Empire State

"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency"
-George W. Bush, June 14th 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaware that a live tv camera was still rolling.

If history has shown us anything, it's that empires or "superpowers" come and go. The Greeks, the Romans, Mayans, or yes Jon (you wookie lover), the Imperial Empire too. Sometimes empires that weren't even know have ended, like "Family Guy's" take on the Irish before they discovered alcohol and how they were the most technologically advanced empire.
I've seen the collapse of the Russian superpower in my lifetime and there are inklings that the Chinese may soon become a superpower. Britain's empire has steadily broken apart since the American Revolution. Which leads me to the question: how long can our "democratic empire" last?
Kamal first caught my attention a few years ago by questioning how long America could stay as dominant on the world stage as we currently are. He even went as far as to compare America to Rome during it's glory days before the waning began. You know when Rome's senators or politicians became absolutely corrupt. Rome's money was tied up in their war industry (stop me when you see the comparisons), and it's legions were spread all around a vast empire trying to hold off various groups from taking over a part of the empire.
We are a nation that is proud of it's bravery, steadfastness, and it's heritage. We have a few black eyes as a country, but when things become hairy, we're there for each other. Just because I don't wrap myself in a flag doesn't mean I don't like our country, the purpose of a democracy and free speech is to be able to criticize things when you don't believe in them. I don't hate America, I just don't like Bush's vision of America. He has divided our nation like no other has done in our history.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I don't think the America we knew will ever come back. I have a distinct feeling that unless we change our path, America cannot survive in it's current state. It may for awhile, but eventually, it will split or completely change in spirit. I guess I sound like Chicken Little, and I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't see things turning out with the same country being around 50 years from now. Alright, any comments?

Are You Stupid Or Something?

Stupid is as stupid does. That should be the American publics motto. Amazing, how people can't find more than Fox News to educate themselves. Closemindedness is a dangerous thing. If you can't open yourself to new experiences, how do you make new friends, or try exotic foods? All we do is eat all the lines the Bushies feed us.

We're in line for an attack if Kerry wins
Kerry didn't earn his medals
George Bush speaks hispanically
George Bush didn't know about Enron
Iraq is a-ok.
Afghanistan is delightful
We are safer
We have a vast number of allies

You have lied so many times Bush, it's no wonder you haven't started crying wolf. I can't believe that polls show that this lunatic is in the lead to win again. If you don't vote or don't register to vote, I don't want to even hear you complain about the next four years. In fact if you vote for Bush or don't vote, you should be sent to Iraq when the draft is reinstitued. Considering you obviously want more wars, I'll sit back here since I don't believe in it. Well I'm sleepy, I'm going.

Religion...Oh yes He's Going There

That's right, I'm acknowledging the elephant in the room, going right for one of the bigger taboo topics in our culture.
First of all, I was brought up in a semi-religious household, so my views of religion may be different. I made my first communion, I went to CCD, sunday school, and a few different churches. Hell I was even in a religious group when for like 3 months when we joined our new church in NJ. My mom gave me the choice of deciding whether to go on with religion after my first communion, and I continued for awhile. But soon thereafter, I decided that that form of religion isn't for me. Actually, religion in any form isn't for me. It's nothing personal, people are free to believe whatever they want to believe. It's neither my place nor my goal to mock anyone's beliefs. I'm here to state my beliefs, nothing more, nothing less.
Religion is made up. Religion is a man made creation, spawned in times when man had no direction or rules. It was something made up to control man into believing there was some all powerful being. Great concept! Actually, religion has performed exceedingly well. People have such devotion to different religions, that they've given up food for religion, sacrificed parts of their day, and entered wars based on religion. That is one of the major problems I have religion, or those that twist religion. You kill base on your religion, isn't that pretty much against religion of all forms? I'm no priest (I don't touch little boys), but churches seem like some of the most hypocritical bunch in the entire world.
I do sound like I'm busting on religion, but this is to set up my point still to come. It really is beautiful that people have faith in such things like religion. Faith that there is an all ominpotent force or being in the universe. And to me, faith is much more important than religion. I'm not a religious person, but I believe in faith. Faith in what you do and what you believe and faith in humanity. Faith is just believing in something so deeply that nothing in the world can change your mind in believing in it. At this point, humanity can survive without religion, but I don't think it can survive without faith. Some will argue that the two come hand in hand, but I don't believe this to be true. Faith is something so deeply embedded in the fabric of who we are, we don't need a piece of paper to tell us to believe in it. I have faith that humanity will overcome the messes we have created to. I don't think you can solve anything without having faith, faith in your own ability, faith in others. and so on and so forth.
I would like to wrap up this by saying that I do believe in a more powerful force in the universe, I mean what would be the point if there wasn't something greater. It would seem like an awful waste of space to have just one planet with beings on it. Faith will guide us, if nothing else.

