on into the White House itself!

It is as if OUR America had been taken over by locusts!

Where I am in OUR America, I literally feel like the Dutch boy walking by the leaking dike, and counting all the holes, versus his available fingers, and toes, and realizing that at a good steady walk, he might reach the high ground in time to barely escape the flood, and so .....

Up here, at least, these next few months are going to be quite telling, and that is something that just has to be talked about, a little each day, to really be understood, and in a lot of ways, it is going to be a eulogy for life in OUR America, as once it was, in the days of OUR youth!

SO!

Please!

Stay tuned for further developments, as they happen!

Live!

Late-breaking!

Life in OUR America.

Isn't that what this "culture of guilt" thing is all about? Where have we heard that phrase before?

BTW, Livyjr, I'm borrowing one of your posts for a preliminary and admittedly speculative analysis of "How Operation Paperclip Destroyed America." If you have anything more on involvement of Dulles et al. with the Nazis, please feel free to PM me; as has been noted the actions of Prescott aren't quite as relevant since it was long before the Bushes got involved in government. Dulles(es) on, the other hand....

In leafing back through, I stumbled on this again (I did read it at time of intial posting) and since it's foundational to what I'm now attempting, it naturally seemed to more urgently demand a response.

What happened? Or what can I PROVE? In my view, something VERY earthshaking, and possibly Americashattering happened that day: the folks REALLY running this country under Ike regained the control they'd lost just over three years previously by a little over a hundred thousand votes. In my view, neo-cons are nothing new; a small Cabal has been running the Greedy Old Party, and, through them, trying to run the country since '52. It's always been the same folks: Bushes, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and a certain other fellow. Has anyone else heard about a certain Mr. Cox who's formed an exploratory committee to investigate a Senate run against Hillary Clinton? Perhaps his more famous wife: Tricia Nixon?

I haven't been a true Democrat for some time; I'm merely in favor of ANYTHING that deposes this Cabal, which is trying to worm its way into the other major party as well. theroyprocess has some confirming data on how far back it goes. You can tell who's involved and who's just a pawn by who sticks around. The names have been retained to reveal the guilty.

Follow up: the MLK-->JFK/RFK cnnxn is MLKs role in bringing out the black vote in '60. MLK went to see the President in early '63 to point out the disproportionate number of African-American casualties, and explain that if the President wanted re-election support he would take steps to rectify this. The story goes that a memo hit the Presidents desk in the spring that he was never supposed to see, one detailing projected casualties through years end and the following year. So JFK made an executive decision to begin a gradual withdrawal. Then he went to Dallas....

Moscow accuses foreign spies of funding "revolution" in Belarus Xinhua

And welcome once again, Morambar!

And I am glad to see that you are still "in the fray", as it were here, and I am glad to also see you "stretching" your intellect a bit here, to consider what might be known in any given situation, versus what might ever be proved, and proving things is damn nigh impossible, all too many times, just because it is, and so, where does that really leave us?

A point that you, and all of us must always consider, Morambar, is that as long as there are three people, anywhere on the face of the earth, two of them will always be involved in a conspiracy against the third!

And so that goes!

BUT .....

What does that mean to the rest of us?

That, Morambar, was where I was trying to focus your attention, especially in here, which truly is international in scope, since I know there are viewers in here from other nations in Europe, who either are just curious about us Americans, or else are outright concerned as to who or what we may really be turning into, which is another attempt at the "THOUSAND YEAR REICH", and the "WUNDERKIND".

IF there are all these "conspiracies" out there, and I don't discount that there are, how does that really affect us, IF we cannot prove these conspiracies, or especially, if proving these conspiracies does not lend itself to doing a thing about them?

That is why I myself don't really spend much time on conspiracies, because like the black flies that are biting up here right now, these conspiracies are just another part of the tapestry, and I am not the weaver!

I am merely a spectator, and every now and then, why, yes, I do get bit!

Yesterday, in fact, I sat in on a conversation between a younger person and an older person on 9-11 and Illuminati conspiracies, and in large part, it was like watching an argument between a Russian shouting in Russian at a Greek who was in turn shouting Greek at the Russian, while being shouted at in Russian, by the Russian, who was being shouted at in Greek, and neither can understand the other, except for the shouting.

"Hey Sergei, what for you yell at the Greek, eh?"

"Because he was barking like a dog at me!"

And there it is.

Illuminati conspiracies!

They're going to take over the world in 2010!

Well, okay!

Then what are they going to do with it?

There is the problem with conspiracy theories, Morambar, which is why I don't spend a lot of time on them!

Now, that is not to discourage you in any way!

Rather, it is to get you to expand even more your thought processes here, and consider the minds of your intended audience, which is always virtual in here, anyway, and often times, does not give you any feedback that allows you to know if your message has "sunk in" or not.

I don't know about anyone else, of course, but as for me, I was alive when JFK got "popped", and I know my thoughts from that moment, and it was and remains my thought that somebody had just killed Kennedy because he got in somebody's way, and stepped on somebody's feet that did not like getting stepped on!

Simply that.

Do I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed him?

Not really!

Do I believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill him?

I have no proof of that, and so, I have no real belief one way or the other, but I have great doubts, since I was alive the day before, and the day before that, and all of that leads me to where my thoughts are on that matter today.

And then, I don't dwell on it, since Kennedy is dead, and time has gone by, and so .....

As to your theories, Morambar, as you are younger than I, and so, are part of a different generation that will have to brace itself for some 30 or more years of life, here in OUR America, I must encourage you to do two things, to wit:

* keep thinking, and digging; and

* be ever critical of your own self as you do so, as you are a spokesperson for your generation, and you want to be as effective in that role as you can be, for the good of posterity!

At the time of this nation's founding, there were first Whigs and Tories, and they did not see eye-to-eye on things, and then there were Federalists and anti-Federalists, and they did not see eye-to-eye, and now, there are CONSERVATIVES and regular Americans, and we do not see eye-to-eye, and so it will always be, Morambar, and this is what you must consider in your researches - CUI BONO?

And I think you are right about old "Cottie" Bush himself being nothing more than a bit player in this drama that was played out back then, and yes, dig into those Dulles boys, because your instincts seem to be leading you from chaff to wheat, and so, you must follow along some further, to see where the trail really does go.

As we old folks say in here, endeavor to persevere!

Ah, the young among us!

And boy, did I ever think that I would be saying that?

Each of us, of course, in here, really knows nothing at all about who the others in here really are, assuming that there even is anyone else in here, and so, we don't really know WHY people are listening to our words, since we cannot see those people to watch the expressions on their faces as we are talking, which is how I look at what I am doing in here, when I am writing these words!

It is a lot like talking to a wall!

I have had more than a few conversations with real people out there about coming "in here" to "talk" about life in OUR America, or whatever, and I find that people are very reticent about doing so, precisely because of the lack of feedback in here, which intimidates people in some seeming fundamental manner.

As for me, I actually "feel" quite comfortable in here, but that is me.

If somebody listens in, that is alright!

If nobody cares for a single thing that I have to say, that is equally alright, because both ways, I learn, and so, am a better person for having indulged in the exercise, but again, that is simply me.

I really do believe that this particular forum has revolutionized "life" for us TODAY, not only here in OUR America, but in the world as well, and so, I try to be somewhat circumspect in what I say, or maybe, more, how I say what I am going to say, because my purpose is not to shock people, but rather, to stir awareness, and in the course of doing that, to continue to learn more and more about this world that we all inhabit, BECAUSE WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME, NOR DO I BELIEVE THAT WE EVER SHOULD BE!

In a healthy environment, diversity flourishes!

Without diversity, the environment becomes unhealthy!

Simple math, so why disturb the equation?

"Violent Protests Break Out in Uzbekistan"

By BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA, Associated Press Writer

10 minutes ago

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan - Outrage over the terror trial of 23 Muslims exploded into broader unrest in eastern Uzbekistan on Friday when armed protesters stormed a jail to free defendants, clashing with police in violence that brought thousands of protesters into the streets.

At least nine people were killed and dozens wounded, witnesses and officials said.

One protester, who put the death toll as high as 20, said 30 soldiers were being held hostage because they were shooting at demonstrators.

Two of the dead were children, Sharif Shakirov, a brother of one of the defendants told The Associated Press.

President Islam Karimov and other top officials rushed to the eastern city of Andijan, where the government insisted it remained in control despite the chaos, though it blocked foreign news reports for its domestic audience.

Andijan is in the Fergana Valley, where Islamist sentiment is high, provoking tensions with the secular government that tolerates only officially approved Muslim observances.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, linked to al-Qaida and the Taliban, fought for establishment of an Islamic state in the valley in the late 1990s and concerns are high that Fergana could be a flashpoint for destabilizing wide swathes of ex-Soviet Central Asia.

The unrest prompted neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, which also share the valley, to seal their borders.

"The people have risen," said Valijon Atakhonjonov, a brother of another one of the defendants.

Karimov's office said nine people were killed and 34 wounded in clashes between protesters and security forces.

Protesters stormed the prison overnight, apparently after attacking a military unit to get weapons, officials and witnesses said.

All 23 defendants — prominent businessmen accused of terror ties and Islamic extremism — were freed, said defendant Abduvosid Egomov, 33.

Egomov, pale and thin, was holed up in a local government compound that had been overrun by protesters, who were breaking up pavement stones to reinforce a metal fence surrounding the compound, to stave off security forces.

"We are not going to overthrow the government."

"We demand economic freedom," Egomov told The Associated Press.

"If the army is going to storm, if they're going to shoot, we are ready to die instead of living as we are living now."

"The Uzbek people have been reduced to living like dirt," Egomov said.

The trial, which has provoked some of the angriest demonstrations yet against the authoritarian government, is part of a broad government crackdown on religious dissent.

Thousands of Muslims have been jailed in Uzbekistan over the past few years in a government campaign that critics say has affected many innocent believers and only inflamed anger against Karimov's harsh rule.

Uzbeks in recent weeks have shown increasing willingness to challenge their leadership, apparently bolstered by the March uprising in Kyrgyzstan that drove out President Askar Akayev and by the so-called Orange and Rose Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.

Shakirov told the AP that the jailbreak was triggered by news that security services on Thursday had started rounding up people who had been involved in a sit-in outside the court where the trial was taking place.

On the square outside the local administration building, thousands of protesters were massed in front of a podium where protest organizers addressed the crowd.

Some had Kalashnikov automatic rifles strapped across their chests.

Shakirov said that protesters on Friday had repulsed several attempts by the army to storm the regional administration building they have held in Andijan since shortly after midnight.

