Politics As Usual

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

And to think, we only have five more months until the election...

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore

Now I can kinda see why Gore liked Dean.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Minnesota cracks down on gas stations for setting prices too low.

[Not Me]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBJU2D6UUD.html

• BOSTON (AP) - Stating that someone is homosexual does not libel or slander them, particularly in light of new court decisions granting gays more rights, a federal judge has ruled.
  
  The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner came as she threw out a lawsuit by a former boyfriend of pop singer Madonna who claimed he was libeled because his name appeared in a photo caption in a book about Madonna - under a picture of Madonna walking with a gay man.
  
  "In fact, a finding that such a statement is defamatory requires this court to legitimize the prejudice and bigotry that for too long have plagued the homosexual community," she wrote in her opinion Friday.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Not Me
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBJU2D6UUD.html

• BOSTON (AP) - Stating that someone is homosexual does not libel or slander them, particularly in light of new court decisions granting gays more rights, a federal judge has ruled.
  
  The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner came as she threw out a lawsuit by a former boyfriend of pop singer Madonna who claimed he was libeled because his name appeared in a photo caption in a book about Madonna - under a picture of Madonna walking with a gay man.
  
  "In fact, a finding that such a statement is defamatory requires this court to legitimize the prejudice and bigotry that for too long have plagued the homosexual community," she wrote in her opinion Friday.

Damn. Next it won't be libelous to call someone a polygamist.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
[waffles, toast]

The waffling accusation might be more effective if it wasn't trotted out for every single presidential election.

[Not Me]

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/May/05292004/utah/170738.asp

SPREE - WWII vet tells his story. (There are real examples of torture in that story.)

[Atticus Grinch]

Justice Scalia's F-I-L told CC&Rs in his retirement community prevent him from flying the American flag.

Best use of praeteritio this year:

• Lamp says he would never invoke the name of the justice in his argument with the apartment manager.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Not Me
SPREE - WWII vet tells his story. (There are real examples of torture in that story.)

The link won't open. Does he explain how it would have been vastly preferable to be smothered in a sleeping bag until he died?

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I haven't the foggiest idea. But since it was Bush's call to bring Brahimi back in, I wouldn't be too quick to assume that what's bad for him is good for us. As S_A_M suggests above, it's at least possible that the IGC just gamed us by announcing its own candidate before we or Brahimi had reached a verdict.

From the reports I've read, Kofi doesn't seem to happy about this. He said something to the effect that the UN "respects" the decision, but that the term "respect" was a very carefully chosen word. Think it was in the NYT from Friday or Saturday.*

*I typically don't read the NYT, but I needed something to read while eating lunch and it was just sitting there so I gave it a once over.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
The link won't open.

Here is the story. No panties were put on his head so I don't know if you will consider this torture or not. But read it and decide for yourself.

• A Legacy of Honor: Bataan Death March survivor knows the power of hope
  
  By Robert Gehrke
  The Salt Lake Tribune
  
  WASHINGTON -- It was late summer 1945 when a dead man called the Pattons' home.
  
  "Mom?" said the far-away voice.
  "Is that you, Henry? They told me you were dead," said the sobbing mother. "But I never gave up hope. I never gave up hope."
  
  For three years, Pfc. Henry Patton was presumed to be one of more than 5,000 casualties on the Bataan Death March through the sweltering Philippine jungle.
  
  By the end of the war, he was practically a skeleton, having shed more than 100 pounds during his harrowing journey, escaping his captors, hiding in jungles, enduring grisly torture, being stranded at sea and being forced into slave labor in Japanese steel mills.
  
  "I don't expect you to understand," says Patton, who now lives in Murray. "But those of us who were in it know the power of hope and the power of the mind over the physical. You have to experience it."
  
  Today, Patton and dozens of other Utah veterans and their families will be in Washington to attend the dedication of the National World War II Veterans Memorial. The monument honors more than 16 million Americans, including 35,672 Utahns, who fought in World War II and millions more who supported the war efforts at home.
  
  "It is a legacy we take for granted: merely the fact that we are free people living in a free country," said Friedrich St.Florian, an Austrian-born architect who designed the granite and bronze memorial and recalls American GIs in rows of Jeeps liberating his village in the Alps in 1943.
  
