Defiantone.com

Hillary won’t quit even though she can’t win - ever. She should throw in the towel because its only hurting her party as a whole. I like John McCain and I also like Obama but I’d rather have a fair fight. Why won’t she quit?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.

If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.

You can read the rest at the NY Times.

Free thought and liberty

All Americans are afforded the same protections under the constitution and the bill of rights regardless of what background they might come from. Our nation is great because we are a melting pot of people from many different nations with different backgrounds, opinions, and religions. Many Americans believe that no matter what, we should all be treated the same. Some people think that if I converted to Islam that I should have my security clearance revoked and that I should be put under a terror watch list. Americans are watching other Americans solely based upon the color of their skin and their religion.

In the mid-1800’s the United States was a divided nation as we fought in a brutal struggle for the rights of everyone despite their background or skin color. Hundreds of thousands died in this struggle in an effort to treat everyone equally. Despite the great loss of life America still did not treat everyone equally. America went through a large civil rights struggle for the equality of African Americans during the early to mid 20th century in an effort to even everything out. They wanted the right to be treated as an equal irregardless of how they might look. Today I think that we are still fighting the same battle but the participants are different. In the past month the president signed a law that allowed him and the secretary of defense to indefinitely hold anyone if they are suspected of terrorism. In a nutshell, they suspended the right of habeas corpus. The American civil liberties union immediately began to fight this new legislation as it was in violation of the rights spelled out in one of our nations greatest documents, the bill of rights.

Today I received an email from… someone that advocated the idea of spamming the ACLU with mail to adversely affect their mission: to protect the freedom of all Americans. First off, this is an illegal act. Second, this is one of the most foolish ideas I have heard of in a long time. Why in the world would we want to fight an organization that is fighting for all of our rights. Sure, the status quo in America is that we don’t care who we jail or whose rights we violate to stop terrorism but I know that I wouldn’t want to be one of those individuals who was illegally detained.

I mentioned this to someone yesterday and they mentioned that the ACLU is notorious for fighting only certain things and not all rights violations. In particular, they often fight not for the right to have religion but to remove it from a particular venue. In some cases, I can agree with this rational because we need to separate church from state. Why? Islam is nearly inseparable from most of the nations where the majority of people are of the Islamic faith. When this happens, only the faith of the majority is promoted and the others.. well, a Christian in Indonesia could get murdered and nobody would care. If the shoe was on the other foot and it was an individual of the Islamic faith the matter would be rigorously investigated.

Now that I’ve beat this to death… lets move on to the next topic today

Voting along party lines is foolish

Most politicians in America campaign on the party policy alone rather than their individual beliefs and ideas. We, as Americans, who live in greatest nation on earth, should elect people who think for themselves. When was the last time we voted on abortion in America? Do you think that the legislative body would subject themselves to a vote that would splinter the voting population in half. Lets face it, if there was a political climate change, as there is now, these people wouldn’t be elected the next time around. To make a campaign on polarizing material would be dangerous… the republican party joined together and supported GW’s decision to send Americans into Iraq. It will take years to figure out if the loss of life was worth setting them free. The crazy part is that they don’t care about what we’ve done over there… they just want us dead and gone.

Ok… whats the deal with this? well, I got an email yesterday telling people to vote on party lines citing the following reasons… time to tear them all apart

1. The economy. More than 6.6 million jobs have been created since 8/03. 4.1 annual growth is superior to all major industrialized nations. Dow hits new records. Productivity is up. Real after tax income has grown by 15% since 2001. Like VP Chaney would say…”What more do you want?” The tax cuts proposed by Bush and the R-Congress can take a bow.

More than anything else, the federal interest rates affect how our economy grows or shrinks. One man, who was put into that office by GW (and reagan before that), is responsible for that. Were you aware that 720,000 of the jobs created were government jobs? Creating a bigger government is not an effective way to reduce taxes and lower costs. Smaller governments are more efficient and cost less money.

Oh yeah, my data from Sept 06 says only 3 million jobs were created…. hmmm… fudging numbers somewhere?

