Politics: J'accuse!

[Not Me]

Is there any way to bomb these fuckers without nuclear fallout hitting Japan or South Korea? Just curious.

North Korea says standoff with US at "brink of nuclear war"

North Korea said Friday the standoff over its atomic ambitions was on the brink of nuclear war as US Vice President Dick Cheney headed to the region for talks with key Asian allies.

The Stalinist state's official news agency accused Washington of "driving the military situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war" with plans for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.

Cheney is expected in Tokyo on Saturday on the first leg of an Asian tour that also takes him to China and South Korea.

North Korea described six-party talks held in Beijing in February as "fruitless," their harshest assessment so far of the meeting that brought together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

"The US demand that the DPRK (North Korea) scrap its nuclear programme first is the main obstacle in the way of solving the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US," the Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary.

"It is a well-known fact that the second round of the six-way talks held in Beijing last February proved fruitless due to the US demand that the DPRK dismantle its nuclear program first."

Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear prorgammes, both plutonium and enriched uranium schemes, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.

Pyongyang denies having a uranium programme and has said it will freeze its plutonium weapons programme in return for simultaneous rewards from Washington.

[Not Me]

I don't know who is nuttier - the Mormon's for baptizing dead people or the jews for giving a fuck whether dead people are baptized.

And what "legal steps" can be taking to stop these lunnies from baptizing dead people?

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABHPZ0VSD.html

• Jewish Group Says Mormon Practice of Baptizing Holocaust Victims Continues
  
  SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Researchers say that Mormons have continued to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims into their faith despite a promise to discontinue the practice.
  
  "We are very hopeful that we will be able to convince the church to stop," Ernest Michel, chairman of the New York-based World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, said Friday. If not, Michel said, his group will consider other options, "possibly legal steps."
  
  Church spokesman Dale Bills said in a statement Friday evening that church officials "do not know what may come of these discussions, but we welcome the involvement of any who seek to resolve amicably the concerns expressed by some of our Jewish friends."
  
  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long collected names from government documents and other records worldwide for posthumous baptisms. Church members stand in to be baptized in the names of the deceased non-Mormons, a ritual the church says is required for them to reach heaven.
  
  The practice is primarily intended to give salvation to the ancestors of Mormons, but many others are included, since the church believes that individuals' ability to choose a religion continues beyond the grave. Non-Mormon faiths have objected to the baptisms.
  
  "It's ridiculous for people to pretend they have the key to heaven," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "And even if they say they want to do somebody a favor ... it's not a symbol of love. It's a symbol of arrogance."

[SlaveNoMore]

Shape Shifter
So how much do those tax cuts mean to you again?

For one, I'll own up to the fact that the tax cuts mean everything to me.

And if I placed a higher concern on safety or terrorism - do you really think for one damn second that I'd vote for this fucking pansy Kerry - when even a hawkish Democrat like Clinton didn't and couldn't do shit to make us any safer?

You people make it sound like this election is Bush v. Douglas McArthur

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
hawkish Democrat like Clinton

That's an improvement over previous descriptions as a dope-smoking draft dodger. I'll count that as a victory.

1-0.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
That's an improvement over previous descriptions as a dope-smoking draft dodger. I'll count that as a victory.

1-0.

The change only comes about in a relative sense, as we now have Kerry for a comparison. Seeing that Kerry is yours, I'd say it's more like 1-0, us.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by bilmore
The change only comes about in a relative sense, as we now have Kerry for a comparison. Seeing that Kerry is yours, I'd say it's more like 1-0, us.

We're always losing those one-point games. Like how W became president. 5-4.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Not Me
Yeah, because if only the Reps had behaved better, the FBI would not have been worried about racial profiling of Arab males in flight schools and the CIA and the FBI would have communicated better. Yep. That is the Reps fault.

What is the Reps fault is treating the global war on terrorism in simplistic, jingoistic terms such as racial profiling and an obsession with Iraq. Worldwide terror is a complex problem that requires complex solutions involving not only cooperation and coordination among agencies, but internationally as well. W's (and his advisers) bottom-line bumper sticker thinking are just not up to the job. It requires (dare we say it?) nuance.

So what are you buying with the money you save from the tax cuts? Makeup?

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
W's (and his advisers) bottom-line bumper sticker thinking are just not up to the job. It requires (dare we say it?) nuance.

Since 9/11, there have been no attacks on US soil. I am thankful for that and see no indication that the Reps have failed on that front.