Many of the men wore square black embroidered skullcaps, while some were in the white skullcaps favored by observant Muslim Uzbeks.

Young men handed out round flatbreads.

The protesters had posted their own guards on the edge of the square.

A nearby theater and cinema were burning, and a group of protesters examined the remains of burned-out car.

In the capital, Tashkent, on Friday a suspected suicide bomber was shot and killed outside the Israeli Embassy on Friday morning, according to the U.S. Embassy, but it was unclear if the incident had any link to the unrest in Andijan.

Uzbekistan, a key U.S. ally after the Sept. 11 attacks, hosts hundreds of U.S. troops.

The men, arrested in June, are accused of being members of the Akramia religious group and having contacts with the outlawed radical Islamic party Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Authorities accuse Hizb-ut-Tahrir of inspiring terror attacks in Uzbekistan last year that killed more than 50.

The group, which claims to eschew violence, denied responsibility.

Akramia unites followers of jailed Uzbek Islamic dissident Akram Yuldashev, who was accused of calling for the overthrow of the predominantly Muslim country's secular government — an accusation he denies.

The group's members are considered the backbone of Andijan's small business community, giving employment to thousands of people in the impoverished and densely populated Fergana Valley.

end quotes

I wonder which side of this George W. Bush is going to come down on?

Probably the side with the boot!

The definitive piece on this is "The Unauthorized Biography

http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm

You can read it on line... for free




The "neo-cons" grabbed control of the GOP in the 1964 election. Now, granted, I've always felt that the mainstream "Mainstreet" repubs let them do it because, well, who in his right mind wanted to go up against LBJ?

Which brings us to people NOT in their right minds - - -the neo cons.

Read their statement of purpose in 1964:

get rid of social security.
Cut taxes on the rich
Eliminate taxes on Corporations.
Bomb Viet Nam back to the Stone Age.

Barry Goldwater (who was a pretty good Senator) lost every state but AZ.

The neo cons, beaten but not defeated, regrouped and, for 40 years have built up a powerful infrastructure of "think tanks" whose main job it has been to introduce "framing language" into mainstream Americanese that solidifies their points of view. Their "guest experts" are prominently featured on the Sunday Gasbag Shows: American Enterprise Inst., Cato Inst., Heritage Found., Family Research Council...

There must be 100 of these out there.

George Lakoff is the expert on this: "Try not to think of an elephant" is his book.

Look at the "frames" already in our everyday language:

Tax Relief (you become the tax oppressor when you argue)
Pro Life (is anyone against life?)
Activist Judges (unites anti abortion people with southern bigots)
Free Trade ( free for Busniess, costly for your employment)
Permission Slip (we'll declare WAR when we damn well feel like it)

the list goes on and on.

My point is, the neocons did not just appear like a plague of locusts. They have been doing their homework for 40 years.

And we have not.

jeffmoskin, here, you are on your game, with this political analysis right above here!

But I wonder, if you yourself had not "been there", as it were, would this be apparent to you?

The times here in the late-1960's to mid-1970's, were very different compared to the times of today, and the politics of those times, especially in 1968, when there was what I thought was some serious blood shed in the streets of Chicago, those politics of those times were inextricably linked to the times themselves, which were like a swirling kaliedoscope of very rapid change, here in OUR America, in a very short amount of time, like 10 years, perhaps!

1967!

The Dow Riots out in Madison, Wisconsin, over the use of napalm in Viet Nam!

Serious bloodshed!

A unit of the famed United States First Infantry Division, "Big Red One", walks into a well set-up ambush up around the Tay Ninh/Dao Tiang area northwest of Saigon, and the son of a WWII "fighting general" is killed, as was fomer West Point football stand-out Donald "Holly" Holleder, who died that day running towards the fires his unit lay dying in.

More serious bloodshed!

And it shaped the politics of that day in ways that are difficult to describe, except to say that these events, and especially the loss of the "Black Lions" in Viet Nam, were like body blows coming in to our administration at that time, and it was simply reeling, like a punch-drunk, washed-up old pug!

Nobody in charge knew what to do, and everyone watching knew that, including Giap!

It was right out there in the open, for everyone to see, thanks to TV: America is ruled by madmen and incompetents who have got us marched into a jungle meatgrinder that we are not going to come out alive of, on the other side!

And they fumbled, and fumbled, and fumbled, and then lost!

And now, because of that, we have the politics of today, which are reactionary politics, knee-jerk politics!

The politics of the times!

The only way to change the politics, is to know the times that are causing the politics to be, and then, change the times, and the politics must follow!

jeffmoskin's LAW OF POLITICAL EVOLUTION!

Well done, jeffmoskin, well done, indeed!

And speaking of George W. Bush, and the "boot" coming down on these people over there in Uzbekistan who want their own "Orange" or "Rose" Revolution like the people George W. Bush is praising in Georgia had, we have as follows:

"Uzbek Protesters Killed As Soldiers Attack"

By BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA, Associated Press Writer

5 minutes ago

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan - Soldiers loyal to Uzbekistan's authoritarian leader, a U.S. ally, opened fire on thousands of demonstrators Friday to put down an uprising that began when armed men freed 2,000 inmates from prison, including suspects on trial for alleged Islamic extremism.

The death toll from a day of violence in the eastern Uzbek city was not known.

The government said nine died before the shootings in the square but gave no overall figure.

Witnesses said dozens may have been killed by the troops, who rode into the square in a truck behind an armored personnel carrier as helicopters hovered overhead.

As night fell, the gunfire died down, with most of Andijan's 350,000 people in their homes.

Authorities said security forces had regained control of the city administration building seized earlier in the day by armed protesters.

Hostages taken by the demonstrators as human shields at the building were released, a high-ranking Uzbek official said on condition he not be named.

The prison raid and the soldiers' fusillades were in sharp contrast to the largely peaceful uprisings that sparked regime changes in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in the past 18 months.

President Islam Karimov is regarded as one of the harshest leaders in the former Soviet Union and apparently favors quick and decisive action against any threats to his regime.

Uzbekistan is a key Washington ally in the war on terrorism and hosts a U.S. air base to support military operations in neighboring Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

But it also is frequently denounced by human rights groups and Western governments for torture and repression of opposition.

The White House urged restraint by the government and the demonstrators.

"The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government."

"But that should come through peaceful means not through violence, and that's what our message is," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"We have had concerns about human rights in Uzbekistan, but we are concerned about the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organization that were freed from prison."

The focus of the jailbreak were 23 men on trial on charges of being members of a group allied with the outlawed radical Islamic party Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which seeks to create a worldwide Islamic state and has been forced underground throughout most of Central Asia and Russia.

Supporters of the 23 men maintain they were victims of religious repression by Karimov's secular government.

The 23 are members of Akramia — a group named for their founder, Akram Yuldashev, an Islamic dissident sentenced in 1999 to 17 years in prison for allegedly urging the overthrow of Karimov in a pamphlet.

He has proclaimed his innocence.

Akramis are considered the backbone of Andijan's small business community, running a medical clinic and pharmacy, as well as working as furniture craftsmen, and providing employment to thousands in the impoverished Fergana Valley, where Islamist sentiment runs high.

Their trial has inspired one of the largest public shows of anger at the government.

In recent weeks, Uzbeks have shown increasing willingness to challenge the leadership in protests, apparently bolstered by the March uprising in Kyrgyzstan that drove out President Askar Akayev and similar ones in Ukraine and Georgia.

Before dawn Friday, armed supporters of the defendants raided the jail in Andijan where the men were being held, freeing all 23 as well as about 2,000 other prisoners.

A rights activist, Saidjakhon Zainabiddinov, said late Friday that some of those freed were surrendering to avoid retaliation.

During the day, thousands of people swarmed into the streets of Uzbekistan's fourth-largest city, clashing with police and seizing the administration building.

Nine people were killed in those clashes and 34 wounded, the government said, although a protest leader, Kabuljon Parpiyev, told The Associated Press the death toll could be as high as 50.

Cars were set ablaze and a nearby theaters were burning.

Two bodies laid splayed near the square — one with a stomach wound, another burned.

Several military helicopters circled overhead.

"We want to be allowed to work and do our business without hindrance," the 42-year-old Parpiyev told AP.

One of the 23 defendants, Abduvosid Egomov, was holed up in the local government compound.

"We are not going to overthrow the government."

"We demand economic freedom," Egomov told AP.

"We are ready to die instead of living as we are living now."

"The Uzbek people have been reduced to living like dirt."

Parpiyev said Interior Minister Zakir Almatov called him Friday morning and heard the protesters' demands.

He initially agreed to negotiations but said later that the offer of talks was off, the protest organizer said.

"He said, 'We don't care if 200, 300 or 400 people die.'"

"'We have force and we will chuck you out of there anyway,'" Parpiyev quoted Almatov as saying.

In the afternoon, about 4,000 protesters massed in the central square and set up a podium under a monument to Babur, an Uzbek prince, where speakers complained of unemployment and living in poverty.

For some, it was the first time in their lives they were able to speak out in public.

Protest organizers, some with Kalashnikov automatic rifles slung across their chests, took turns addressing the crowd through a microphone.

"You have a chance now to say what you've wanted to speak openly about all these years," one thin, slight speaker wearing a white Muslim cap urged the crowd.

"Come on and talk."

But shortly before dusk, the soldiers moved in and opened fire, sending the terrified demonstrators fleeing.

One man wailed, "Oh, my son!"

"He's dead!"

A witness told The Associated Press he had seen a group of about 100 protesters mowed down by gunfire as they headed to the square.

The city's hospital was cordoned off and officials could not be reached for casualty figures.

Karimov and other officials flew to Andijan during the day but returned to the capital of Tashkent on Friday night.

The government blocked foreign news reports for its domestic audience.

Uzbek authorities blame the banned party Hizb-ut-Tahrir for inspiring deadly attacks and bombings last year that killed more than 50 people in Uzbekistan.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir says it disavows violence and has denied responsibility.

A statement from Hizb-ut-Tahrir's office in London said "the blame for today's unrest lies squarely with the desperate Karimov regime whose repression of Uzbekistan's Muslims knows no bounds or limits."

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is linked to al-Qaida and the Taliban, also fought for establishment of an Islamic state in the Fergana Valley since the 1990s.

Andijan is in the Fergana Valley, and there are concerns that the region could be a flashpoint for destabilizing wide swaths of ex-Soviet Central Asia.

Uzbekistan, a nation of 26 million people, is the world's third-largest exporter of cotton.

