Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: Passions
Originally posted by: BBond
WTFU already people. This is beyond unacceptable. This administration is an outrage.
OUTRAGE! Because nothing bad ever happened during Clinton's tenure!!!! EVERYTHING WAS SO GOOD BACK THEN!!!
Nothing on the scale of mass illegal wire taps, a misguided and false war, a 50% increase in sovereign debt, a mishandling of all disasters, and international condemnation of foreign policy.
Yet, clinton got impeached for getting a BJ and lying in a farce of a trial.
However, Bush doesn't even get investigated for not upholding the constitution and perhaps lying to the American people and proceeding with a war under false pretenses.
Wake up kool aide drinker.
Originally posted by: Passions
Originally posted by: BBond
Originally posted by: Passions
Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: Passions
Those illegal wire taps saved lives and prevented another 9/11. In 5 years, no attack has occured. Wake up backstabber.
Do you have proof that they lead to the arrest and prevention of terrorists?
Do you have proof that they would have *NOT* lead to the arrest and prevention of terrorist activities if they had gone through FISA, which is legal and constitutional?
We do have proof that terrorists have been caught under the auspices of FISA, so why is there no credible evidence that the circumvention of the Constitution and the erosion of our rights lead to the prevention and arrests?
Why would any government circumvent it's ruling document when they have a process in place that has been proven to work?
Could it be because they were not utilizing the program to catch terrorists, but to broaden their powers to completely dominate not just terrorists, but also dissenters among the general population?
Lets say, if 10 years down the road, illegal wire taps were still allowed and the government overstepped it's boundaries, finally leading to an uprising of the people, which are no longer represented by the government. How then, will a Revolution and declaration of independance, such as 1776, happen again? How then, will the grand experiment of a Republic of Self-rule and equality happen?
It will not, because we will have been dominated by the very totalitarian yolk we fought to escape more than 200 years ago. We have freedoms of expression, rights to bear arms, and representitiveness through checks and balances for a reason, and it's not to open ourselves up to terrorist attacks.
It's to guarantee that our government can be checked if it gets out of control and becomes nothing more than a totalitarian regime. THAT is why we have those rights, so that we are never subjugated and we CAN plan against our government if it happens to NOT represent us anymore.
It is topics such as these that tools such as you can never grasp, even when you visit the Jefferson Memorial. Because your simpleton mind could never grasp the fact that the people who are elected are servants and we are their masters, not the other way around.
You could never grasp the idea that the battle against fear is not winnable and that terrorism is not about killing, it is about usurping rights and changing the way of life of the target.
Call me a backstabber all you want, but when you go to the Jefferson, or read the Declaration of Independance, or read any of the biographies or quotes of the people who were obviously your intellectual superior, think then, of your ignorance and blind faith in those who have no true interest to see you succeeed, or supplant them in their absolute power.
You sir, are the blind fool and backstabber of the true meaning of this country.
Spew all the garbage you want. Answer me this simple question.
How many terrorist attacks have happened on US soil since 9/11/01?
Enough said.
You criticize and slander our President, yet the answer to the question above fully redeems him 100%.
Hey, Passions, how many terrorist attacks between 1993 and 2001??? And all the while people like you were criticizing and slandering our PREDISENT!
Hypocrite.
:laugh:
Please show a thread where I was slandering the president from 1993 to 2001.
Enough said.
:laugh:
Originally posted by: Passions
Spew all the garbage you want. Answer me this simple question.
How many terrorist attacks have happened on US soil since 9/11/01?
Enough said.
You criticize and slander our President, yet the answer to the question above fully redeems him 100%.
Originally posted by: DAC21
Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: Passions
Originally posted by: BBond
WTFU already people. This is beyond unacceptable. This administration is an outrage.
OUTRAGE! Because nothing bad ever happened during Clinton's tenure!!!! EVERYTHING WAS SO GOOD BACK THEN!!!
Nothing on the scale of mass illegal wire taps, a misguided and false war, a 50% increase in sovereign debt, a mishandling of all disasters, and international condemnation of foreign policy.
Yet, clinton got impeached for getting a BJ and lying in a farce of a trial.
However, Bush doesn't even get investigated for not upholding the constitution and perhaps lying to the American people and proceeding with a war under false pretenses.
Wake up kool aide drinker.
Quoting Comrade Dean doesn't make it so.
MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin took a swipe at the United States in his state of the nation address yesterday, bristling at being lectured by Vice President Dick Cheney and comparing Washington to a wolf that "eats without listening."
During an emotional moment in the nationally televised speech, Putin used the fairy-tale motif on the need to build a fortresslike house to illustrate Russia's need to bolster its defenses. He also suggested that Washington puts its political interests above the democratic ideals it claims to cherish.
"Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here, it seems, everything is allowed; there are no restrictions whatsoever," Putin said, smiling sarcastically in the address to both houses of Parliament.
"We are aware what is going on in the world," he said. "Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he's clearly not going to listen to anyone."
Political analyst Alexei Makarkin told Ekho Moskvy radio the "wolf" reference was a response to the "United States, its actions in Iraq and plans toward Iran, its games on the territory of the CIS (former Soviet territory) and its criticism of Russia."
Putin's speech came nearly a week after Cheney on May 4 took a verbal slap at the Russian leader, saying the government sought "to reverse the gains of the last decade."
In another apparent barb aimed at the United States, Putin said countries should not use Russia's World Trade Organization membership negotiations to make unrelated demands.
"The negotiations for letting Russia into the WTO should not become a bargaining chip for questions that have nothing in common with the activities of this organization," Putin said.