I am unhappy with what is going on in Iraq right now, although I still believe invading Iraq was the right thing to do. If things get worse and worse in Iraq, then I will have to rethink my position on that. What is going on now is a bad problem and I don't have a solution to it. I don't think the answer is to pull out of Iraq, though.

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
So what are you buying with the money you save from the tax cuts? Makeup?

Uncanny. Do you know me IRL? These are some of the current products I am eyeing:

http://www.makeupalley.com/product/s...sh/NARS/Blush/
http://www.neobeauty.com/shsunprlifos.html
http://www.janeiredale.com/products/liqmin/liqmin.html
http://www.labelladonna.com/lbd.php?...05&cartItems=0
http://www.makeupmania.com/Details/TI-0156-01-000.cfm


I also want a Bobbie Brown kabuki brush and the eye smudge brush:

http://makeupalley.com/product/showr...wn/Face_Brush/
http://www.makeupalley.com/product/s..._smudge_brush/

If you are interested in knowing more, you should read and post on this forum:

http://www.makeupalley.com/board/default.asp?BoardID=1

They have alot of skincare products for men, nowadays,

[Not Me]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1000484839

• Sony Pictures has optioned film rights to Richard Clarke's nonfiction best seller "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" for producer John Calley.
  
  "Enemies" -- which was published last month by the Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster -- has been at the center of the current national debate about America's readiness to respond to terrorist threats before Sept. 11. Clarke, who was a counterterrorism expert in the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, appeared before the 9/11 Commission the week the book was published. During that hearing, he testified that the Bush White House didn't consider terrorism "an urgent issue" in the months before the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.
  
  His political memoir, currently in second place on Amazon.com's sales ranking, offers Clarke's assessment of the anti-terrorist efforts of the past four White Houses, all of which he worked in. "The book, written in a compelling, highly readable style, at times almost seems like a fiction thriller," Amazon.com reviewer John Moe wrote.
  
  Calley, who stepped down as chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment in the fall, is producing such films as Mike Nichols' "Closer," an adaptation of Patrick Marber's play about two couples that is scheduled for a December release, and the big-screen adaptation of the fiction best seller "The Da Vinci Code," along with producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard.
  
  Clarke was repped by ICM in the deal.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Not Me
I also read that someone counted the words spoken at the hearings and Condi spoke 40% of the words and the commissioners spoke 60%. Yeah, it was information from her that they wanted.

Didn't she give a 20 minute opening statement? In any event, you have a strutured Q&A with 10 commissioners (5R/5D) questioning one witness. Thus, it is rather impressive that she spoke 40% of the words about 6.6 times the number spoken by any individual commissioner.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Not Me
You can argue all you want about whether we should be there or not, but the fact is that now we are there. Now what? Pull out? Stay? If we stay, is it is good idea to vote down the money to fund the troops?

Hmmm. I could have sworn that Wolfowitz said that the U.S. wouldn't end up paying the freight.

I'm surprised he and Clarke never had a fistfight.

S_A_M

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by Not Me
I don't know who is nuttier - the Mormon's for baptizing dead people or the jews for giving a fuck whether dead people are baptized.

I have mixed feelings, as usual.

On the one hand, there is a long tradition in mainstream Christianity of surreptitously baptizing Jews in some kind of game of theological "gotcha!" Google "Edgardo Mortara" if you want to see how harmful this practice was. Which sucks, and I understand why Jews are upset that people who died for being Jewish are having that taken away from them, even if it is only in the eyes of Mormons. No one else even thinks this is possible, much less desirable.

On the other hand, anyone who has done more than thirty seconds of ancestry research has grown to respect and appreciate the care that the LDS church gives toward preserving all historical documents that contain ancestry information --- immigration records; Holocaust records; slave graveyard records. I wish they could find a reason to do this other than providing forebears with temple ordinances.

[Shape Shifter]

Don't wait for the movie. At the risk of outing myself as Ty's non-dork sock, you really should read the book.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Didn't she give a 20 minute opening statement? In any event, you have a strutured Q&A with 10 commissioners (5R/5D) questioning one witness. Thus, it is rather impressive that she spoke 40% of the words about 6.6 times the number spoken by any individual commissioner.

S_A_M

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,116563,00.html

I read that on littlegreenfootballs but didn't count them myself. Above is a link to the full transcript if you would like to count them yourself.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Hmmm. I could have sworn that Wolfowitz said that the U.S. wouldn't end up paying the freight.

At this point, I don't give a fuck how much it costs as long as the killing/injuring of coalition forces can be brought under control.

We can argue about how to pay for it later.