The largely arid nation, which depends heavily on irrigation, also has some gold and oil reserves.

end quotes

As White House "SPOKESBOY" Scottie McClellan says, this is just one more shining example of what he would have us believe is DEMOCRACY on the march across the world at the behest of President George W. Bush, who just happens to be Scottie "BOY" McClellan's favorite president of all time!

This soldier firing business is what REPUBLICANS call democracy!

What an interesting use of the term that is, is what I think!

How is it government by the people when the tyranical BUSH-ally over there in Uzbekistan has his soldiers mowing down people in the streets for wanting democracy, which is government by the people?

What is it that I am missing here?

I think the BIG difference is that, since what seems like FOREVER, the democrats have controlled at least one house of congress (usually the house) and often both houses. So that while most of the presidents in the 20th century were actually repubs, they have been effectively held in check by democrats in congress. And the dems got lazy. That is why I say the neo cons have been hard at work those 40 years while we were sleeping. And now we are in trouble.

And the composition has all changed in Congress.

We are very divided as a country; the house and senate have a slim Repub majority, but with both sides holding to the party position, there is no room for deal making - - -only for rancor.

I fear for OUR America if we cannot take back the House in 06. I will work my *ss off to help bring this about. The Senate is too hard, but we CAN get the house.

And while this BUSH-ally thug over there in Uzbekistan is crushing with military might and unrestraint any thoughts of fledgling democracy taking hold over there in Uzbekistan, to be a thorn in the side of a thuggish, despotic tyrant of a BUSH-ally leader over there, what is happening to OUR own budding democracy, over here:

"Parties battle over judicial nominees with one eye toward elections"

By James Kuhnhenn, Knight Ridder Newspapers

1 hour, 20 minutes ago

WASHINGTON -The passionate intransigence of both major political parties in the Senate stalemate over a handful of judicial nominations is as much about the next election as it is about the next Supreme Court justice.

Both sides see election payoffs ahead.

Republicans are labeling Democrats as obstructionists.

Democrats are branding Republicans as arrogant power grabbers beholden to religious conservatives.

As the Senate heads into a historic showdown next week over the balance of power between its majority and minority parties, the national spotlight is focused on a little-understood parliamentary maneuver that last made headlines when Southerners used it to oppose civil rights legislation in the 1950s and '60s.

At issue is whether a minority of the 100 senators should be allowed to employ the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate - the filibuster - to prevent decisive votes on some of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Republicans say no, Democrats yes.

With Supreme Court vacancies perhaps on the near horizon, the stakes are huge.

The ideological bent of the court - and thus great questions of law and society - hangs in the balance.

If Republicans prevail, they'll have an easier time confirming judges who, for example, think abortion rights are too permissive and church-state separation too restrictive.

If Democrats succeed, they can force Bush to nominate more moderate judges.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says Bush's judicial nominees deserve up-or-down votes, where a simple majority of the 100-member Senate could confirm or deny the appointments.

To ensure that, Frist threatens to change traditional Senate rules so that a 51-vote majority could end a filibuster against a judicial nominee, and pledged Friday to hold a vote on the matter next week.

It now takes 60 votes to shut down a filibuster.

The Senate has 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and one independent who usually sides with Democrats.

"If Senators believe a nominee is qualified, they should have the opportunity to vote for her."

"If they believe she is unqualified, they should have the opportunity to vote against her," Frist said Friday.

"Members must decide if their legacy to the Senate is to eliminate the filibuster's barrier to the constitutional responsibility of all senators to advise and consent with fair, up or down votes."

Democrats argue that the seven judicial nominees they've blocked hold extreme views and the filibuster is the last defense against one-party rule.

They say they want to retain the traditional power that political minorities have in the Senate and to protect the independence of the judiciary.

Yet Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada offered a compromise - to allow votes on four of the seven nominees - if Frist would drop his plan to change the filibuster rule.

Frist rejected the offer Thursday.

Christian conservatives and other Republican allies are spending millions on ads calling for an end to judicial filibusters.

They argue that the conflict is about fairness to Bush's nominees, fairness to majority rule and, ultimately, fairness in the judicial system.

In a radio broadcast Monday on Christian radio stations, James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, a conservative advocacy group, said the filibuster was "a way of keeping conservatives and those who have strong religious views, and certainly pro-life, pro-marriage and pro-family views, from ever serving."

"That's what's at stake here."

Liberal groups and other Democratic allies have replied in kind.

On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released an ad that links Frist's efforts to do away with the judicial filibuster to ethical questions swirling around House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

"Frist and DeLay - gutting ethics rules, threatening judges, changing the rules as they go along, abusing their power," the ad says.

"Frist and DeLay."

"Out of control."

Both parties claim to be bullish about their prospects.

With several Republican senators undecided or uncommitted, the outcome is in doubt.

It's no accident that the two nominees whom First has chosen to bring up for votes next week are women.

One, Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court, is an African-American with a compelling life story.

The other is Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court.

Republicans think Democrats will be put on the defensive by having to justify standing in the way of women gaining power, a trend that Democrats ordinarily champion.

The dispute over judges comes as Congress is entangled in other partisan squabbles over Social Security and ethics in the House of Representatives, and not long after it passed a bill intervening in the Terri Schiavo case.

A Gallup poll taken May 2-5 found that the public's approval rating for Congress is 35 percent, the lowest in eight years; 57 percent disapproved of the job Congress is doing.

Some party tacticians on each side see election advantages ahead from this showdown.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee:

"The only joy I take in this - and it's very little 'cause I think it's bad for the country - is the more this small group of extremists calls the shots, the better chance Democrats have of regaining the Senate in 2006."

Sen. George Allen of Virginia, who headed the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee when the Republican Party gained Senate seats last year:

"No matter where you went, the best way to fire up folks to get out and vote for our candidates was to talk about this obstruction on judges."

"I think it's bad for the institution."

"That's what bothers me," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who's said he'd vote against restricting filibusters.

"I don't know how the American public will perceive this."

"We see mixed polls."

"One, they want every judge to have an up-or-down vote, yet they don't want to deprive the minority in the Senate the right to filibuster."

"I don't know how it plays."

end quotes

Well, I do, John, I don't want the filibuster to end, and I do not want CONSERVATIVE judges on the bench, here in OUR America!

I want law-biding judges here in OUR America, regardless of who it is that is standing before them, and these CONSERVATIVE judges, by broadcasting their CONSERVATISM, have in my mind disqualified themselves from serving on the federal bench, on the grounds that they are self-admittedly biased and therefore, prejudiced, against a majority here in OUR America, who is not CONSERVATIVE, like them, and their faction, who they are biased towards, to OUR detriment, as a nation, if these self-admitted biased and prejudiced persons under consideration by the Senate actually do succeed in gaining the federal bench.

NO BIASED AND PREJUDICED CONSERVATIVE JUDGES in OUR America, please!

Pass it along!

Thank you!

And to tell your Senator, click on this url, now:

http://www.congress.org

Since I wrote those words, I have been thinking quite a bit about what meaning I intended to convey by them, and why, and that comes from the perspective of this on-going attempt by people like this James Dobson above here, to "re-establish" the "church", here in OUR America, some 250 years, give or take, since it was "dis-established" by the original thirteen colonies, BY THE VEHICLE OF TAKING OVER OUR FEDERAL JUDICIARY WITH HIS PEOPLE, who will then change the course of OUR national history, and heritage of religious liberty, by re-writing American history as they issue their decisions, which is how the history of Constitutional law is written here in OUR America, by judges!

And this is a pretty slick gambit, when you think on it, since "dis-establishment" of the church happened under the "Articles of Confederation", when each state was sovereign unto itself, and so, could take action within its self as sovereign, to do that, which was to rid "society" of the control of a small group of priests!

At the time of dis-establishment, of course, the church could have the civil authorities try people for heresy, which severely restricted one's right to free expression, if your free expression was going to get you burned at the stake on the orders of some priest!

Thomas Jefferson himself was for dis-establishment of the church, which was a parsitic thing, living off of the people's taxes, but providing nothing to the people in return!

This does not make me, or Thomas Jefferson "non-religious"!

To the contrary, this makes me tolerant!

I do not ask that anyone should have to work as a slave to me, without their consent, to support my belief system.

That is what existed back in the 1700's, where people in the back-country of places like Virginia had their own belief systems, and churchs and ministrys, and yet still had to pay taxes to support another, that was not theirs.

By the vehicle of taking over the federal judiciary, this James Dobson is looking to "revise" American history, by having HIS FEDERAL JUDGES INTERPRET OUR CONSTITUTION IN SUCH A WAY AS TO "RE-ESTABLISH" RELIGION here in OUR America as an entity to be supported by public finances!

NO REVISING OF AMERICAN HISTORY to put the "CHURCH" back on the public payroll!

NO BIASED AND PREJUDICED CONSERVATIVE JUDGES in OUR America, please!

Pass it along!

Thank you!

And to tell your Senator, click on this url, now:

http://www.congress.org

What follows is a post I just made over in my JUDICIAL thread, where the discussion these days over there is on the differences in protections a human being who is an American citizen is afforded by the New York State Constitution and the United States Constitution, all at the same time, in the State of New York!

I was talking to a younger American about that today, this dual constitutional coverage here in the State of New York, which is perhaps somewhat unique, here in OUR America, BECAUSE at the time of INDEPENDENCE in 1776, New York State was in fact a sovereign nation, and its Constitution, adopted at the time of Independence directly reflected OUR experience as citizens with Englich tyranny of literally the day before, and so, ends up being a CONSTITUTION that is very protective of LIBERTY, because of that fact!

The more western states are in this nation from the east coast, the later in time their state constitutions derive from, AFTER the United States Constitution had been ratifed, and so was there to serve as an example to the residents of those territories at the time they were ready for statehood, and it is a much different example, indeed, just as the Articles of Confederation in the end were so much different than the United States Constitution, in ultimate purpose, and therefore utility!

I have never really realized before this time how much different in equality as American citizens this really does make us, and it does, in very fundamental ways, especially with respect to "dis-establishment" of religion, which would likely strike a Virginian a much different chord than it would someone in Utah, say, or Tenessee, or Texas, where Bill Frist and Tommy DeLay come from, respectively!

THEIR EFFORTS TO STICK RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVE JUDGES BEHOLDEN TO THEM ON OUR FEDERAL BENCH HERE, so as to change the course of the law in this state vis-a-vis the church/state relationship is an affront to OUR Constitutional history, here in New York State, and I, for one, am standing up in this forum, and I am speaking about about this threat to OUR religious liberty, which is coming directly from BLATANT ATTEMPTS AT TYRANNY OF THIS MAJORITY PARTY down there in Washington, D.C., at the hands of George W. Bush, Bill Frist, and Tommy DeLay!