Clinton took the jobless rate from 7.5% to 4% during his two terms in office. The GW took the jobless rate from 4% to 6.6% to 4.4%…. we’re almost back to where we started. He didn’t do anything legendary… he just got us back to where we started out in the first place.

You’ve also got to take into account that our nation now has over 300 million people… more people means more jobs.

want to know more check it out at senate.gov

2. The Patriot act. The much discussed civil liberty abuses have just not materialized. It has permitted the CIA and FBI to cooperate.

There has been no mention of civil rights abuses because all of the cases are handled in a seperate court that is out of the publics view. I am not aware of any… nor could I find any but the potential is just too great. Rewrite the legislation and give us something better. There IS a way to do it without infringing on citizens rights. The CIA and FBI have continually proven that although they can communicate they often do not communicate.

3. The ABM Treaty has been cancelled permitting us to work on missile defense. Is anyone but Nancy Pelosi sorry?

The fear mongers want us to spend billions on a missile defense system that does not work. They’ve already spent billions on the system and it doesn’t work… hey, I’ve got an idea. Give me your money and I’ll flush it down the toilet for you.

4. Immigration. The Republican Congress has gotten the first serious immigration restriction law passed in years.

If I was to look at the voting record I found that democrats and republicans worked on the reform together… you can’t take the credit for everything. Whats next? taking the credit for the sun rising every morning?

5. There has not been another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. Who would have predicted that on 9/12?

You got me here… there also haven’t been any more flying spaghetti monsters attacking our cities…. this is the most asinine statement out of all of them… yes, voting republican stopped the terrorists… oh wait 2819 americans died on 9/11 and 2828 american soldiers have died so far in Iraq… yep, we really showed them (I just want out troops back… soon)

6. Libya has surrendered its nuclear program.

Hmm… years of economic pressure or they saw republicans and gave up…. duh!

7. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear smuggling network has been rolled up.

Can you really attribute this to one party alone? No

8. John Roberts and Sam Alito sit on the Supreme Court.

I’ll give you this one…

9. The Demos that do not want to close Gitmo altogether want to give all its inmates the full panoply of rights Americans enjoy in criminal procedures.

Thats right, we don’t want to lock people up and throw away the key without trial because other nations watch what we do. If we abuse human rights why shouldn’t everyone else do it. We should at least give these guys and chance and if they are innocent… let em go, they didn’t do anything. It also doesn’t help that negativity is associated with the prison in the international community. One of the only reasons we have it is because its not located in America and we can pretty much do whatever we want to the prisoners.

10. Demos believe in immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If this happens the US will face a stinging defeat on the war against terror. According to Osama bin Laden, and those who share his views, we are militarily strong but psychologically and spiritually weak. Like it or not - and no one likes it - we cannot leave Iraq now without utterly and decisively validating this analysis.

Or maybe he says things like this to keep is embroiled in a war that we might not be able to win. He’s taunting us, this is what he does. I don’t want to loose either but if they outlook predicts no chance of winning… why stay? Lets get some guys together and find out what we need to win it… and win it. If we don’t change anything we don’t have a chance.

11. Demos would like to eliminate the terrorist surveillance program.

I can’t verify this one

12. If Demos achieve the majority in the House, Barney Frank will chair the Financial Services Committee, Henry Waxman the Government Reform Committee and Alcee Hastings the Intelligence Committee.

The three individuals are tools… but, we should get rid of them instead of voting for a republican… there have quite a few people in the past year that are involved in scandals, this time around most of them are republican…. lets keep the good people and get rid of the bad ones regardless of political party affiliation…

13. Demos believe the proper response to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test isface-to-face talks. That’s what the Clinton Administration did for years.

For six years the bush administration has done no better… neither made any progress

What I’m trying to say is this, give me a list of facts and I can counter almost all of them as I’ve done here. Vote for the right person, don’t vote for someone based on party affiliation alone… its a bad idea.

