Most intelligent people gather information from many sources before forming an opinion. And if they encounter a reason to change their opinion they do.

UNLIKE YOU.

“Bush routinely asks to see the families of the fallen when he visits military bases, which he does about 10 times a year. It does not appear that the White House or the military makes any effort to screen out dissenters or embittered families, though some families decline the invitation to meet with Bush. Most families encourage the president to stay the course in Iraq. ‘To oppose something my husband lost his life for would be a betrayal,’ says Inge Colton, whose husband, Shane, died in April 2004 when his Apache helicopter was shot down over Baghdad. Bush does, however, hear plenty of complaints. He has been asked about missing medals on the returned uniform of a loved one, about financial assistance for a child going to college and about how soldiers really died when the Pentagon claimed the details were classified.

At her meeting with the president at Fort Hood, Texas, last spring, Colton says she lit into Bush for ’stingy’ military benefits. Her complaints caught Bush ‘a little off guard,’ she recalls. ‘He tried to argue with me a little bit, but he promised he would have someone look into it.’ The next day she got a call from White House chief of staff Andrew Card, who said the White House would follow up. ‘My main goal was to have him look at my son, look him in the eyes and apologize,’ says Colton. ‘I wanted him to know, to really understand who he has hurt.’ She says Bush was ‘attentive, though not in a fake way,’ and sometimes at a loss for words. ‘He didn’t try to overcompensate,’ she says.

“The most telling—and moving—picture of Bush grieving with the families of the dead was provided by Rachel Ascione, who met with him last summer. Her older brother, Ron Payne, was a Marine who had been killed in Afghanistan only a few weeks before Ascione was invited to meet with Bush at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa, Fla.

“Ascione wasn’t sure she could restrain herself with the president. She was feeling ‘raw.’ ‘I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why my brother was never coming back, and I wanted him to know it was his fault that my heart was broken,’ she recalls. The president was coming to Florida, a key swing state, in the middle of his re-election campaign. Ascione was worried that her family would be ‘exploited’ by a ‘phony effort to make good with people in order to get votes.’

“Ascione and her family were gathered with 18 other families in a large room on the air base. The president entered with some Secret Service agents, a military entourage and a White House photographer. ‘I’m here for you, and I will take as much time as you need,’ Bush said. He began moving from family to family. Ascione watched as mothers confronted him: ‘How could you let this happen? Why is my son gone?’ one asked. Ascione couldn’t hear his answer, but soon ’she began to sob, and he began crying, too. And then he just hugged her tight, and they cried together for what seemed like forever.’

“Ascione’s family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way. Ascione is just over five feet; her late brother was 6 feet 7. ‘My whole life, he used to put his hand on the top of my head and just hold it there, and it drove me crazy,’ she says. When Bush saw that she was crying, he leaned over and put his hand on the top of her head and drew her to him. ‘It was just like my brother used to do,’ she says, beginning to cry at the memory.

“Before Bush left the meeting, he paused in the middle of the room and said to the families, ‘I will never feel the same level of pain and loss you do. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, a member of my family or someone that I love. But I want you to know that I didn’t go into this lightly. This was a decision that I struggle with every day.’

“As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. ‘I am sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he said.”

I disagree with Maureen Dowd’s comment that these KIA families are entitled to special “moral authority” in discussions of the war (I believe all citizens are entitled to their own opinions on the war). However, if she is right, then it is incumbent on everyone, including the President’s critics on the left, to read and acknowledge the contents of this article with open minds and hearts. For my part, I am struck by several things that the left routinely denies, especially the President’s routine requests to meet with KIA families, despite the difficulties such meetings present; the President’s compassion for all KIA families, regardless of their political views; and the emotional toll these meetings take on both the families and the President, even under the best of trying circumstances.

The Newsweek article does not resolve every question about the war in Iraq. However, it does tend to confirm Cindy Sheehan’s first account of her own meeting with the President, and to contradict her second account. It also suggests that a second meeting now between the President and Mrs. Sheehan would do nothing more than has already been done to comfort her and honor her sons memory. It would only be a vehicle for further attacks by the left on a President whose compassionate qualities are denied every day, no matter what he does.

Maybe someone should tell him if he stays another week at the Rancho FAKE-O, he will achieve 1 more thing for which he will be remembered.

Or perhaps, he thought he was going to break ray-gun’s record but he IS too dumb to do the math.

HE IS EVEN A FAILURE AT VACATION RECORD BREAKING.
HE IS A FAILURE AT BEING A HUMAN.

“shut up, just shut up! you people make me sick.”

hmmmmmm

how many times did you see farenheit 9/11?

how do you feel about gay marriage?

how do you feel about black people voting?

how do you feel about abortion?

if you hate the views on this blog so much, how do you manage to stay here so long?