We now exist!

And for people like me in OUR America, what a thought that is!

Parity, at least as far as the power of the truly democratic press goes, here in OUR America!

Each of us here in OUR America is now a publisher, and editor, and creative writer, and correspondent, and yes, "muck raker", even if we are in physical actuality confined to a wheelchair on a mountain top way out in the country somewhere, and so, the weakest are becoming equal to the strongest, in voice, in the PUBLIC SQUARE, where that dialogue belongs, as it was back in the good days of the Roman Republic, before it destroyed itself in an orgy of stupidity and greed!

This in here is politics, American-style, and it is as pure as it can get, because it is going from citizen to citizen without any filters at all, other than what is considered by each of us to be OUR own individual standards of conduct!

And by these "writings" in here, we, ALL OF US, are collectively doing exactly as young Alexander Hamiltion, a foreign-born man who served as Aide-de-Camp to George Washington during the American Revolution, said we must continue to do as Americans, 24/7, which is to continue to prove, as "THE PEOPLE" of this country, THAT BY OUR CONDUCT AND EXAMPLE, WE, the PEOPLE, you and I, ARE CAPABLE of deciding the important question, WHETHER SOCIETIES OF MEN AND WOMEN ARE REALLY CAPABLE OR NOT, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, and WE CHOOSE TO ANSWER THAT IN THE AFFIRMATIVE!

SO!

THEN .....

It comes down to OUR CONDUCT AND EXAMPLE, and this is mine!

My best offering, I guess you would say, back to young Alexander Hamilton, for him to judge whether WE have passed the test!

ARE WE, AMERICA, "THE PEOPLE" of this country, REALLY CAPABLE OF PROVING, to ALL the candid world watching, THAT BY OUR CONDUCT AND EXAMPLE, WE, the PEOPLE, you and I, ARE CAPABLE of deciding the important question, WHETHER SOCIETIES OF MEN AND WOMEN ARE REALLY CAPABLE OR NOT, of establishing good government from reflection and choice?

Which way will you go?

Which side are you on?

Stay tuned for further developments, as they happen!

Updated regularly by live people!

This is not a recording!

"Uzbek president blames Islamic group for violence"

By Dmitry Solovyov

Sat May 14, 1:15 PM ET

ANDIZHAN, Uzbekistan (Reuters) - Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Saturday blamed Islamic militants for violence in which troops fired on protesters and hundreds of people are alleged to have been killed.

One human rights campaigner said the overall death toll on Friday could have been as high as 500, which would make it the bloodiest incident in Uzbekistan's post-Soviet history.

The government of Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous state, is an ally of both Moscow and of Washington's "war on terror" and has been widely accused of severe repression of political opponents.

Few observers expected the uprising in the eastern town of Andizhan to emulate the success of the March rebellion in neighboring Kyrgyzstan which led to the overthrow of its president.

In his first word on the violence in Andizhan, Karimov denied any order had been given to troops to open fire.

He said rebels who seized a state building belonged to the outlawed Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

"I know that you want to know who gave the order to fire at them ... No one ordered (troops) to fire at them," a visibly angry Karimov told a news conference in the capital Tashkent.

Karimov, in power since 1989, said 10 police and troops had been killed and 100 wounded.

He said there was a higher number of rebel casualties, but made no mention of dead or wounded among protesters.

He said the protesters were relatives of the 30 rebels who stationed them as human shields outside the building they took over.

But a human rights campaigner in Andizhan, Saidzhakhon Zainabitdinov from the Uzbek rights group Appeal, told Reuters by telephone:

"The total number of deaths could reach 500 people from both sides."

Most of the dead were killed by heavy machineguns mounted on armored personnel carriers, he said, adding the streets were strewn with spent bullet-casings.

A pro-opposition reporter counted 30 corpses and a doctor spoke of "many, many dead."

A protest of around 1,000 people continued on Saturday, but the situation was calmer and fewer soldiers were on the streets, Zainabitdinov said.

The violence in Uzbekistan follows unrest in March in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where violent protests started in the city of Osh, just across the border from Andizhan, and led to the ousting of President Askar Akayev.

THOUSANDS FLEE

According to Kyrgyz border guards, as many as 4,000 people, including women and children, fled to the nearby village of Kara-Su on the closed border.

At another point, 500 people forced their way across the border.

Karimov said the rebels had hoped the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan would help them to foment trouble.

In the past 18 months, there have been peaceful uprisings in two other ex-Soviet republics, Ukraine and Georgia, both of which installed Western-leaning leaders.

Central Asia's hardline leaders have reacted by clamping down further on dissent.

Russian news agencies said Karimov called Russian President Vladimir Putin and both men expressed concern at the danger of destabilization in Central Asia, made up of five ex-Soviet states of which Uzbekistan is the most populous.

The EU and NATO called for a peaceful resolution to the Uzbekistan conflict.

Analysts said the unrest was unlikely to spread as it did in Kyrgyzstan, because of Karimov's tight grip on the country.

"I think that repression is basically the policy of the Uzbek government and this will be quite brutally suppressed, I fear," Craig Murray, Britain's former ambassador, told British television.

"This is a much less liberal regime than was in Kyrgyzstan or Georgia."

HIZB UT-TAHRIR DENIES INVOLVEMENT

The anti-government Hizb ut-Tahrir denied starting the violence.

The pan-Islamic group has been blamed by Karimov for several past attacks, but it says it is non-violent.

Karimov said Hizb ut-Tahrir was behind explosions last July that killed four people at the U.S. and Israeli embassies and at the prosecutor's office in Tashkent, and responsible for suicide bombings that killed 50 people a year ago.

The protesters, some calling for Karimov to stand down, gathered on Friday after armed rebels stormed a prison and freed inmates, including 23 businessmen charged with religious extremism.

The rebels then seized the building and took about 10 police hostage.

Former ambassador Murray said the 23 had been detained on "patently false charges of Islamic extremism."

Uzbek troops retook the state building from the rebels late on Friday, but the area was sealed off and sporadic gunfire was heard.

Officials said the rebels had refused to compromise.

Journalists were told to leave Andizhan, but some were able to return later in the day after roadblocks were eased.

Uzbekistan, a Central Asian country bordering Afghanistan, gave the United States use of a military airbase after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities.

The country is one of the world's leading cotton exporters, is a gold producer, and has some oil and gas reserves.

But its largly state-controlled economy has failed to attract investment.

Rights groups say there are at least 6,000 religious and political prisoners in Uzbekistan, where only state-sponsored Islam is allowed, and that torture is widely used.

(Additional reporting by Shamil Baigin in Ferghana, Maria Golovnina in Tashkent and Olga Dzyubenko in Bishkek)

end quotes

Torture is widely used, it is reported, and the leader is a real thug, and surprise, surprise, there is George W. Bush and Donnie Rumsfeld, right there in bed with him!

Saddam Hussein all over again, except this time, it is the Bush son and not the father who is the PATRON!

Taxes back then were primarily duties on imports. Income tax didn't get going until 1913.

Yes we are capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice.

Yes we are capable of establishing bad government from reflection and choice.

Right now, the baddies are running the show. They are a minority junta. The majority of Americans exercised their right not to vote. Maybe by next election they will realize that was an error.

SO!

jeffmoskin, what I take from all of this is that at one time, we might have been capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, and then times changed, and now, we no longer are, and so we now have the worst government that I can ever recall this nation having, in my lifetime, anyway!

And you think that we can reverse this in what is left to us of OUR lifetimes?

The other day, I happened to have to be in a public place, and there was an older man there, pontificating on and on about how everything wrong in this country, INCLUDING 9-11, was the fault of "BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS"!

"Excuse me", said I, "but that is the biggest load of Horse S*** that I have ever heard!"

WHO IS THIS BLEEDING-HEART LIBERAL THAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 9-11?

WHO?

The discussion that ensued with this man was then quite illuminating with respect to HIS thought processes, and yes, he was for George W. Bush and the murder!

In his words, America has to rid itself of BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS, and then clean up the world of "undesirables", before things will ever "be right" again, here in his America, and so, the sooner the clean-up begins, the better.

And to him, that is just that!

I was trying to get him to tell me what his ultimate solution was for all these BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS, but he was non-committal!

Gas chambers?

Put them all on a boat and send them to Africa?

What?

No answer!

Just get rid of them, however.

Now, that is a conversation held up here in the vicinity of Albany, New York, in the shadow of the capital of one of the most unpopular governors in America, outside of the governor of Ohio, who holds firmly to the "bottom-of-the-basket" position right now, I am told, and so, this conversation might not be typical of how the POWER PARTY sees life in OUR America, all over OUR America, but up here, it is!

And somehow, out of this person, and his bigoted like, we are supposed to be able to establish "good government from reflection and choice!"

Well, I just don't know, because I personally don't think that bigots do much reflecting!

Rather, they hate, and that certainly is not a product of any kind of reflection that I can see, or discern!

And when you take a look at these haters, these bigots, the thought that comes to my mind is that if they were to reflect a bit, maybe by standing in front of a mirror for a moment, they might find that instead of looking for faults in anyone else, maybe they should look to home, first!

But that is a different subject and so .....

One of the points of this discussion with this man was a statement that he made about his daughter, an honors student at a local high school, who did not know we were ever at war with Viet Nam, BECAUSE THEY DON'T TEACH THAT IN HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY, at least up here, where she went to school, in Niskayuna, New York, near Schenectady, just west of Albany!

The point that this man was making, from what I could understand of it, is that in his opinion, BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS are being somehow created in the first place by OUR own government, through OUR school system, which, according to him, is just saturated to overflowing with BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS, and now, as a result, we are "flooded" with them!

The cure, of course, is for CONSERVATIVES who "know right from wrong" to "TAKE BACK" America, and that is what he and they are now intent on doing!

And part of that attack by them has to be on the CONSTITUTION, which just gives us too much liberty, in his estimation, and it is that excessive liberty which led directly to 9-11, because these BLEEDING-HEART LIBERALS extended too much protection to the hijackers, who were poor and non-white, and not enough to the people in the World Trade Center Towers, who were apparently white and well-to-do, in his scenario, anyway!

SO!

jeffmoskin, there is "reflection", for you, CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN-style, up here in the corrupt EMPIRE State of New York!

Can any kind of "good government" come from this man's pen?