Comments? please let me know your opinion

Got the video of the whole Pres. Clinton deal (that hasn’t been deleted yet)
Check it out at Break.com

I’m sure you’ve all been watching the news and have seen that the war on terror is not progressing as swimmingly as some would like. In the past week we’ve seen the extremely right wing Fox News tear into Former President Clinton in an interview on his actions to thwart Al Qaida when he was in office. Quite simply, he didn’t have the political ammo to get the job done though he did have the planning to take care of him. Lets face it, he did all that he could and I guess in some ways GW is doing all that he can. Fox News shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone… its all crap

We’ve also seen a report come from some of our intelligence agencies that states that the war on terror and the war in iraq are only helping to stir jihadism to greater levels. We’ve got a problem with what we’ve done to strike back and we need to change our course. To continue on this path and expect different results could be disastrous to the American people and the rest of the world. I still think we need to get the Iraqi people to some level of stability but after that we need to spend billions (as much as we spent on the Iraq war or more) on humanitarian efforts to help redeem our image. Our image, unfortunately, is all that we have in the eyes of the Muslim world and its not doing all that well right now. I don’t know how long it will take if we can ever make any positive impact but we need to let these people know that we accept their religious beliefs but we need to stop extremism as its it detrimental to everyone involved.

Thats about it for now

Well, nobody really likes this icy psychopath. If you actually listen to her and agree with anything she spews from her trap, never visit my site again because that lady is nuts.

Lets see what Bill Clinton has to say about her

Occasionally someone else does a much better job at saying something than you did. In my case, many people do a much better job at saying something better on a daily… wait hourly basis. Straight from The Inq was this little gem.

“For years, the RIAA has claimed that illegal downloads and file sharing is killing music. Those claims look pretty damned stupid in the face of a 1,300% increase in legitimate album sales.

What Live 8 proved beyond doubt is that if you write good songs and can actually play instruments rather than simply sampling a George Clinton bass line and droning on about hoes and other garden implements, people will slap their foreheads in amazement, exclaim “bugger me, that’s really good,” and nip down the shops to buy the album.”

I can only think of one band that I really liked, Pink Floyd… the rest of them… well, they can still either

A. die
B. drive off a cliff… and die
C. drive into a brick wall at high speed… and die
D. move to antarctica… and die

animosity? INDEED

Bush spoke yesterday at Bragg to the soldiers stationed there and to the rest of the world. A few things caught my eye while reading through the transcript. I wish I could have seen the live video of it because he used some rather large words… as we all know he hasn’t quite mastered the spoken english language.

“The United Nations is in Iraq to help Iraqis write a constitution and conduct their next elections.”

I checked it out and this is largely true (a good thing) check out the linkage. I would hope that our only role there is to provide the security so that their country can move forward till such time they can run the whole show. We need to be making as few decisions as possible and advising when it is needed rather than trying to force them one direction or another.

“Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don’t you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever — when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters — the sober judgment of our military leaders.”

This whole chunk is quite a doozy. Many American commanders stationed along the border with Syria have been authorized to provide the brutal honest truth. The truth: They need more help. A realignment could be the solution to our problems but a short term influx of troops to meet the shortfall of the Iraqi forces could be a better option. We know that we want to hand over power in totality to them at some day and never have another nation like S. Korea where we are forced to provide a defense force 50 years after the last major battles. There is a break point with the number of forces in that country; if the Iraqi forces do not grow fast enough we may not be able to beat the growing insurgency. In other words, our defense needs to grow faster than their offense. Every day that we spend in that country we are providing an effective training ground for terrorists. They are becoming more proficient in urban warfare as every day passes. Short term (yes SHORT TERM) help may be needed by “coalition” (read: American) forces so that we can get out of there as quickly as possible.

Rummy tried to play with the English language yesterday and tried to warp something said by Cheney. He said that the comment “last throes” could mean as long as 6-10 years. Hmm… we’ve been there two years already and the last throes could be 3-5x as long? Sorry Dick, you don’t have the command of the english language that President Clinton did. That guy could effectively argue the definition of “is”.