I bet you don’t have the balls to answer my questions.
you should go to iraq and “fight for freedom”

or is it fight for shrubya’s fortune?

Grieving Bush Protestor Has No Exit Strategy
by Scott Ott

(2005-08-16) — Cindy Sheehan, the protestor whose son died fighting for freedom in Iraq, today acknowledged that she has “no exit strategy” for getting out of what some have called the “quagmire in Crawford” outside of the Texas ranch of President George Bush.

“My opponent is more entrenched than I expected,” said Mrs. Sheehan, whose vigil has focused national attention on the ability of the news media to focus national attention on Mrs. Sheehan. “I’m still committed to victory, but it may take longer than I thought at first.”

Mrs. Sheehan said she is willing to “pay any price, bear any burden” to get a second meeting with Mr. Bush.

So now she speaks ill of the president and as you say, he treated her like garbage. Kind of different from her original quotes dont you think.

I’ll be waiting for your response filled with hate and profanity and no “facts”

The idea and practice of empire is doomed from its birth. Unlike the beauty and profound dignity of the cycle of life, in its ultimate statement of purpose and symbolism of all it governs, the birth, decline and death of empire; of dynasty; of all belief in divinity of such institutions is death itself. It is the death of the individual. It is the death of objectivity. It is the death of itself over time.

The practice of empire is a deliberate ignorance of progress, of change, and is inherently incapable of addressing such notions and can only respond with subversion. Policies and practices are drawn. The great estates conspire to control the lesser of the three, and the third carries the burden for all for the duration of the empire.

The empire; the kingdom, upon its lengthy success and pride in its perpetuation will then succumb to its own decadence. The king will cease from preserving his noble persona. His court and his nobles will follow, bringing a new age of oppression to the lesser. One that wears no mask nor serves to preserve the intellectual control of the kingdom. Because of his great conceit, the King will declare his own divinity and serve himself openly at the great expense of his kingdom. In his decadence, it will be he himself who will insure the death of his empire.

And the Barbarians; the Galls, those of the greater body of the empire who have suffered and lost the most will eventually reach the great walls of the palace and place it under siege. They are more prepared than the king and his court. They are familiar with starvation and with unspeakable pains. They have been conditioned as great warriors at the hands of their oppressors. They will supersede the divine ideals of his court, who haven’t an inkling of the devotion of those who they themselves have pushed to this ultimate place.

The king and his court have retreated to the palace. The palace is under siege. Will he emerge from his palace and accept his punishment, thus sparing the lives of his court? Or, will he retreat further within his palace as did Sardanapalus, and with great arrogance, set his court afire for the sake of witnessing his court and the treasures of the dead empire lost to all?

The practice of empire is inevitably its own mortal enemy. Yet we are still witness to it today.

It is as if there are always those who are capable of blatant ignorance of the lessons of history. It will perplex me to no end how the greater of all people submit to relinquish their very souls to empire when it is always clear where the empire will lead us.

he is NOT OUR PRESIDENT…. NEVER WAS

GORE WON, KERRY WON….PURE AND SIMPLE, NO conspiricy and NO delusions…

EVERYONE KNOWS!!!! NO BIG SECERET!

Published on Saturday, August 13,2005 by CommonDreams.org
Election Fraud Continues in the US
New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004
By Peter Phillips
In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.
New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election.
The facts are as follows:
In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.
More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush – another statistical impossibility. .
Dennis Loo writes, “A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held.”
There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media.
Black Box Voting reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections.
That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations – and the fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national election.
There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American “democratic” process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Dennis Loo’s report “No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election,” can be viewed at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html

SEE I CHECK FACTS, AND NOT FROM ONLY ONE SOURCE!

as he spends no time checking facts.

He treated her like garbage. He was “rude and arrogant”.

But even the trained monkey can not live up to daddy, because when daddy was confronted in 1987 by a mother of a KIA this is how he responded:

“..shut up, just shut up! You people make me sick.”

He went on to barf on a VIP in the far east.

CLASSY

As for people attacking the rich spoiled President for taking a vacation, I do not hear the same people attacking rich spoiled congress for taking a vacation(aren’t they the ones who make the laws). Maybe they should be at work right now looking into the reports of a military group not being able to get terrorist information to the FBI during the Clinton administration, but I guess that would be bad for a democrat so you won’t talk about that.

Last, but not least, there is nothing funnier than people referring to others as ignorant, illiterate pigs while using nothing more than profanity and name calling. Very Classy.

The Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts The Long political odyssey of Bill Clinton seemed to pass a milestone of sorts, as he vacationed here on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and daughter. The frenzied pace of his first six months in office, to nearly everyone’s surprise, just stopped. Mr. Clinton seemed suddenly to realize that the nation and the world could get along for days, even weeks at a time without any action by him, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, without any comment from him.

Aug, 1996 President Clinton and his family vacation in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
Aug, 1995 Hilary Rodham Clinton hosts 75th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment and Women’s Right to Vote Conference at Jackson Lake Lodge.
Jul, 1995 President Bill Clinton spends summer vacation in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
http://www.vailresorts.com/ourcompany.cfm?mode=history&resort=grand%20teton%20lodge%20company

Killed when the C-130 carrying the Presidential Limos crashed near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. August 18, 1996. All nine people on board a White House support plane were killed late Saterday (10:48pm MDT), when it crashed into Sheep Mountain (also known as Sleeping Indian Mountain) near Jackson Hole Wyoming. The aircraft was en route from Jackson Hole to John F. Kennedy International airport. The Air Force Lockheed Martin C-130 Hurcules transport aircraft was carrying a presidential vehicle and many pieces of luggage, all related to the president’s vaction (50th birthday celebration in the Grand Tetons). President Clinton said Sunday afternoon that he was told the pilot was attempting to return to the Jackson Hole airport when it crashed (CNN news report). The Air Force reported finding no evidence of an in-flight mechanical emergency after examining the flight data and flight voice recorders and could not find evidence that the pilot radioed mechanical trouble before crashing into the mountainside as reported by the White House. The victems included 8 crew members and one Secret Service agent. The aircraft and crew were stationed out of Dyess Air Force Base
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass. (AllPolitics Aug. 20) — President Bill Clinton often jokes that he’s the country’s best-known resident of public housing. But when he leaves the White House for vacation, Clinton isn’t as predictable as some of his predecessors.

When Ronald Reagan needed a vacation, he retreated to his California ranch, nicknamed “the Western White House.”

And George Bush ran off to his oceanside home in Maine, often inviting other world leaders to join him.

But Bill Clinton doesn’t own a home — vacation or otherwise. So he relies on the hospitality of friends, like Boston developer Richard Friedman.

Clinton is spending three weeks — free of charge — at Friedman’s 20-acre oyster pond retreat, enjoying some reading time in a guest cottage and walks on the grounds with daughter Chelsea. “I’ve had a wonderful time here,” Clinton told the press yesterday.

Friedman is a Democratic Party contributor who once spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom at Clinton’s invitation.

Aides say Clinton, who’s been a guest of Friedman three times, likes the island’s golf and other recreation opportunities — like today’s boat trip with Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The White House says there’s nothing wrong with the First Family accepting accommodations, like these, worth $15,000 or more.

White House press secretary Mike McCurry said, “Just because someone has some issue pending before the federal government doesn’t rule him out as someone who can grant an act of hospitality to the president of the United States.”
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/08/20/clinton.vacation/
BLOCK ISLAND 8/18/97
– In a brief but bright day trip before cheering and excited crowds, President Clinton churned his way through Block Island yesterday, speeding down its roads in his motorcade and charming the island with an impromptu stop for ice cream.
With First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea, the president partook of Block Island’s natural beauty with gusto.
The president climbed the Southeast Light, motored around the rolling countryside and dined on striped bass at one of the island’s elegant Victorian hotels. Sen. Jack Reed, who invited the Clintons to visit the island, played host.
While the White House had billed the trip as a time for quiet reflection on the way to a three-week Martha’s Vineyard vacation, the excursion was anything but.
The only private moments he spent were at the home of developer Gerald Zarrella, down a long driveway off Corn Neck Road. The rest of the time, Mr. Clinton was feeding on the energy of enthusiastic crowds.

Clintons add new chapter to history of presidential vacations

August 27, 1999

All three presidents made it clear they were pleased to get away from the pace and some of the responsibilities of the presidency. Compare those plans to the current presidential vacation of Bill Clinton, in which bouts of relaxation and golf on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts have been interspersed with heavy-duty political fund-raising.

Presidential vacations have been as varied as the presidents themselves. From long periods of do-little relaxation — Truman spent nearly half a year in Key West during his seven years in office — to the current political activism of the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Of course, “activism” is in the eye of the beholder. “I think the vacation will be substantially ‘down time,’” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said earlier this month when asked about the first family’s vacation plans. “The vast majority of their time will be vacation, rest and relaxation.”

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/08/27/presidential.vacations/

And that was not all his vacations, but once again I proved you people don’t know what you are talking about, so that’s all I needed. And military families lost loved ones for his vacation!