I personally wonder at that myself, and he does vote!

SO?

What happened to all these other ones then, who did not vote?

Are they just ignorant?

Lazy?

Or scared of this man, and his kind, if they go near a polling place?

Any thoughts, America?

After all, it is YOUR FUTURE that we are discussing in here!

Or don't you care?

An expression straight out of the 60's!

Where did it oriignate?

It has been in the American Lexicon for SO LONG that even an old geezer like myself cannot remember who coined it.

But it is, to use the more modern (George Lakoff) term for it, a "frame."

Once it has been uttered, all meaningful discussion stops.

Anybody out there know?

In OUR lifetimes?

Well, these BULLS have been breaking a lot of china in the china shop, so the inevitable repair work that must be done (if we are ever to achieve peace and equality) will take a little longer, say, than had we prevented them from stealing Ohio.

I have to be an optimist and say I will live to see it. Even better, I want to be part of making it happen.

I think that history (which once was more than just a channel on TV) will show that we had, under FDR, a government that truly cared for the common man, which is important, because nobody else does. I think that government can be as good in the future as it is terrible right now. And, yes, I believe that 50 years from now, historians will look upon this period in OUR history as one of the worst ever.

There is a good series starting today in the NY Times about "Class in America."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national...VIEW-FINAL.html?

I wonder what readers of this thread think about it.

And as always, jeffmoskin, thank you for your continued participation in here, and for your continued inputs, as well, from your own perspective as an older and politically-experienced American living on the opposite coast of OUR America from myself.

And I think where we are, here in OUR America, certainly can and does "color" OUR perspective of just how life on a day-to-day basis is really going, and here, I am talking about the collapse of that retaining wall down there in New York City the other day that blocked off a chunk of major highway, and apparently put some buildings above in some kind of jeopardy, and that is something that I would say is a direct result of what I am going to call one more time, THE STSTEMATIC LOOTING OF OUR NATIONAL TREASURY by the REPUBLICAN crowd that is in control in America right now, with the attendant degradation and ultimate DESTRUCTION OF OUR INFRASTRUCTURE, as a direct result!

WHO are these REPUBLICANS that they were able to funnel an obscene amount of OUR money into their own pockets so that they could then hold this ORGY OF PREJUDICE AND BIGOTRY in New York City that they called the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION?

WHO ARE THESE TREASURY LOOTERS, and where does their power over OUR treasury come from, other than the barrel of a heavy machine-gun mounted on an armored personnel carrier?

How many millions of dollars were looted out of the treasury of New York so that this ORGY could be held in New York City, at the expense of the infrastructure of the city, part of which just tumbled down, and closed off a major artery or thoroughfare in that city?

And how, jeffmoskin, do we, THE PEOPLE, make up this money?

How many BILLIONS have been siphoned out of OUR treasury in the last four years alone for export to Iraq, where God alone knows where that money is really going to, WHILE OUR AMERICA, like Bloomberg's and Pataki's and Giuliani's city of New York crumbles down into the Hudson River?

The LAYING LOW of OUR America has just begun, jeffmoskin, and I don't think we are barely in to what is yet to come, when there is no money for anything in OUR America but a massive security force that will be OUR enslaver, at least economically, which is really all that matters, to the enslaver!

As access to that New York Times article jeffmoskin mentions requires "registration", which some people understandably might not want to do, and as it is germane to OUR discussion in here, and in the JUDICIAL thread as well, I have "captured" the article in here for further discussions on its contents, which are interesting from the perspective of pointing out "opinions" held by various factions, here in OUR America, that might be to OUR detriment as the "common folks" of this nation, or at least me, who is a disabled veteran, and so, occupies that "LAST CLASS" here in OUR America, those who get nothing, because they "DON'T WORK", like everybody else has to, and so, should not get anything, here in America, as a result!

THE LAST CLASS!

The "class" in America worth nothing, at all!

Avoid it at all costs!

"Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide"

By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 15, 2005

There was a time when Americans thought they understood class.

The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God.

The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men.

The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This is the first in a series of articles examining the role of social class in America today.

A team of reporters spent more than a year exploring ways that class - defined as a combination of income, education, wealth and occupation - influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity.

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness.

Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents.

Social diversity has erased many of the old markers.

It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin.

The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life.

Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways.

At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class.

At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more.

At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe.

In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream.

It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots.

There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all.

With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht.

The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class.

It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners.

Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.

The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of certain class lines; the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their relative places.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening.

Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made billionaires.

Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980's.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another.

Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy.

Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children.

But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based.

Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards.

When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning in a rout.

"The old system of hereditary barriers and clubby barriers has pretty much vanished," said Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, a social science research group in New York City that recently published a series of studies on the social effects of economic inequality.

In place of the old system, Dr. Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that are beginning to assert themselves."

Faith in the System

Most Americans remain upbeat about their prospects for getting ahead.

A recent New York Times poll on class found that 40 percent of Americans believed that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen over the last 30 years, a period in which the new research shows that it has not.

Thirty-five percent said it had not changed, and only 23 percent said it had dropped.

More Americans than 20 years ago believe it possible to start out poor, work hard and become rich.

They say hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background.

"I think the system is as fair as you can make it," Ernie Frazier, a 65-year-old real estate investor in Houston, said in an interview after participating in the poll.

"I don't think life is necessarily fair."

"But if you persevere, you can overcome adversity."

"It has to do with a person's willingness to work hard, and I think it's always been that way."

Most say their standard of living is better than their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still.

Even families making less than $30,000 a year subscribe to the American dream; more than half say they have achieved it or will do so.

But most do not see a level playing field.

They say the very rich have too much power, and they favor the idea of class-based affirmative action to help those at the bottom.

Even so, most say they oppose the government's taxing the assets a person leaves at death.

"They call it the land of opportunity, and I don't think that's changed much," said Diana Lackey, a 60-year-old homemaker and wife of a retired contractor in Fulton, N.Y., near Syracuse.

"Times are much, much harder with all the downsizing, but we're still a wonderful country."

The Attributes of Class

One difficulty in talking about class is that the word means different things to different people.

Class is rank, it is tribe, it is culture and taste.

It is attitudes and assumptions, a source of identity, a system of exclusion.

To some, it is just money.

It is an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life.

Some Americans barely notice it; others feel its weight in powerful ways.

At its most basic, class is one way societies sort themselves out.

Even societies built on the idea of eliminating class have had stark differences in rank.

Classes are groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who, for that reason, may share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities to get ahead.

Put 10 people in a room and a pecking order soon emerges.

When societies were simpler, the class landscape was easier to read.

Marx divided 19th-century societies into just two classes; Max Weber added a few more.

As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more heterogeneous.

As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the commonly accepted big three - the upper, middle and working classes - have broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or lifestyles.

A few sociologists go so far as to say that social complexity has made the concept of class meaningless.

Conventional big classes have become so diverse - in income, lifestyle, political views - that they have ceased to be classes at all, said Paul W. Kingston, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

To him, American society is a "ladder with lots and lots of rungs."

"There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have this common experience," Professor Kingston said.

"Each step is equal-sized."

"Sure, for the people higher up this ladder, their kids are more apt to get more education, better health insurance."

"But that doesn't mean there are classes."

Many other researchers disagree.

"Class awareness and the class language is receding at the very moment that class has reorganized American society," said Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I find these 'end of class' discussions naïve and ironic, because we are at a time of booming inequality and this massive reorganization of where we live and how we feel, even in the dynamics of our politics."

"Yet people say, 'Well, the era of class is over.'"

One way to think of a person's position in society is to imagine a hand of cards.

Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class.

Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class.

At first, a person's class is his parents' class.

Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.

Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards.

Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces.

Many Americans say that they too have moved up the nation's class ladder.

In the Times poll, 45 percent of respondents said they were in a higher class than when they grew up, while just 16 percent said they were in a lower one.

Over all, 1 percent described themselves as upper class, 15 percent as upper middle class, 42 percent as middle, 35 percent as working and 7 percent as lower.

"I grew up very poor and so did my husband," said Wanda Brown, the 58-year-old wife of a retired planner for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard who lives in Puyallup, Wash., near Tacoma.

"We're not rich but we are comfortable and we are middle class and our son is better off than we are."

The American Ideal

The original exemplar of American social mobility was almost certainly Benjamin Franklin, one of 17 children of a candle maker.

About 20 years ago, when researchers first began to study mobility in a rigorous way, Franklin seemed representative of a truly fluid society, in which the rags-to-riches trajectory was the readily achievable ideal, just as the nation's self-image promised.

In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next.

In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing.

If that had been the case, the rise in income inequality beginning in the mid-1970's should not have been all that worrisome.

The wealthy might have looked as if they were pulling way ahead, but if families were moving in and out of poverty and prosperity all the time, how much did the gap between the top and bottom matter?

But the initial mobility studies were flawed, economists now say.

Some studies relied on children's fuzzy recollections of their parents' income.

Others compared single years of income, which fluctuate considerably.

Still others misread the normal progress people make as they advance in their careers, like from young lawyer to senior partner, as social mobility.

The new studies of mobility, which methodically track peoples' earnings over decades, have found far less movement.

The economic advantage once believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last closer to five.

Mobility happens, just not as rapidly as was once thought.

"We all know stories of poor families in which the next generation did much better," said Gary Solon, a University of Michigan economist who is a leading mobility researcher.

"It isn't that poor families have no chance."

But in the past, Professor Solon added, "people would say, 'Don't worry about inequality'."

"The offspring of the poor have chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich.'"

"Well, that's not true."

"It's not respectable in scholarly circles anymore to make that argument."

One study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, found that fewer families moved from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's.

A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's.

The incomes of brothers born around 1960 have followed a more similar path than the incomes of brothers born in the late 1940's, researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of California, Berkeley, have found.

Whatever children inherit from their parents - habits, skills, genes, contacts, money - seems to matter more today.

Studies on mobility over generations are notoriously difficult, because they require researchers to match the earnings records of parents with those of their children.

Some economists consider the findings of the new studies murky; it cannot be definitively shown that mobility has fallen during the last generation, they say, only that it has not risen.

The data will probably not be conclusive for years.

Nor do people agree on the implications.

Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better early-education and antipoverty programs to try to redress an imbalance in opportunities.

Conservatives tend to assert that mobility remains quite high, even if it has tailed off a little.

But there is broad consensus about what an optimal range of mobility is.

It should be high enough for fluid movement between economic levels but not so high that success is barely tied to achievement and seemingly random, economists on both the right and left say.

As Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, "We want to give people all the opportunities they want."

