| To: LindyBill who wrote (111626) | 4/29/2005 4:55:29 AM | | From: JDN | | | | | I honestly believe, if Iran gets Nuclear Weapons there is a very good chance Nuclear war will erupt in the middle east and that such war will spell the beginning of the end of the world just as the Bible has described. jdn |
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| To: unclewest who wrote (111692) | 4/29/2005 5:08:24 AM | | From: JDN | | | | Well, with nearly 300 million people I cant believe we cant satisfy the need for our Armed Services and Reserves. Personally, I think some SPIFFY UNIFORMS would go farther then these plans to attract young people. I saw a program on I believe the History or Discovery channel awhile back regarding uniforms and what they are working on for the future. They were SO GREAT that even made me want to reenlist and I am 61!! (gg). General Patton knew what a uniform ought to accomplish. haha.
I remember when I was about to get out of active duty from the USMC and wanted to go to college. I hadnt even taken the College entrance exams, but my wise old Aunt (a guidance counserlor at HS) told me to put on my DRESS BLUES and go to a small college in Western PA. I did, and when I snapped to attention they FAWNED ALL OVER ME and even arranged for me to take the exam while on leave ALL BY MYSELF. haha. I guess I passed, went on to College and graduated FIRST IN MY CLASS, got the highest paying job offer at the time from the school. jdn |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 5:32:31 AM | | | | | | No Liberal Lie Left Unexposed By Matt Margolis
By John Hawkins on Education
One regular claim made by the Democrats-especially during the 2004 campaign-was that the No Child Left Behind Act was "an unfunded mandate."
Well, we can add that myth to the list of debunked liberal lies:
There are two things wrong with the [National Education Association's] claim that NCLB is an unfunded mandate: The law is neither a mandate, nor is it unfunded. The nonpartisan General Accounting Office dismissed the mandate claim last October. The law only provides funds to those states that wish to receive them. Any state that wants to reject the dollars -- and the rules that accompany them -- is free to do so. That no state has yet taken this route provides an on-the-ground basis for rejecting the complaint out of hand. As for funding, the law does contain this clause: 'Nothing in this Act shall be construed to ... mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act.'"
I never get tired of being right... or correct. |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 5:35:35 AM | | | | | | DEBKAfile’s Exclusive Islamic and Intelligence sources report:
An announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death appears Friday in one of his close aides’ most credible Web sites. It has sparked a storm of controversy in al Qaeda circles, some of whom claim notice is false.
Signed by the Pen of Jihad Warriors, the site provides no information on circumstances of death, only asks:
Where are those who break out of borders? Where are the lamenters? Where are those who throw themselves from the tops of towers and skyscrapers? Where are the heart-rending cries?
Egyptian bin Laden adherent, Yasser Sari, calls notice a lie and promises new videotape soon in which leader announces end of al Qaeda truce in Europe. Other followers credit the announcement as “authentic and Islamic.” |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 5:37:51 AM | | | | | | Putin’s Mid East Visits Signpost Unfolding Russian Penetration
DEBKAfile Special Analysis
April 29, 2005, 11:42 AM (GMT+02:00)
Israeli officials are not sure what to make of Vladimir Putin’s current Middle East tour, the first Russian president ever to initiate a visit to Jerusalem and the first world leader to call on Palestinian Authority leaders in Ramallah. Putin himself made much of the one million Israelis who understood every word he said in Jerusalem. Despite differences over key issues, he and his hosts basked in the warm friendliness of their encounters.
But while protesting he would never jeopardize Israeli security, Putin brushed aside Israeli objections to the supply of 50 Russian armored personnel carriers to the Palestinians -whose terrorist structures are still thriving, and to the sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Syria. President George W. Bush also said again Thursday that he was unhappy about the missile sale to Damascus. Bush and Putin are due to meet in Moscow in ten days.
Ignored most conspicuously was the enigmatic relationship revived in Ramallah, on Friday, April 29, ten minutes’ drive from the Jerusalem venues of the Russian leader’s Jerusalem talks the day before.
Just as the Russian president made sure to enunciate words Israelis wanted to hear on Thursday (“Tehran needs to do more to assure world it is not trying to build atomic weapons.” Returning spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr plant to Russia is not enough. Iran must also “abandon all technology to create a full nuclear cycle”), on Friday, he sang a tune that fell easily on Arab ears in Ramallah.