In April, U.S. senators visiting Moscow said Russia's democracy record and its stance in the Iranian nuclear crisis would influence Congress as it considers Moscow's bid to join the global trade body.
Nationalist legislator Alexei Mitrofanov told reporters in the Kremlin that Putin's Russia was in no way looking for a confrontation with the West, "but we want to be a politically and economically independent state."
Putin pointed out that Russia's military budget is 25 times lower than that of the United States. Like the United States, he said, "we also must make our house strong and reliable."
"We must always be ready to counter any attempts to pressure Russia in order to strengthen positions at our expense," he said. "The stronger our military is, the less temptation there will be to exert such pressure on us."
Originally posted by: DAC21
Quoting Comrade Dean doesn't make it so.
Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: DAC21
Quoting Comrade Dean doesn't make it so.
I have done my own leg work and analysis. Sorry that you don't have the will or power to be independant minded and analyze the current situation, which sucks.
Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that, I guess 65% of Americans think Bush has mishandled everything also.
But then again, they are all Comrade Dean lovers also?!?
Get your head out of your butt and quit rubber stamping a loser.
THERE'S A distress signal in South Orange.
Blossoming on the slope of Flood's Hill in Meadowland Park is the silhouette of a crop-circle-sized AK-47, picked out in white artificial roses on the green spring grass.
The big outline of an assault rifle is a work of art by New York artist Carlo Vialu, who is referring to Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion before the invasion of Iraq that American troops would be greeted with flowers.
Vialu and 15 other regional artists, six of them based in New Jersey, are part of "Headlines," an exhibition of art about current events at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange. Three years after George Bush's statement of "mission accomplished," this is the first full-throated American anti-war art exhibition in the New York area -- at least in a permanent gallery setting.
"Headlines" is almost all about the war in Iraq, from Lynn Sullivan's crude papier-mâché figures made out of New York Times pages and posed like selected war photos to Karina Aguilera Skvirsky's video of people dressed like Middle Easterners jerkily approaching the camera along a wooded street, asking us to wonder, like a reservist in Iraq, "Which one do I shoot?"
"We've all been trying to lead our normal lives since 9/11," says Pierro director Judy Wukitsch. "And on through the war, the natural disasters, all the disasters, trying not to let it weigh us down so we cannot function. But you can't ignore trauma and depression forever. Artists have been doing this work all along, they just didn't have a place to show it. And I think hosting this show now in South Orange is almost cathartic for all of us."
Amy Wilson's long, narrow watercolor series here, "A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Could Be Like," is already somewhat famous. The series tells a complex story in densely scripted thought balloons emanating from tiny figures, some of them skeletal, about the shifting rationales for war with Iraq and the horrific consequences. (Wilson is also showing two anti-war watercolors in "Among the Trees," a show at the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts in Summit through June 4.)
The New York Daily News made one tiny, 4- by 5-inch section of "Glimpse" known earlier this year by blowing it up and putting it on the paper's cover: a painting of a hooded figure with electrical wires attached to his hands, based on the famous torture photo from Abu Ghraib prison, only in Wilson's version the wires loop down below the figure to spell out "LIBERTY." The ruckus kicked up by the tabloid ultimately got the Drawing Center, a widely respected SoHo nonprofit where Wilson's drawings were on display, kicked out of the cultural planning for the new development at Ground Zero.
That "Headlines" comes to a relatively modest municipally supported art gallery in an inner-ring New Jersey suburb, before anything similar has opened anywhere else in the region, must say something about today's art world -- probably about its intense love affair with wealth, and the timidity of institutions that have dreams of billion-dollar facility expansions.
It says something about South Orange, too. Guest curator Mary Birmingham of Montclair drew this show together in a relatively short time (though there is a full-color catalog) and did a remarkable job, cobbling together a collection of committed art works that nonetheless seem to touch on a broad range of contemporary currents in terms of media and methods. She found that many artists were making anti-war pieces all along, so many that she had to arbitrarily cut off the stream of work.
Painter Joy Garnett's oils on canvas mine a painterly interest in form while conveying a deeply threatening sense of global dread (check out "Evac," from her "Strange Weather" series). Jersey City artist Brendan Carroll sets up toy soldiers and snaps Polaroids that look like grainy field shots with absurdist typewritten captions like "Somebody kicked the baby buffalo. It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes."
Montclair collagist Peter Jacobs is showing the collage journals he's been keeping since the war began -- he makes at least one a day -- each image reproduced on the page of a spiral sketchbook. Jonathan Allen paints blue skies and blowing leaves in acrylics with faint outlines of an M1-A1 Abrams tank limned in over them. Curt Ikens of Cranford, who does "unauthorized collaborations" with the work of other artists (he is also currently showing a sculptural assemblage at the Jersey City Museum) has the largest installation: two enormous, quite comfortable sofa chairs made entirely from shredded and baled copies of The Star-Ledger.
A checklist of objects in the show is no substitute for finding your way to the second-floor galleries in the Baird Center, which is in Meadowland Park. No doubt "Headlines" will raise some controversy -- though perhaps less than it might have before polled approval rates for the war began plummeting.
The chief weapon of these artists is a sassy irony. Take Indiana artist Cheryl Yun's very witty set of women's clothing, hung on a garment rack in a gallery back room. Yun takes photos of war subjects, prints them on tissue, cuts the paper into dress patterns, and then sews them into nighties or beachwear to mesh with President Bush's post 9/11 injunction to Americans to go shopping.
That's how you get pieces titled "Flyaway Babydoll with Suicide Hipsters: 'U.S. Troops Get a Warm Thank You from President Bush, April 13, 2005.'''