"We want to remove the barriers to upward mobility."

Yet there should remain an incentive for parents to cultivate their children.

"Most people are working very hard to transmit their advantages to their children," said David I. Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher.

"And that's quite a good thing."

One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France.

It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.

Those comparisons may seem hard to believe.

Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen.

The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal.

The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe's in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity.

But the United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine.

Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children.

Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found.

"Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said.

"Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada."

Blurring the Landscape

Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in American life?

For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions.

Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone.

Federal deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls.

Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer evidence that someone is middle class.

The economic changes making material goods cheaper have forced businesses to seek out new opportunities so that they now market to groups they once ignored.

Cruise ships, years ago a symbol of the high life, have become the ocean-going equivalent of the Jersey Shore.

BMW produces a cheaper model with the same insignia.

Martha Stewart sells chenille jacquard drapery and scallop-embossed ceramic dinnerware at Kmart.

"The level of material comfort in this country is numbing," said Paul Bellew, executive director for market and industry analysis at General Motors.

"You can make a case that the upper half lives as well as the upper 5 percent did 50 years ago."

Like consumption patterns, class alignments in politics have become jumbled.

In the 1950's, professionals were reliably Republican; today they lean Democratic.

Meanwhile, skilled labor has gone from being heavily Democratic to almost evenly split.

People in both parties have attributed the shift to the rise of social issues, like gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many working-class voters rightward and upper income voters toward the left.

But increasing affluence plays an important role, too.

When there is not only a chicken, but an organic, free-range chicken, in every pot, the traditional economic appeal to the working class can sound off key.

Religious affiliation, too, is no longer the reliable class marker it once was.

The growing economic power of the South has helped lift evangelical Christians into the middle and upper middle classes, just as earlier generations of Roman Catholics moved up in the mid-20th century.

It is no longer necessary to switch one's church membership to Episcopal or Presbyterian as proof that one has arrived.

"You go to Charlotte, N.C., and the Baptists are the establishment," said Mark A. Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona.

"To imagine that for reasons of respectability, if you lived in North Carolina, you would want to be a Presbyterian rather than a Baptist doesn't play anymore."

The once tight connection between race and class has weakened, too, as many African-Americans have moved into the middle and upper middle classes.

Diversity of all sorts - racial, ethnic and gender - has complicated the class picture.

And high rates of immigration and immigrant success stories seem to hammer home the point: The rules of advancement have changed.

The American elite, too, is more diverse than it was.

The number of corporate chief executives who went to Ivy League colleges has dropped over the past 15 years.

There are many more Catholics, Jews and Mormons in the Senate than there were a generation or two ago.

Because of the economic earthquakes of the last few decades, a small but growing number of people have shot to the top.

"Anything that creates turbulence creates the opportunity for people to get rich," said Christopher S. Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard.

"But that isn't necessarily a big influence on the 99 percent of people who are not entrepreneurs."

These success stories reinforce perceptions of mobility, as does cultural myth-making in the form of television programs like "American Idol" and "The Apprentice."

But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class.

Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class.

Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever.

This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality.

The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation.

The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent.

For most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90's.

Reduced pensions have made retirement less secure.

Clearly, a degree from a four-year college makes even more difference than it once did.

More people are getting those degrees than did a generation ago, but class still plays a big role in determining who does or does not.

At 250 of the most selective colleges in the country, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.

Some colleges, worried about the trend, are adopting programs to enroll more lower-income students.

One is Amherst, whose president, Anthony W. Marx, explained:

"If economic mobility continues to shut down, not only will we be losing the talent and leadership we need, but we will face a risk of a society of alienation and unhappiness."

"Even the most privileged among us will suffer the consequences of people not believing in the American dream."

Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows.

Life expectancy has increased over all; but upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and in better health than those at the bottom.

Class plays an increased role, too, in determining where and with whom affluent Americans live.

More than in the past, they tend to live apart from everyone else, cocooned in their exurban chateaus.

Researchers who have studied data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses say the isolation of the affluent has increased.

Family structure, too, differs increasingly along class lines.

The educated and affluent are more likely than others to have their children while married.

They have fewer children and have them later, when their earning power is high.

On average, according to one study, college-educated women have their first child at 30, up from 25 in the early 1970's.

The average age among women who have never gone to college has stayed at about 22.

Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children.

"There is no reason to doubt the old saw that the most important decision you make is choosing your parents," said Professor Levine, the Berkeley economist and mobility researcher.

"While it's always been important, it's probably a little more important now."

The benefits of the new meritocracy do come at a price.

It once seemed that people worked hard and got rich in order to relax, but a new class marker in upper-income families is having at least one parent who works extremely long hours (and often boasts about it).

In 1973, one study found, the highest-paid tenth of the country worked fewer hours than the bottom tenth.

Today, those at the top work more.

In downtown Manhattan, black cars line up outside Goldman Sachs's headquarters every weeknight around 9.

Employees who work that late get a free ride home, and there are plenty of them.

Until 1976, a limousine waited at 4:30 p.m. to ferry partners to Grand Central Terminal.

But a new management team eliminated the late-afternoon limo to send a message: 4:30 is the middle of the workday, not the end.

A Rags-to-Riches Faith

Will the trends that have reinforced class lines while papering over the distinctions persist?

The economic forces that caused jobs to migrate to low-wage countries are still active.

The gaps in pay, education and health have not become a major political issue.

The slicing of society's pie is more unequal than it used to be, but most Americans have a bigger piece than they or their parents once did.

They appear to accept the tradeoffs.

Faith in mobility, after all, has been consciously woven into the national self-image.

Horatio Alger's books have made his name synonymous with rags-to-riches success, but that was not his personal story.

He was a second-generation Harvard man, who became a writer only after losing his Unitarian ministry because of allegations of sexual misconduct.

Ben Franklin's autobiography was punched up after his death to underscore his rise from obscurity.

The idea of fixed class positions, on the other hand, rubs many the wrong way.

Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of a pecking order based on anything other than talent and hard work.

Class contradicts their assumptions about the American dream, equal opportunity and the reasons for their own successes and even failures.

Americans, constitutionally optimistic, are disinclined to see themselves as stuck.

Blind optimism has its pitfalls.

If opportunity is taken for granted, as something that will be there no matter what, then the country is less likely to do the hard work to make it happen.

But defiant optimism has its strengths.

Without confidence in the possibility of moving up, there would almost certainly be fewer success stories.

Well, this is quite an article, for sure, but it betrays a lot of ignorance the authors really have about America, and Americans, is what I think, especially this thing of "class" which to me, is a distinctly UN-AMERICAN concept in its entirety!

"Class" today is about arrogance, largely, or that has been my impression, anyway, having had people's "class pedigree" jammed down my throat by some snob or boor on several occasions, so as to let me know in no uncertain terms how inferior I am to them, and then to know, again in no uncertain terms, how lucky I am in the first place to have these people there to explain to me exactly how class structure does work in OUR America, so that I can then be impressed that I am in their company, however temporarily that might be!

Being non-materially-oriented as I am, and favoring a true meritocracy over any alternatives, I am not impressed by how much money someone has, and to be truthful, I really don't care, nor want to know!

To me, it means absolutely nothing at all that Donald Trump has x-dollars, or Bill Gates has y-dollars, because that is a measure of nothing at all to me, and certainly not success of any sort that I recognize!

Out in Wyoming, a land that I dearly love, they say, from experience, that IF you are going to go around judging men by the horses that they ride, then you must always take into account that the very best horses are always being ridden by either rich men, or horse thives, so the real art is in knowing the difference, and sometimes, well, it is just not that awful clear!

And there is my measure, I guess!

Who you really are, and not some class crap that you are trying to lay on me, to impress me, like that tall horse that you are now riding, as if it were really yours, meaning that you were the one who went out and caught it, and broke it, and trained it, when such is not the case, at all!

When I was young, I went to high school in an ordinary concrete block building, and I rode a school bus to get there, or else I walked!

Today, that same school building is all camoflaged with fancy work so that the kids won't be stigmatized by the "ordinariness" of their school building, and they drive Lexus' and BMW's to school!

And what does any of that really mean?

Ask ten people, and you'll get twenty or thirty different opinions, probably!

Ask a hundred people, and you'll be up to ten thousand opinions, and so .....

Has America where I am changed?

Most certainly!

And how so?

Stay tuned!

That is just too dynamic a question to answer with a static answer, and the real answer is, that no one really knows!

Because it has not really happened yet, the events that shape that answer, and to me, this series of events has really only just now started to begin, and so ....

And as a part of that article, there is a "test" that you can take to see where in OUR very obvious class structure here in OUR America you might be!

In OCCUPATION, I would be in the 78th percentile, whatever on earth that really means to anyone!

In EDUCATION, I am in the 97th percentile!

In terms of income, I am in the 56th percentile and in terms of material wealth, I am down to 37th!

My AVERAGE, for whatever that might be worth, is 67th percentile!

Now, all I have to do is find my own crowd of people who are impressed by any of this, and who knows, I just might be the next president of the United States, or maybe I'll own Trump Towers!

And if pigs had wings, they'd be eagles!

And speaking of democracy, George W. Bush style, let's go back to Afghanistan to see what OUR George has wrought over there for those folks, in the image of him and his pack of REPUBLICANS here in OUR America, like Frist and Tommy DeLay:

From the May 13, 2005 edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

RAW MATERIAL: A farmer opens a poppy head in Zhera district, west of Kandahar, Afghanistan. Lucrative opium production is flourishing in the country.

"Afghanistan riddled with drug ties"

The involvement of local as well as high-level government officials in the opium trade is frustrating efforts to eradicate poppy fields.

By Scott Baldauf and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN; AND WASHINGTON – The case of an Afghan village police chief, named Inayatullah, is a small example of a much larger problem.

Is Commander Inayatullah a courageous law-and-order crusader responsible for smashing the drug mafia in his hamlet?

Or, is he an opium smuggler?

Or, as his bosses say, is he both?

It's a question that hangs over more and more public officials here.

The post-Taliban boom in opium production means that drug money now permeates every stratum of Afghanistan's society - from the farmers cultivating poppies in the east to those in the highest levels of the central government of Kabul, according to senior Afghan and European officials working here.

"We are already a narco-state," says Mohammad Nader Nadery at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has studied the growing impunity of former military commanders and drug dealers who now work within the Afghan government.

"If the governors in many parts of the country are involved in the drug trade, if a minister is directly or indirectly getting benefits from drug trade, and if a chief of police gets money from drug traffickers, then how else do you define a narco-state?"

Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan's minister of tribal and frontier affairs, says that the government has become so full of drug smugglers that cabinet meetings have become a farce.

"Sometimes the people who complain the loudest about theft are thieves themselves," he says.

In the past two years, the UN reports that poppy cultivation increased by two-thirds in 2004 to 51.7 million acres.

The US estimate was even higher - at 87.5 million acres.

Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world's opium - most of it ends up on the streets of Europe and Russia as heroin.

European officials warn that this fledgling democracy is being undermined as Afghan officials make decisions based on what's good for the drug trade, rather than the electorate.

"There is a danger that all the stabilization and reconstruction efforts will be neutralized unless the narcotrafficking problem is addressed," says Ursula Müller, political counselor at the German Embassy in Washington.

"We have to fight this corruption ... those guys involved in the drug business [who] are in all levels of Afghanistan's government," adds Ms. Müller, who has been actively involved in rebuilding Afghanistan since the US toppled the Taliban in late 2001.

The Afghan government of US-backed President Hamid Karzai has made countering the narcotics trade - over fighting terrorism - its central aim.

And the international community, with Britain taking the lead, is planted firmly behind him.

Germany, for example, is training local Afghan police, and the US has budgeted $780 million this year to support the antinarcotics battle.

But the opium trade is deeply rooted in Afghan society.

Many regional warlords and opponents of the Taliban are now top officials in the Karzai government.

One of the most complicated - and delicate - tasks is to get corrupt officials to turn away from the drug trade as a source of personal income.

Müller says it can be done.

She tells of a former Afghan provincial official who was nominated to become a deputy minister in Kabul.

"We had doubts, and the [Bush] administration had doubts about him," Müller says.

"It was an open secret that he was heavily involved in the drugs business."

But, she says, he has turned his back on his former trade and has become a responsible government official leading efforts to staunch the illicit drug business.

The effort in working with local governors has been mixed, though, according to Steve Atkins, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington.

Britain provided funding and advice to Afghans on an eradication program in 2004.

Governors who participated claimed they eradicated 37,000 acres, but a verification team found that only 13,000 acres had actually been eradicated.

"We have always been clear of the limitations of the governor-led eradication, given that many governors are themselves implicated in the trade," says Mr. Atkins.

The problem, as illustrated by Commander Inayatullah's case, starts at the lowest levels of government.

Three months ago, the Afghan police chief made his biggest drug bust yet.

In a village in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, the commander arrested a suspected smuggler named Safiullah, and at the time confiscated 80 kilos of opium.

But Inayatullah later refused to hand over the opium to the provincial police as evidence, say police officials.

He was fired.

The provincial police officials also say that Inayatullah may have arrested Safiullah only to get rid of competition from a fellow opium trader.

But Inayatullah steadfastly maintains his innocence.

"I cannot see the minister of interior directly to ask him what the evidence is against me," says Inayatullah, who is in Kabul awaiting reassignment in another district.

"I'm the only police commander who has arrested smugglers in Badakhshan."

"Why am I accused of smuggling?"

Afghan officials interviewed say that Inayatullah's case isn't an isolated one.

They say that the people facilitating the drug trade are often the very people who have been assigned to stop it - the police.

But these police would not be able to act alone, they say, without the knowledge or consent of their superiors, including governors, provincial police chiefs, and even deputy ministers.

"Whatever number of police cars there are in Kabul, I can tell you that more than 50 percent of them are carrying drugs inside from one place to another," says a senior police commander in Kabul, requesting anonymity for his own safety.

"The problem is that Afghanistan is training police to stop drug smugglers, and when they go out into the field, their police commander tells them how to protect the drug smugglers."

Those who confront the drug lords often find themselves in danger.

Syed Ikramuddin, former governor of the northern province of Badakhshan, was nearly assassinated by a roadside bomb last October, as was vice presidential candidate Ahmed Zia Massoud in Faizabad.

Mr. Ikramuddin survived, but the person sitting next to him was killed and two others were injured.

"Except for the minister of the interior himself, Mr. Ali Jalali, all the lower people from the heads of department down are involved in supporting drug smuggling," says Ikramuddin, who now serves as Afghanistan's minister of labor.

Ikramuddin says that many of these policemen and commanders are former warlords who have disarmed and reintegrated into government jobs, and are now using their position to facilitate the drug trade and get rich.

Among those corrupt commanders, he says, is Inayatullah, the police chief from Yawan, a district in the former governor's province.

"Commander Inayatullah is a smuggler, I know him well," Ikramuddin says.

"There is a competition among smugglers, that is why Inayatullah arrested Safiullah and the others."

"It's not to do his job honestly, but just to weaken a competitor."

The police chief who replaced Inayatullah is involved in the drug trade, according to several interior ministry officials.

Kabul officials have ordered that he be removed from the position but say he is being protected by provincial police authorities.

One senior Interior Ministry official says that the new chief paid a $60,000 bribe to get the job.

Despite corruption in the police ranks, many Afghan politicians say that Afghanistan's drug problem can be solved.

"People inside the mafia should be introduced to the power of law," says Yunous Qanooni, a former presidential candidate in last year's elections and a top leader in the northern-based mujahideen party, Shura-e Nazar.

"I'm sure that this will solve 70 percent of the problem, and the remaining 30 percent will be solved easily, step by step."

Minister of Labor Ikramuddin agrees that Afghanistan's drug problem is solvable, both with outside help and a little more political will from within.

"If the world could not tolerate Afghanistan as the center of terrorism, then the world is not going to tolerate Afghanistan as the world's biggest producer of drugs."

"If we have good and honest people in this government, then gradually this problem can be solved."

"The carpet of the smugglers will be rolled up forever."

But Commander Inayatullah, the former police chief of Yawan, warns:

"If we don't solve the problem now, there will be a day when all decisions will be made by smugglers."

end quotes

Ah, those REPUBLICANS!

Anything for the BID-NESS community that they can do, well, they're just happy to do it, and well, in Afghanistan, it looks like they're succeeding alright, so, they must know their stuff, yessiree Bob!

And how about that alleged $60,000 bribe to become a Police Chief over there, will you?

Good old Republican values, coming to the fore!

The REPUBLICAN MERITOCRACY in action!

If you just have the money, why, you can be as upwardly mobile as you want to be, so long as you have the money, and of course, you know whose pocket to stuff it into, but, well, folks, that's BID-NESS, Republican style, and I guess that's just what they like, and so, we and the Afghans got a dose of it, and that is for sure!

I regard dollars as I do toilet paper.

First, you NEVER WANT TO RUN OUT.

Second, you always want to have enough to last you until you can get more, or if your getting more days are over, then for the rest of your life.

Any more than that just takes up space. It is of no use.

From the April 15, 2004 edition of the Christian Science Monitor, some background on this situation in Uzbekistan, where the thug who is the ally of George W. Bush just had a bunch of his freedom-seeking citzens over there machine-gunned to death, for wishing for democracy for themselves:

"US counterterrorist strategy held hostage in Uzbekistan"

By Eugene Rumer

WASHINGTON – A recent string of bombings, suicide attacks, and assaults on police in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, have shattered the relative tranquility that settled over Central Asia since the arrival of US troops there in 2001 and the defeat of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan.

The violence is a telling sign that one of America's key allies in the war on terror is in danger of falling prey to the very terrorist forces it was enlisted to help defeat.

The most difficult question about the recent violence in Uzbekistan is not why the violence has occurred, but why it has not occurred more often.

Key socioeconomic indicators in Uzbekistan have long been at crisis levels.

The effects of poverty and environmental degradation inherited from the Soviet era have been compounded by haphazard attempts at economic reforms pushed by foreign donors and international financial institutions.

Corruption and wanton disregard for basic human rights - from torture of detainees to the propensity of officials to brand and squelch all dissent as Islamic militancy - have produced an oppressive society.

President Islam Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since 1989, pledged at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992 that he'd take his country along the path already charted by the "Asian tigers" - East Asian nations that undertook vigorous economic reforms, while holding off on political liberalization in the interest of domestic stability.

Today, more than a decade later, economic reform in Uzbekistan is a myth, and political stability has been squandered.

But Uzbekistan remains important to the US.

It borders on Afghanistan - and has hosted US military facilities ever since the 2001 US war on the Taliban.

A loyal partner in the war on terror, Uzbekistan is the perfect illustration of the challenge the US faces in its long-term antiterror strategy.

The Uzbek regime is key to the task of defeating terrorists and thwarting their operations - yet it is an intractable part of the terror problem because it contributes to the underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit.

The Uzbek regime has already portrayed itself as a victim of Islamic terrorism and will continue to do so, seeking to justify its oppressive actions at home.

The US has condemned the recent terrorist acts in Uzbekistan - and it should request that Uzbek authorities allow US law enforcement agencies full access to the investigation.

Without such access and full public disclosure upon completion of the investigation, its results will be automatically suspect.

Public scrutiny will be essential to the credibility of Uzbek appeals for US assistance to combat terrorism.

The US can't afford the perception that it is propping up a corrupt and oppressive regime.

The US can make clear - publicly and privately, in blunt and certain terms - that the reactionary policies of Uzbek leaders are creating conditions ripe for extremist exploitation.

The Uzbek leaders are thus failing their own people in this critical aspect of the war on terror.

As seen from Tashkent, the US is beholden to Uzbekistan as an indispensable ally, and for as long as the US maintains a military presence there, warnings about domestic reform can be ignored.

Uzbekistan's leaders must be disabused of this notion.

The US has other options in Central Asia.

No country there has a perfect record, but some have gone a long way toward modernizing their economies and preserving a degree of political freedom that makes them look like reasonably healthy democracies when compared with Uzbekistan.

Uzbek leaders will continue to turn a deaf ear to US appeals for internal reform for as long as they think that when all else fails, they can fall back on the safety net of the US military presence in their country.

• Eugene Rumer is a senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. The opinions expressed here are his own.

And then, jeffmoskin, you do what is most important to me as a fellow American citizen, you don't talk about it!

You are not your money!

YOU, are simply you!

A big difference, I think!

Especially where this thing of "class" is concerned!

SO?

I wonder what Donald Trump thinks of class, and I wonder if he wishes he had some, instead of just a lot of money?

From the April 05, 2004 edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

JAILED: Latifa Nabieva holds a photo of her imprisoned sons, charged with membership in an outlawed Islamic group.

"Why Uzbek women opt for bombs - Amid crackdown on Muslims, wives and mothers joined last week's attacks."