Putin was able to converse freely in the Russian language with Mahmoud Abbas, an old colleague from their Cold War days in the KGB First (Foreign Relations) Directorate. Last January, Abbas, newly elected to replace the late Yasser Arafat, chose Moscow for his first overseas trip outside the Middle East. There, as DEBKAfile reported at the time, he held secret talks with his former KGB bosses on collaboration and settled with Putin on a Russian-Palestinian arms deal to be unveiled when opportune. The time for that is now.
The Kremlin has embarked on a cautiously evolving strategic drive to re-establish itself in the Arab world. Its anti-aircraft missile deal with Syria is believed by DEBKAfile’s strategic experts to be only a foretaste of much larger transactions to come. The deal happened at the very moment when Syrian president Bashar Assad’s fortunes are at their lowest ebb after his army was pushed out of Lebanon by a joint US-French shove. Putin sees long-term advantage in strengthening the Syrian ruler’s standing in the eyes of his military. And should a military coup unseat Assad, Russia will already have its foot firmly through the door of any future regime.
These are not the only irons in Putin’s Middle East fire. While rapping Iranian nuclear weapons aspirations in public, the Russian leader has formed a developed nuclear relationship with Tehran. Semi-clandestine ties (on the Abu Mazen model) are maintained with pro-Baath Iraqis actively running the guerrilla war against US forces from outside the country. The Russians are also in close contact with such Palestinian radical and terrorist groups as the Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine.
Put together, these connections add up to a quiet political and military Russian penetration of Middle East forces close to the fringes of power in a way that will not arouse too much attention in Washington, but will at the same time provide Moscow with an inside track to regional developments and jumping-off points for broader penetrations.
This careful balancing act was aptly illustrated just before the Putin trip in an announcement by foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia would begin withdrawing its troops from Georgia by the end of the year. This step came after a long period in which the Kremlin ignored demands from Washington and Tbilisi to eliminate the Russian military base in the former Soviet republic. But, when combined with a Russian initiative to gain a stronger foothold in the Middle East, this step signaled a tit-for-tat deal whereby Moscow would pull back from a key Caucasian region in Washington’s favor while pressing forward in the Middle East. This deal will most certainly figure high on the agenda of the Bush-Putin summit next month.
In the war on terror, cooperation between Moscow and Jerusalem is more sparing than Israel would like. The Russians command a rich fund of intelligence on the Arab world, the Palestinians and al Qaeda’s activities in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. Moscow has cut Israel out of its counter-terror loop for a reason. Gone are the days of late 2001 and early 2002 when, in the aftershock of the 9/11 attacks, Putin collaborated fully with Bush on data that helped the American-led coalition successfully invade Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. These days, the Kremlin plays its cards very close to its chest. Jerusalem’s bid for intelligence-sharing with Moscow was rebuffed in early 2004 when the Russians indicated they were open only to one-way traffic from Israel, but offered nothing of value in exchange.
Another important dimension of Putin’s Israel visit comes from his attitude to the ex-Russian community. While most Israeli institutions and media treat Russian citizens as new immigrants to be absorbed in the overall fabric of society like all previous waves of newcomers, for the Russian president they are not ex-Russians but expatriates, exemplars of Russian culture, art, sport, language and education. Putin does not see a million Russian-speaking Israelis, but the largest Russian minority in the Middle East, which must be fostered, protected and sponsored. He is personally in regular contact with several Israel-Russian business figures and he rates these connections as highly as any political ties. |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 5:42:32 AM | | | | | | EU tax commissioner talks sense (sensation)
adamsmith.org
By Madsen on Europe
Laszlo Kovacs, the European commissioner for taxation, has described the flat tax as "absolutely legitimate" (reports Stephen Castle in the Independent). The single flat rate tax, already in use by four EU members and planned or under consideration by many more, has been attacked by the French and others as "social dumping," even though it has actually raised more revenue.
Mr Kovacs, a former Hungarian foreign minister, brings a further fresh breath of Eastern air to the enlarged EU by pointing out that "the EU does not tackle the issue of income and corporate tax rates." This is true, but it must have made Brussels shudder because tax harmonization is among their ambitions.
Flat tax threatens those ambitions. It has spread across the former Socialist economies not because it is only suited to developing countries but because it is politically easier to introduce in transitional economies. The interest groups which benefit from the status quo were less entrenched there. Fortunately the competitive pressure from their success makes it easier to take on those groups in advanced countries.
