Just so you know, I am not at all happy with the straw man campaign that’s being run by the opposition party. Yeah, its fun to think of George W. Bush as a straw man and its always fun to knock a straw man down but its still just a straw man and not the actual candidate that has enough issues on his own that a straw man shouldn’t be required.

But here’s the problem, if you personally attack Sen. McCain you have no place to say he’s the one slinging the mud. No one is going to mind you slinging a little mud on a lame duck president whose approval rating is in the gutter.

I’d love to find a righteous man that I could support but he isn’t out there this year.

In eight days we elect the next president of the United States. I haven’t said much about this because I’m less than enthused about my choices. There is really no one running, not even in the various third parties, that I feel I can support. For the first time in ages I’m truly undecided…. or at least I was.

I’ve made my choice but even now it wouldn’t take much to sway it in the next eight days. Basically I’ve been torn between wanting to keep congress and the administration out of the control of one party and voting for someone who once said that they would prefer a clean government to freedom of speech. There’s more than that one comment that has me upset with him but I think that most succinctly explains where I’m coming from.

As of now my plan is to be the last person voting in my precinct in eight days. I’m going to take as long as I possibly can to completely commit.

I’m getting sick of it. I’m watching a lot of finger pointing taking place by every partisan out there. I’m hearing a lot blame being placed in all the various locations and predictions of things getting much worse before they get better. What I’m not seeing is any cooperation and collaboration between our two major political parties or even our numerous minor and miniscule politcal parties. I’m not hearing any proposed solutions.

I’m watching Democrats drag failed financiers in front of congressional hearings for no reason other than to badger them and talk indignant to them. I’m watching Republicans defend these failures. I’m hearing failed financiers complain because the government didn’t bail them out but bailed out everyone else. The Democratic badgering isn’t getting us out of this mess, the Republican apologist aren’t getting us out of this mess and the failed financiers, even if bailed out, aren’t getting us out of this mess.

But are we really in a mess? We are now since congress approved giving $700bln or your and my money to a bunch of failed financiers, but were we when Henry Paulson pulled that $700bln figure out of his….. hat? I don’t think we were. I think some folks were but I don’t think we as a nation were on the brink of bankruptcy that Ben Bernanke would have us believe.

Think about this for a moment. Every one who has been for the $700bln bail out has had something to gain personally from it. Because of this the Fed gains all kinds of new powers, the Treasury Secretary gets to determine who receives the $700bln, the Bush administration leaves office to join the commercial world after ingratiating itself to the financiers of that world.

This isn’t just a boon for the Republican administration, it’s also a boon for the Democrats. Look at the polls! McCain and Obama are neck and neck and then, BOOM, we have a sudden financial crisis with a Republican in the White House and Obama’s numbers shoot to new heights.

This whole mess is a joke, a dirty joke and we, the taxpayers, are the butt of it.

I’m really interested to see where this goes.  Marine Sgt. Rick Sanchez is a career soldier who received an expensive gift has been relieved of duty and is under an investigation that could lead to a court martial. A Marine Corps spokesperson has stated that, “as of now it doesn’t look like he’s done anything illegal but we are still investigating.” So I have to wonder is this really a story?

I’m depressed. The only candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States who brings the experience needed to the table to actually perform the job from day one has just dropped out of the race. I can’t in good conscious vote for Senators Clinton, Obama or Edwards. I just don’t see them as people capable of being the president I want leading my country. I’m not sure there is a Republican candidate for the nomination that I feel any different about.

This may be the first presidential election I opt out of.

About three weeks ago my son, who is a member of the Tennessee Army National Guard, found out that he will soon be heading to Camp Bucca in Iraq to help guard the camp. At that time he was told he would be stationed for between six to eight weeks someplace in the US to train for his mission and after the training would immediately be shipped to his duty station in Iraq.

Friday he found out he would leave on June 7^th for Fort Dix in New Jersey for his training. Today I read this. I’m more than just a little worried about him.

Okay, here’s something I don’t understand. The Department of Justice has a couple of scandals on its hands. One scandal affects every citizen’s of this country privacy rights while the other affects the employment of six lawyers. Why has the firing of six US Attorney Generals caused such an uproar while the FBI overstepping their bounds in their use of National Security Letters to obtain private information about you and me caused little more than just an acknowledgement that there is a problem there and a mild warning that the NSLs may be made harder to obtain?