PS- I'll talk about my beliefs about reincarnation at a later date

Read Me

September 16th, 2004 1:44 pm
'War president' Bush has always been soft on terror; His campaign says vote Republican or die - but he lets al-Qaida off the hook

by Craig Unger / The Guardian

Where's George Orwell when we need him? Because we Americans need him. We desperately need him. Consider: in August 2001, immediately after reading a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US", President George Bush went bass fishing - and never called a meeting to discuss the issue.
A month later, on September 11, when he was told that the terrorists had attacked, Bush spent the next seven minutes reading a children's book, The Pet Goat, with a group of schoolchildren.
And when it comes to his own military service, recent revelations show that Bush got out of fighting in Vietnam thanks to his dad's political clout. Even then, Bush didn't fulfil his obligations to the National Guard.
Yet somehow the Bush-Cheney ticket is convincing Americans that only a Republican administration can handle national security. If John Kerry wins, Dick Cheney warned: "The danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating." The choice is simple: Vote Republican, or die. And voters are buying it.
A poll just after the Republican convention showed that 27% of the voters preferred Bush to Kerry when it came to national security. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that if Bush wins in November it will be because of the fear factor.
Yet the truth is that Bush is actually soft on terror. When it comes to going after the men who were behind 9/11 and who continue to wage a jihad against the US, Bush has repeatedly turned a blind eye to the forces behind terrorism, shielded the people who funded al-Qaida, obstructed investigations and diverted resources from the battle against it.
One key reason is the Bush-Saudi relationship, the like of which is unprecedented in US politics. Even after the success of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the subject is largely taboo in the American media. Never before has a president of the US - much less two from the same family - had such close ties with another foreign power.
Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a powerful member of the royal family, has been a close friend of George Bush Snr for more than 20 years. Nicknamed Bandar Bush, he drops by the Bush residences in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Crawford, Texas, not to mention the White House. He and Bush senior go on hunting trips together.
Then there's the money. More than $1.4bn of financial transactions have gone from the House of Saud to corporations and institutions tied to the Bushes and their allies - largely to companies such as the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, and HarkenEnergy. So what does all that influence buy the Saudis?
Let's go to the White House on September 13 2001. Just 48 hours after 9/11, the toxic rubble at the World Trade Centre site was still ablaze. The estimated death count, later lowered significantly, was thought to be as high as 40,000.
On that afternoon, Bandar met on the Truman balcony with President Bush and the two men lit up Cohiba cigars. At the time, the White House knew that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. It knew that Osama bin Laden was Saudi. And, as the 9/11 commission concluded, it knew that Saudi Arabia was "the primary source of money for al-Qaida", which was largely funded by wealthy Saudis via Islamist charities.
President Bush was in the presence of the ambassador from the country that is the guardian of Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist sect which helped produce al-Qaida. This is where the war on terror and a massive investigation into the greatest crime in US history should have begun.
But, given the intimate relationship between the two families - and, of course, the fact that the Saudis help fuel America's 165m automobiles - this was not just a meeting between the president of the US and the ambassador of a country that harboured and financed terrorists. The Saudis were special.
Because Bush and Bandar were the only two people present, we do not know exactly what was said. But we do know that the president failed to join the issue of the Saudi role in terror or how to stop the funding of terrorism through Islamist charities and financial institutions.
That same afternoon, the first of 11 chartered planes began to pick up more than 140 Saudis scattered throughout the US. Saudi Arabia and the president's defenders have mounted a massive PR campaign to minimise the damage of the Saudi evacuation. But the facts in the 9/11 commission report remain unchanged. The Saudi evacuation flights were not the fantasies of conspiratorialists. They actually took place. The departures were approved by the White House and the vast majority of Saudi passengers were not interviewed by the FBI.
This was the biggest crime in US history. But, in the midst of a grave national security crisis, rather than investigating it the White House and the FBI spent their limited resources helping evacuate the Saudis.
Over the next two years, the 9/11 commission found, the Bush administration failed "to develop a strategy to counter Saudi terrorist financing". As a result, our Saudi allies were half-hearted in cooperating on terrorist financing and, the commission concluded: "the US government still has not determined with any precision how much al-Qaida raises or from whom, or how it spends its money."
Now, thanks to Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror, a new book by Senator Bob Graham, we know that the Saudis may have played an even bigger role in 9/11 than previously reported. As a member of the Senate intelligence committee, Graham said he learned that "evidence of official Saudi support" for at least two of the 19 hijackers was "incontrovertible".
As co-chairman of the joint House-Senate panel investigating 9/11, Graham found his efforts to get to the bottom of the Saudi role in 9/11 again and again were quashed by the Bush administration. When his committee tried to subpoena a key witness who happened to be an FBI informant, the FBI refused to cooperate. "It was the only time in my senatorial experience that the FBI has refused to deliver a congressional subpoena," Graham told Salon.com in a recent interview. "The FBI wasn't acting on its own," he added, "but had been directed by the White House not to cooperate."
In the end, 27 pages of the report on the role of the Saudis in 9/11 were classified by the White House and not released to the public. According to Graham, the Bush administration may have censored the material because it did not want the public to be aware of Saudi support for the 9/11 terrorists. "There has been a long-term special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia," he said, "and that relationship has probably reached a new high under the George W Bush administration, in part because of the long and close family relationship that the Bushes have had with the Saudi royal family."
Graham writes: "It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."
If that is the case, no wonder the Bush-Cheney ticket is counting on fear.