Flat tax improves things because it lowers tax rates, and because it is simpler, and easier to understand and administer. It also brings the chance to sweep away all of the quirks and complexities which have disfigured tax codes over the years. Now that is "absolutely legitimate." |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 7:01:48 AM | | | | | | Sometimes, it simply isn't Vietnam
usatoday.com
With each year, each conflict and each generation, America moves beyond the war in Southeast Asia — only to be pulled back again by the usual suspects. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, it's more than clear that Iraq is not another Vietnam.
By Jonah Goldberg
This Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. For a child born today, that war is as ancient as World War II was for someone born in 1975. But for some, Vietnam is still current events, not history.
The cliché is that generals like to fight the last war. The phrase is usually invoked to suggest (often inaccurately) that military types are behind the times. But in America, even if generals were fighting the last war, that would still put them several wars ahead of much of the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood.
The gravitational pull of Vietnam analogies is so powerful in some quarters that it can bend not only light but logic. At The New York Times, especially, there seems to be a hair trigger for such comparisons. It's as if their computers have macros designed to bypass the laborious and go straight to the lugubrious; so that R.W. “Johnny” Apple & Co. needn't even type words such as “quagmire” or phrases such as “echoes of Vietnam” when deadlines loom.
For example, on Day 24 of the war in Afghanistan, Apple wrote, “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?” Apple pondered. “Echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.” For some, the echoes stopped suddenly when the Taliban fell a few days later.
But for many others, the beat goes on. Since the beginning of the second Iraq war, comparisons, insinuations, allusions to Vietnam have been a near-daily occurrence. Literally thousands upon thousands of articles and editorials make the analogy as though it were actually a novel insight. You get the sense that Earth could be invaded by Klingons and some editorialist would hear “echoes of Vietnam” amid their disruptor blasts.
One is tempted to simply chalk this up to the geezerification of liberal baby boomers who can't shake their nostalgia for the glory days of speaking truth to power. But many of today's younger generation have been Vietnamized as well. This isn't as odd as it might sound. World War I seemed like ancient history before the ink on the armistice was dry. World War II, meanwhile, continues to dominate our imaginations, on the right and left, six decades after it ended. As any historian will tell you, public understanding of WWII has become far more literary than literal. So it is with Vietnam.
There's an enduring myth that Vietnam was a singular evil undone by America's idealistic youth, holding hands and singing songs in one voice for peace. This reflects the ego of baby-boomer liberals more than the facts. Not only did large numbers of young people support the war, but in the annals of unpopular wars, it wasn't that special. In 1968, Sol Tax of the University of Chicago cataloged anti-war activity from the Revolutionary War until the beginning of peace negotiations and found that Vietnam ranked as either the fourth or seventh least-popular war in American history.
Regardless, Vietnam is part of our cultural DNA now, and it will probably never be fully erased anymore than the Civil War or WWII will be. Right or wrong, silly or legitimate, that's the reality. And that's fine. If people want to argue about the Tet Offensive forever, so be it. But it is history.
But it's not particularly useful history. Ask military experts about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq (or Afghanistan), and their eyes roll. Vietnam was a state-to-state war and had vastly more support from its Communist benefactors than Iraqi “insurgents” could ever receive from Syria and Iran. Indeed, in Vietnam, the insurgency phase of the war was largely over by 1965.
In Iraq, meanwhile, it's nothing but insurgency now. But, unlike the Viet Cong, Iraq's insurgency is ideologically diverse. Some are terrorists seeking to impose a pan-Arab theocracy, some are looking to restore the secular bacchanalia of fear they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein, and others are just gangsters. Vietnam was a jungle war that started against the French in the 1950s. Iraq was a desert war that permanently toppled Saddam's regime in a month. The technologies in play are incomparable. The terrain, the political will and ideologies behind the efforts, the cultures — almost every single point of comparison doesn't add up — save the common bravery of America's military. Perhaps most important: Casualty rates are vastly different.
Now, none of this is to say that the Iraq war was right (though I believe it was). The point is that a war can be completely different from Vietnam in almost every major respect and still be wrong — and hard. We've come to think that any military blunder or challenge must be akin to Vietnam (in much the same way some people think that if a law is bad, it must be unconstitutional). The war on terror and the Cold War are profoundly different enterprises, so it should only follow that the conflicts they generate would be different, too.
Of course, there are some similarities between Iraq and Vietnam — including the press' attitude toward both. But such similarities are inherent to all wars and national struggles in a republic such as ours. The Spanish-American War, for instance, would probably be a far more fruitful point of comparison for critics of the Bush administration, but that would require they read up on it first.
Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online. He is a syndicated columnist and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. |
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