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN – Angry and hopeless, Latifa Nabieva threatens to set fire to herself - like an increasing number of frustrated Uzbek women - unless her men are released.

Ms. Nabieva says she has had enough, following the arrest on terrorism charges of two sons and a nephew - all devout Muslims - since 2000.

The final straw came in January, when police smashed in her front door, beat her husband bloody, and imprisoned him, too.

Shortly before a wave of suicide attacks shocked Uzbekistan last week, leaving 42 dead - several of the 33 militants who died were female suicide bombers - Mrs. Nabieva fired off a letter to the authorities, vowing to immolate herself in front of top police officials.

A government crackdown against Muslims has led to the arrest of some 7,000 accused militants; torture, using a term of the United Nations, is "systematic."

The result is a growing level of anger among Uzbekistan's Muslim wives and mothers that may serve as a funnel for more female suicide bombers.

"I am very angry, and feel hatred toward the police and government ... and I am ready to burn myself," says Nabieva.

"There are thousands of women like me; [some] may be willing to protest in this way."

So far, Nabieva has drawn a line:

"Suicide is not allowed in Islam, and it is one of the things that holds me back," says the head-scarved matriarch, adding that taking other lives with hers is not an option.

She condemns the recent attacks as "terrorist acts" forbidden by her faith.

Analysts draw parallels to the recent phenomenon of female suicide bombers deployed by Palestinian militants against Israel, and Chechen rebels against Russia - the so-called Chechen "black widows," whose husbands have been killed by Russian forces.

They also point out that Uzbekistan has a history of female suicide - as an extreme way to protest domestic violence or fiscal hardship - that goes back centuries.

Not all angry Uzbek women draw the line where Nabieva does.

Across town, another mother with imprisoned relatives declined to give her name for fear of retribution from the regime.

She says:

"If I'm going to kill myself, I'll take one of those [police officers] with me."

Such sentiment does not surprise Uzbeks, since uncompromising government efforts to stamp out any sign of Islamic militancy date from the late 1990s, and were stepped up after 1999 bomb blasts in the capital killed 16.

It remains unclear, however, who may have been able to link such distraught, ready-to-die Uzbek women with an armed militant network.

"We condemn [the attacks], but whoever was behind it, we can only blame the government," says Husniddin Nazarov, the son of a well-known religious cleric who disappeared in 1998.

"If they start again this kind of repression, there may be an even bigger reaction."

"Many religious people have been arrested, and now the government should stop and think [how] they've pushed people to the edge."

"If dozens are committing suicide now, maybe later there could be thousands."

"It's a real threat to the government."

Changing gears may not be easy for a former Soviet republic that inherited its communist party boss as president.

Mr. Karimov has been feted by Washington since the 2001 Afghanistan campaign as a "strategic partner" that provides a key logistics base to American troops.

The US continues to condemn widespread human rights abuses, but so far with limited effect.

"The political elites in Uzbekistan were trained in the Soviet period, and there is still a belief that repression can work to hold onto power, to keep potential rivals afraid and at bay," says Acacia Shields, author of a Human Rights Watch report released here last week called "Creating Enemies of the State."

Choosing that tactic may stem from the regime's success in crushing all political opposition in the early 1990s, by banning and forcing key players and groups into exile, says Ms. Shields.

Public reaction has been muted.

"Western observers look at levels of Uzbek repression, and expected some uprising, but what we've seen in the last six years is a very quiet population that is not ready for that," adds Shields.

Accused Islamists have been killed in custody, and their relatives threatened with rape.

"Uzbekistan has almost become synonymous with torture," Shields says, but until last week, "we've seen no violence so far."

"It would represent a dramatic departure."

But some Uzbeks may now have been pushed to that point.

The country's prosecutor general Friday night displayed an array of explosives, ready suicide belts, several hundred detonation devices, cash, and fake passports meant for use by the 33 dead militants.

"I think the Chechen [black widow] phenomenon can happen here," says Iskandar Khudayberganov, a pro-democracy activist.

"Now people are so repressed there is no other choice - [they think] it's better to die than live such a life," says Mr. Khudayberganov.

"Before, the government believed that repression and spreading fear will help them keep control."

"But ... you can only be frightened so far."

While there is widespread anger among Uzbek Muslim women about the fate of their relatives - and even a history of suicide, that has in the past translated into cases of self-immolation in police offices - hooking up with militants was not easy.

"Where could an ordinary woman find these explosives?" says Rana Azimova, a human rights activist.

"Muslim Uzbek women do not commit such acts."

"Women with men arrested ask God for patience, and expect a better life in Heaven."

Still, rights activists say that female suicide is prevalent.

Some estimate a yearly toll of 60 suicides; in the province of Djizzakh alone, Ms. Azimova says there were 27 cases last year.

Such incidents usually occur in private, as a result of domestic violence or financial hardship.

In one case, a woman killed herself in protest because her husband refused to let her watch Western soap operas.

Uzbeks say such actions with fire have pre-Islamic Zoroastrian roots, the religious system of the Persians dating back to the 6th century BC.

Connecting the dots may not prove too difficult in a nation where Uzbeks say that many applauded the attacks on police forces despised for corruption and a heavy hand.

The regime's reaction - to crack down, or to moderate - will frame the long-term result.

"This is the government's product," says Tolib Yokubov, head of the Uzbek Human Rights Society.

"Cursing the president has become common; many people feel sympathy toward the attackers."

"It doesn't matter who is behind those blasts, but now people know how to confront the government, to protest."

end quotes

And why am I not surprised to hear that George W. Bush is right there in bed with this guy, as his Pap and Donald Rumsfeld were with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Assiz?

Straw at odds with US over brutality of terror war ally Telegraph.co.uk

In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The biggest threat to America in 1800: outgoing conservative President John Adams' attempt to revoke the Bill of Rights before the ink was dry with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and antidisestablishmentarianism. Biggest threat in 2000: incoming Resident George Bushs attempt to revoke the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act (OK, that was in 2001, but you get my point,) and antidisestablishmentarianism. And they talk about the founding fathers....

Edit to add: I actually clicked on the link before I remembered that after contacting a number of Senators and one Representative, the only one from whom I have yet to receive a response are Senator Clinton and BOTH of my own Senators, who have received by far the most contact. I've gotten apologetic notes from Boxer and Reid explaining that they can't provide a specific response to non-constituents due to volume. I can't even get that from Cornyn and Kay, and I AM a constituent. So, for whom would ya'll say they work? I'll stick to writing Senators from OTHER states; they represent me better, and want to more.

I should let this go because

1) I took AP American History in TX, not NY, and

2) It was fifteen years ago,

but, in fairness, we weren't that we were at war with Vietnam because, despite being involved in armed hostilities with them for a length of time similar to what has passed since I sat in that class, we WEREN'T at war with them, we just sent folks like you over there to kill and be killed by them. To my knowledge, Congress hasn't declared a war since 8 December, 1945, and for good reason. Why we and they allow Presidents to fight undeclared wars is a good question.

We did cover Vietnam rather extensively, though perhaps they'll be some bleed through for me, since the Academic Decathlon history topic that year was the sixties. I remember a question about where Kent State happened, the fact that most didn't know the answer, and the fact that those that did knew because of CSN&Y, not the eductational system. Just another in a long line of examples of how liberals tend to know history better than conservatives who try revising it (usually why they're liberals.)

If you see the fella again, you might tell him that little story, and ask him why, if he agrees with us liberals that the educational system is in such a moribund state, why the Resident doesn't fund NCLB. Or why his solution to the problem is not to build and modernize schools, PAY TEACHERS A LIVING WAGE (how many Masters holders do you know making <$30,000 after five years who AREN'T teachers?) and provide more and better educational resources to kids, but to facilitate the closing of schools and the dismissal of teachers. We've all heard the old adage: "those who know do; those who can't teach" but has anyone (or any conservative) ever asked why? Put another way: todays schools may be responsible for the ignorance of that fellas daughter; what's his excuse?

It's a "frame" in more ways than one. Same old Republican garbage: "our actions are your fault!" How can one argue with something so irrational?

Very astute, particularly the last part. This "too much is not enough" culture is destroying the country and the world.

The biggest thing I got out of the article, btw, is a reminder of what we already knew: wealth is a function of education, but education is, in its turn, a function of wealth, and thus it's a self fulfilling prophecy. The current climat in America just exacerbates the problem: we are told the solution to outsourcing jobs is "better education" but it's hard to pay for college when you're poor (which is why I'm not there) and it's also difficult to make it to school when your time is all spent trying to feed your family, whether you're a minor or not. Most of the creature comforts PERCEIVED to have improved the lives of the middleclass are illusory; they remain for as long as their employment and ability to pay the interest on debt, as the article relates.

Meanwhile, the folks that have it all want more, and if the liquidation of America will destroy it, well, what part of America are Switzerland and the Bahamas in? If the value of the dollar sinks through the floor as a result of borrowing and debt, that's not where their wealth is anyway, right? For us, the prosperity of America is essential to both our personal well-being and our patriotism; to them, Americas success is a liability.

Gunfire continues in Uzbekistan USA Today

Perhaps it should really be said that it is the way, or manner, in which things ALWAYS CHANGE, that remains the same!

Change, Morambar, is constant, CONSERVATIVES and their attempts to have it be otherwise, to the contrary!

Depending upon who you listen to, and how you apply the "model", there are perhaps five generations to a "rotation", where the last generation "rotates back", in essence, in order, and becomes the "first, again, and so, a pattern is said to repeat, and over expanses of history, that is indeed observable!

The trick for us, here in OUR America, as I see it, and of course, this is only my view, is to be able to discern future trends in OUR America, now, when they are in their formative states, and so, be able to be a positive influence on the seeds of those future trends now, by the force of OUR character, and by OUR will to effect positive change down here on earth, during OUR individual lifetimes, without expectation of gain!

This forum now gives us that opportunity, and I think that it is now incumbent upon us, and especially your generation, Morambar, to figure out how to use this forum as an INTELLIGENT POLITICAL FORUM, which means not only making a statement about out-going "conservative" John Adams in 1800, but perhaps developing that thought so that someone else would even know what it was in the first place!

Don't assume that your points are obvious is what I am saying, Morambar!

If you have an insight into history, that "insight" is not automatically universal, and so, you should spend some time on development of what your theme really is, and how it might educate us today as to a potential threat to OUR liberty, tomarrow!

People don't know American history, Morambar, and so, you should not assume that they do.

Instead, you should use American history as a pallet upon which to paint vivid pictures of what life in OUR America has really been like down through the years since the days of OUR nation's founding back in the 1770's.