GET BACK TO WORK!

That's my message to George Bush. You are the laziest President in the history of our country. Our nation's capital is Washington DC, it's a little piece of real estate on the Potomac. But instead you decide to spend most of your time down in Crawford Texas. I can't take 40% of time off from work to go down to Texas and "work".
Sure this is the time of internet, faxes and cellular phones, but the action is in Washington. If nothing else it's symbolic that the power of our nation lies in our capital. There is too much going in the world not to be in Washington handling all the problems that currently lie at the feet of our government.
Iraq isn't exactly a hot spot, Afghanistan's president nearly escaped another attempt on his life, and NBC's Must See Line Up on Thursdays is at an alltime low. Our President come November must be able to rebuild our alliances, the world and the US. Someone told me that the Patriot Act doesn't bother him, because it doesn't affect him. He's probably right it doesn't affect him yet. He's a middle class white guy with a nice job. So it wouldn't bother him at the level he would know. You know like when the FBI searches his apartment or house without bothering to tell him, or when they check to see what books you're checking out.
I still don't understand people, when Clinton got a BJ people seemed more pissed off than a President lying about reasons going to war. Are you really safer? Where's Bin Laden? How would our stretched armed forces react if we were actually attacked by a conventional enemy? Who would come to our aid now that we've pissed off a majority of the world? Can anyone answer these questions for me?

Get Your Kids Out Of The Movies

Ok, so I need to take a break from political rant after political rant. When I talk about those things it gets me all worked up about the future and we all know whenever I mention the word future, I immediately start into my poor "Doc" Brown impression. Anywho, this blog is for any parent that has decided to bring underage kids into rated R movies.
Those warnings are there for your help parents. Maybe it's because a decent amount of people that have kids, shouldn't have kids. You know people that aren't ready for the responsibility of caring for another HUMAN BEING. I for one, know I'm not responsible enough to raise a kid (my 2 fish died this week...granted they were alive for almost 2 years, pretty long for a goldfish).
Jon had a link on his blog that a three year old had choked on popcorn while watching Alien Vs. Predator. Jon had said that that was idiotic. He wasn't making fun of the fact that the child died while choking on popcorn, but rather that the parents put the child in a position where he shouldn't have been hence the child would not have choked. A three year old has no business being in a movie like AVP or movies like it. That child had a parent or parents who didn't have the maturity and level of responsibilty to raise a child.
I have to state that I by no means know the secrets of raising a kid. That would be a ridiculous statement considering I'm 24 years old, and don't even have pictures on the wall in my apartment, but I think I know some things about how NOT to raise a child. Movies with extreme violence and language: probably not the best for children under 5. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Keep The Faith

Obviously we've all seen a shift in the polls favoring a balance to Dubya since the Republican National Convention (which will now be referred to as the RNC). But keep the faith, friends. Of course the Republicans are going to have a momentum shift after they have been on the air for three days, with no huge outlet for Democrats to have a response. We have to turn out in droves to take care of this election. LEAVE NO DEMOCRAT UNTURNED! Although I wish we had more than two political parties I have never seen the democrats so bonded against or for something as they are against the Bush administration.
Sure there will be a few renegades like Zell Miller. But with a name like Zell, who's really going to listen to him, I mean c'mon, Zell. It's too bad that Bush's party has to use the false Swift Boat allegations to help turn the tide for him. It's too bad Kerry isn't firing back strongly by immediately comparing the service record of George Bush. I have never heard a Presidential candidate who was a veteran of a war been called a 'wimp' as many times as I've heard Kerry been called one. It's shocking that a man that volunteered to go fight and earned three purple hearts is called a wimp. Some people are just bitter that he actually spoke out against the war, that these dillusional hawks believed was necessary.
These are the same type of individuals who want us to invade countries on a whim a la Iraq. Of course at this point we can't because our active and reserve forces are stretched too thin at this point. It's too bad we've alienated a lot of our important allies (Moldova not withstanding), because we could use some of them to help provide security in Iraq, so we could use some of our troops to help provide so we could provide them with a few rests from active duty, sort of like how Bush took breaks from service. But oh well, we don't need no stinking allies. We'll just alienate everyone, because that will definitely provide us with the proper alliances and communication that is needed on fighting GLOBAL TERRORISM. But anyway, I digress. We should keep the faith, the majority of people didn't vote for Bush last time, so hopefully the majority will not lose this time.