I can’t get worked up over six government appointees losing their jobs because the administration that appointed them decided to go with someone else. Yeah, it was probably unfair to a couple of them, probably deserving of at least one of them but they were appointed to the job by the President it’s up to him whether they keep their job or not. They knew it and, I would think, Congress also knows this. What’s the big deal?

I find it much easier to get worked up over the FBI overstepping the expanded authority given to it by the Patriot Act but it doesn’t seem that many in Congress are thinking much about hearings over this. Where is their priority?

Growing up in the early sixties I remember people building fallout shelters and a fear people had of Soviet missles being launched at the US. The decade hadn’t passed before those bomb shelters were being converted into storage space and the worries of Soviet missles was greatly diminished. There were other, more pressing evils out there and it seemed that even though the US and the Soviet Union still had thousands of warheads pointed at each other it was pretty much decided that the fear of mutually assured destruction would prevent them from ever launching.

The cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it went whatever worries we had about nuclear weapons. Even though India and Pakistan joined the Nuclear Club neither country was showing any aggresive animosity toward anyone but each other so we still felt sort of safe from nuclear weapons being used by anyone. Destruction by nuclear weapons was just things that movies were based on.

Then North Korea started making a noise. For years, though, all of the tantrums that Kim Jung Il were throwing were good for was just to make eyes roll. Last night that changed.

North Korea is now a member of the Nuclear Club. Even China, who often just laughs and pats little Kim Jung Il on the head when he pull his tantrums is now showing concern. Talk is surfacing in Japan about talks of rewriting its constitution to allow for possible preemptive strikes when done in conjunction with other countries and arming itself with nuclear weapons. Even suggestions that South Korea may now be motivated to posess nuclear weapons of its own are circulating.

Someone is trying to alleve our fears over this with this:

Analysts say North Korea probably has enough fissile material to make six to eight nuclear bombs but probably lacks the technology to devise one small enough to mount on a missile.

But how long will it take to reduce the size of their device down to where it will fit in the back of a truck to be launched against US soldiers manning the frontier between North and South Korea? I don’t think we are looking at much more than a couple of years before they will have developed a warhead capable of being launched by one of their missles that you can bet they are currently working on improving.

I don’t want to scare anyone with my take on this but I do want people to recognize that we need to find out what it’s going to take to make the Chinese stop worrying about a unified Korea if we really want to get things back under control in this region. My biggest concern isn’t a nuclear North Korea, it’s a Nuclear Japan with a new constitution 40 years from now.

Last week we learned that a fine, upstanding and moral Republican Congressman was actually an immoral, hypocritical creep. Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) had been sending naughty e-mails and lurid IMs to former congressional pages. Foley resigned from Congress, declared himself an alcoholic and immediately checked himself into rehab.

It annoys me that this happened for a couple of reasons. First, I’m troubled that we put creeps like this in office. At least Foley is now gone and out of the picture but what type of environment has Congress become that something like this could occur in the first place… and this isn’t the first time. Secondly this has taken the national debate away from immigration, tax reform and foreign policy and replaced it with something that you would expect to only see in some prime-time SOAP opera. This partisan circus is just not good for the country.

Now, up until today I was hoping this would just go away. As badly as Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) may have handled this problem I didn’t see a need for more than just an investigation. Yeah, he’s been a do-nothing Speaker but I didn’t see this being enough for him to step down. Like I said, though, up until today.

What has changed today is Speaker Hastert’s own words:

Hastert asserted that any Republicans urging his ouster are playing into the hands of Democrats and blamed his problems on the media and Democratic operatives, even suggesting former President Clinton might somehow be involved.

“All I know is what I hear and what I see,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune on the eve of the ethics meeting. “I saw Bill Clinton’s adviser, Richard Morris, was saying these guys knew about this all along, If somebody had this info, when they had it, we could have dealt with it then.”

This man is not a leader. That has been apparent from almost the begining. However, the above quote shows him to be, not only ineffective, but a man out of touch with reality. Dennis, it’s time to go.

