http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1524.htm Yawn this. You are so a swollower of government propaganda. Police are our friends. They help find your house when you are lost.Thats all.
gonzomax, you do know that the Patriot Act II was debated in Congress and that not every provision in your link from the beginning of 2003 was implemented, right? (And I hope you know that every spin placed on that site’s description of the act is not necessarily how it could be enforced.)
Accuracy nitpick: gonzomax claimed only that the Patriot Act’s definition of “terrorist” included “green protesters and people who picket defense plants”, not that such people have actually been prosecuted as terrorists under the Act.
Its funny, there was a sit in here in D.C. and the majority of the protesters chaining themselves together in the capitol building in protest were baby boomers. They all had grey hair and seemed to operate under the naive belief that we still had an independent media. If it weren’t so serious it would be funny.
I think you might want to take a closer look at those re-enlistment numbers. Re-enlistment bonuses are as high as $90,000 (more if you are a minesweeper or something like that). There is also the specter that you will be forced to re-enlist, I am not sure that they can actually force you to re-enlist but its a tactic being used by re-enlistment recruiters. The stop-loss mechanism is also making it a matter of re-enlisting and getting a bonus or not re-enlisting and risking getting stop-lossed. Its not as rosy as you think. We need troops to support this war and we cannot afford to have qualified soldiers quitting right now merely because their regular tour of duty is over, they have an inactive reserve requirement that last maybe another 8 years and that can be translated into active service without paying you any sort of bonus.
The bonuses are even structured so that the lifers don’t get it. The bonus is not available to anyone with more than 14 years of service.
http://www.greenparty.org/patriot.html There are a lot of organizations that are not main stream and see the Patriot Act as a way to stop them. The ability to do it does not mean they already have. However the radicals that burn down construction in what were pristine areas have been subject to it.Where do they stop. ? Why did it the act so broad unless they intend to use it.
The baby boomers that marched once still think they have a right to.
Those of us who oppose the war are still in a small minority.
Most Americans like war.
Tris
It reminds me of an argument I got into a guy that was collecting clothes and canned food at his church to send down to the Katrina victims sometime around Christmas. I told him “just send money, it goes a lot further”
I told him a story about what happened in downtown NYC right after 9/11. I went down there along with a bunch of other people. We went to the Red Cross tent and asked if we could do something (we had tried to give blood but there were so many donors lined up that they had a guy on a megaphone telling people that they were only taking O neg and AB (pos or neg). The guys in the tent asked if we were mediaclly trained or had any emergency rescue training, we said nope, he told us to donate money to the red cross. We insisted we cold help so they had us check donated canned food for dents and separate them into different categories so that they could distribute them to the soup kitchens in the area, another group separated donated clothing by size and they shipped that off to Africa or someplace. We eventually got hte hint and wrote some checks and stuck around in case the recovery effort suddenly had a need for a bunch of corporate lawyers. Then one guy (a banker) came along and demanded to help so they told him to check the tops on the water bottles in a truck to make sure the safety seal hadn’t been broken (I think they had another group of insistent volunteers folding tarp and then laying it flat again), after about an hour, he wrote them a check, got a T-shirt and left.
So after telling this story, I tell this guy that he is just trying to make himself feel better, if he really wanted to help, he’d donate money. He got real upset at the implication that what he was doing was anything less than selfless and that money was what was really needed by aid agencies (not a semi full of used clothes and canned food driven down to New orleans). I just left, but I bet there is a container full of used clothes and canned food sitting in a parking lot in New Orleans somewhere unless the Red Cross had already sent it somewhere else.
I used to think that the best way to get out of this war was to go through it. Now, I am not so sure that forging ahead is best for anyone involved.
I don’t quite buy that. I believe the anti-war protests made McCarthy’s position mainstream. No protests, and McCarthy looks like a radical. The protests made Gene clean by comparison.
The protests were because pols are surrounded by yesman. It is hard to break through. The notion that Bushies only listen to good news has been widely reported. When hundreds ofthousands of people shut down DC ,they can not pretend it is not happening. Its a wakeup call.
The Viet Nam protrests were significant in the fact that politicians who were against the war could come out. To face the admin .the military and war profiteerers was a risky political stance. When it became clear that the masses were against it as the protests demonstrated, they could tell the truth. They helped end the war.