I have some friends that are extreme critics of the current administration. Nothing George Bush says or does is correct to them. The same goes for any member of the Bush administration. Of course these friends consider themselves good liberals. I agree with about half of their opinions. The problem comes to play in that when George Bush claims that there is a segment of Islam that is out to destroy the western world and replace it with a theocracy under Islam my friends can’t agree with him because agreeing on anything with him would give him credit for being right on something and their partisanship won’t allow that.

Sam Harris wrote a column on this phenomenon yesterday. Sam considers himself a liberal and is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration but he’s learned to give the devil his due.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

I am worried about the direction this country is poised to take in foreign relations. Partisanship is going to either continue to carry us the direction we are going or flip is 180° when somewhere in the range of 90° is the way we need to be going.

I recognize that Islam is made up of people and that some will be violent by nature and some will be peacful by nature and that both groups can find justification in their Koran for their violent or peaceful nature. It’s the same with my religion, Christianity. I also recognize that when outsiders point out certain things about one’s religion that isn’t so pretty that it’s real easy to get defensive.

Getting defensive is one thing. Getting violent is something else completely.

AN ITALIAN nun was killed by gunmen at a children’s hospital in Somalia yesterday in an apparent revenge attack for the Pope’s speech about Islam last week.

The Pope reads a passage from a 600 year old text that states that Islam is inherently violent and the response from some muslims is to prove the point? I’ve got to ask, what is everyone thinking? On top of this you also have Anjem Choudary over in London seeking the death penalty for the Pope and anyone else who insults Islam. What is all this suppose to make me think about Islam?

I need a new catagory, “Things I just don’t understand.”

* This post can also be found here in the forums.*

Immigration protests are beginning to get so numerous that some of the activist are beginning to wonder if they might not be causing more resentment to their cause than support. I think that is a valid concern. While continued bombardment with civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s led to an acute awareness of the fact that seggregation is absolutely wrong I don’t see the immigration issue having the same moral anchor. Regardless of what the activist may want you to believe this is an issue of border control and only the most adamant libertarian would argue for no controls on our borders.

Immigration is essential to the continued economic strength of the US but the immigration has to be legal. One of the problems I’m seeing is that we just make it more difficult to get into this country as a resident alien than it needs to be. Even with the millions of illegal aliens in our country our unemployment rate is still at around 5% which by most is considered full employment so why do we restrict work permits in our country the way we do?

If left up to me I would do completely away with any limit in the numbers that are allowed work visas. The only real requirement I would have for obtaining a work visa for immigrants would be that they would need a sponsor, be free of communicable disease and have not be tied to any known subversive groups. The sponsor could be either an individual or a US based business and would be required to pledge to provide food and housing support as needed for the immigrant.

There is also a bueacratic barrier to obtaining a work visa that needs to be streamlined. There is no reason that it should take over a week for a work visa application to be processed and either approved or denied. Taking longer is preposterous and places undue burden on people.

As far as amnisty for illegals currently in this country and working they need to go home and enter the country properly. They already have contacts in this country that can serve as their sponsor allowing them to stay here without going through the proper channels just isn’t right to the people who are trying to do things legally. It’s also shows a lack of respect for our own laws by just ignoring laws that have been broken. I would also make entering the country illegally cause for denying future applications for a work visa. If you come to our country and return before being caught here illegally you would still be eligible for receiving a work visa but getting caught would put you on an undesirable list.

If given my way I would simplify immigration as I have stated above and then after six months of the new immigration laws being in effect I would start mass deportation of those people found to be in this country illegally. This would give those in the country illegally time to arrange for sponsorship, return to their country and apply for a work visa with certainty they could return to this country after doing things right.

A little over two years ago I wrote this. I came across it while looking for something else but I had to stop and read it again just to make sure I’m staying consistant.

What’s bothering me is that I don’t like a lot of what could happen in the aftermath. Who’s going to fill the vacuum? There will be a stabilization period after the war where the US will more or less be in control of that country. The UN may have its name on the provisional government but it will be the US pulling the strings. How are those strings going to be pulled? That’s what’s bothering me.

Okay, the UN had no involvement in the government but my concerns are still the same.

In the old TV show Get Smart Maxwell Smart, agent 86, held the cover of being a greeting card salesman. He didn’t use this cover while he was being a secret agent, he used this cover for friends, family and acquantances. When he was undercover he was always undercover with a different name and a different occupation. His cover as greeting card salesman enabled him to live a somewhat normal life around family and friends with plausible reasons for being gone while he was spying.

While Get Smart was a sit-com that has nothing to do with intellegence gathering in the real world the “Greeting Card Salesman” cover is something that is used by intelligence agencies. No, not actually selling greeting cards, having a standard cover for friends and family. Brewster-Jennings & Associates appears to be a company that supplied this type of cover to, at least, Valerie Plame Wilson.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that this whole Rove, Novak, Wilson, Plame ordeal is seriously bothering me. What is bothering me about this is that I really can’t figure out what is actually going on. Valerie Plame, a CIA operative working under non-official cover, marries a high profile US diplomat and expects her cover not to be blown by this marriage. She recommends her husband to go and investigate whether or not Niger is attempting to supply nuclear material to Iraq and expects to remain under cover. But evidently there is something to the investigation into who leaked her information to Bob Novak or it wouldn’t have continued on this long…. unless someone with some juice is keeping it alive for politcal purposes.

Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are not supporters of the Bush administration. It appears that they have never been. She is not a supporter of the Bush administration because she gave $1000 to the 2000 Gore campaign listing her employment as being with Brewster-Jennings & Associates. He was an advisor, for a short period, to the 2004 Kerry campaign. In fact, I think it is fair to say that both Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are political opponents of the Bush administration.

With this in mind it is easy to see both why someone in the Bush administration, someone like Karl Rove, would have no problem destroying either of their careers in government and why both of the Wilson’s might have reason to do anything to discredit the Bush administration. I’m not saying either is the case but it’s easy to see motivation for both.

Now fifteen years ago I don’t think I would have had a problem coming to a conclusion on what to believe but fifteen years ago things weren’t as partisan as they are now. This is the problem with the polarization that we are seeing in politics these days. It’s way too easy for me to dismiss what might ought to be legitimate outcry as just more partisanship. I’m looking too hard at motivation behind peoples actions anymore and I know I’m not the only one doing this.

I just can’t accept that someone is just selling greeting cards.

Here are the current headlines in the top stories section of my my.Yahoo.com account:

• Attacks kill 33 in London, Blair breaks off summit - 14 minutes ago
  Four blasts rocked London during rush hour early on Thursday, killing at least 33 people and disrupting a summit of Group of Eight leaders in Scotland in the deadliest peacetime attack on London.
• London-like attack not expected in U.S.-officials - 20 minutes ago
  The U.S. government raised the terrorism alert level for buses, subways and trains across the United States on Thursday in the wake of deadly bombings in London but said it expected no similar attack in the United States.
• Bush orders U.S. vigilance after London blasts - 3 hours ago
  President Bush directed U.S. security authorities on Thursday to be extra vigilant and take precautions in response to a series of apparently coordinated attacks in London.
• London blasts fit al Qaeda pattern - analysts - 30 minutes ago
  Apparently coordinated blasts across London’s transport network on Thursday bear similarities to last year’s Madrid bombings and suggest an attack in the style of al Qaeda, security analysts said.
• World recoils in horror at London attacks - 11 minutes ago
  The world recoiled in shock on Thursday after bombs tore through London’s transport system killing at least 33 people in a coordinated rush-hour attack.
• Al Qaeda says kills Egypt envoy in Iraq-Web - one hour ago
  Al Qaeda group in Iraq said on Thursday it killed Egypt’s top envoy to Iraq for representing a “tyrannical” government allied to the “Jews and Crusaders.”
• London blasts throw G8 summit into disarray - 15 minutes ago
  A series of attacks in London threw the Group of Eight summit into disarray on Thursday, forcing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to rush from the venue in Scotland to handle the crisis.
• Taliban vow to kill ‘captured’ U.S. commando - 2 hours ago
  The Taliban reiterated on Thursday that they are holding a U.S. commando who has been missing in Afghanistan for more than a week and vowed to kill him, but the U.S. military said it had no information to support the claim.

While I expected most of the stories to be about the London bombings it’s the two other stories that I’m looking at and seeing a common thread. Acts of violence in the name of Islam is the only thing newsworthy at this moment. What is sad is that I don’t see this being uncommon. What is even sadder is that some people will see these headlines and not get angry with the people who set the bombs or killed the diplomat or threatened to kill the captured soldier, they will get angry at Tony Blair or George Bush.

There is something very wrong with that.