  "Because of the kind of place America is, very little is ever done unanimously and very little is ever done at the time it ought to be done. It should've been done a long time ago," says Patton. "The interesting part that a lot of people don't understand is that the World War II Memorial is for everyone, not just those in the service. There were a lot of ladies who worked in aircraft factories and the World War II Memorial is for them as much as it is for soldiers."
  
  Patton was a radio operator on reconnaissance planes near Manila when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the next morning launched a swift assault on the undermanned Americans in the Philippines.
  
  He survived being shot down three times in the first two days of fighting before all the planes were destroyed and he was ordered to the front lines to try to fend off the Japanese ground assault.
  
  For five months, the outnumbered Americans held off the Japanese despite dwindling ammunition and almost no food. In April 1942, they surrendered and the captives were marched 90 miles in sweltering heat toward Bataan.
  
  On the fifth day marching, a wounded friend told Patton he couldn't go any farther and the two decided to try to escape, dashing into the jungle with bullets whistling behind them.
  
  They joined Filipino guerrillas who were staging a covert war against the Japanese occupiers and for the next 18 months wreaked havoc on the Japanese occupiers, ambushing patrols, bombing bridges and train switches, ammunition dumps and fuel caches from Bataan to the Pampanga Province.
  
  In October 1943, the freedom fighters were captured and sent to San Fernando provisional prison, where Patton temporarily escaped again. They were then transferred to the notorious Billibid prison camp where prisoners endured heinous torture.
  
  "They worked on the mind as much or more than the physical," Patton said.
  
  Inmates were forced to watch, Patton said, as guards poured battery acid into a prisoner's eyes. He screamed and writhed in pain until he died of shock. The next day, the inmates were lined up and guards began pouring liquid into the eyes of terrified inmates, who didn't know it was only water.
  
  "They were very, very, very creative," said Patton. Of the 63 guerrillas captured, only 17 survived.
  
  Those 17 were transferred to Cabanatuan prison camp and shipped to labor camps in Japan. But the boat was torpedoed by an American submarine, leaving Patton clinging to debris, floating in the ocean for 27 hours until a Japanese fishing boat picked him up and returned him to his captors.
  
  He worked in the Fukuoka steel mills, not far from Hiroshima. On Aug. 6, 1945, workers in the camp heard a rumbling and saw smoke in the distance, but figured that the Hiroshima shipyards had been bombed.
  
  It wasn't long before the doors were opened and the inmates released and Patton, who said he weighed just 67 pounds, walked out of the camp.
  
  With nowhere to go until the Americans arrived to shuttle them home, Patton and several fellow liberated prisoners took the trip to Hiroshima and were stunned by what they saw.
  
  "The only buildings that were even partially standing were concrete buildings," said Patton. "Everything had just disappeared. The humans and the pets at the epicenter, probably six or seven miles across, had just atomized. There was no evidence that anybody had even lived in the area. Everything else was covered with a quarter-inch to half-inch of light, white ash."
  
  The group met four priests who had been looking toward the blast and they were dying. "Their faces were essentially gone. Their eyes had been open and it cooked them right out," he said.
  
  Each of the men who was with Patton on the visit have suffered from cancer.
  
  When the Americans arrived, Patton said officials wanted to hospitalize him and send him home, but Patton wanted none of it. He and a friend stole a military police Jeep idling nearby and drove into the jungle to see the Philippine people to whom he says he owes his life, stopping outside of Manila to call his mother.
  
  "If I ever get to heaven I expect to see those Filipinos because they were that kind of people," he says. "They were willing to pay the price for whatever it took for freedom."
  
  Military records verify that Patton was stationed in the Philippines at the start of the war and that he was in Fukuoka labor camp at the end. His name also appears on an unofficial roster of the Philippine freedom fighters posted on the Internet.
  
  For all he experienced, Patton knows he was among the blessed who survived the war and can witness Saturday's memorial dedication.
  
  "There are a half of million of us who never came home after the war," he says. "There were 386 men in my outfit when the war started and when the war ended there were 11 of us who came home. I left a lot of my buddies overseas. This is for them."

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/May/05292004/utah/170738.asp

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
I'd rather be shot in the head than slowly suffocated while being kicked.

and yet you keep posting, inviting your enemies to keep up the head-kicking>

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
more balanced assessment: "Reuters

this is a crank post- right? please say so. Ty, credibilty is important, you haVe to back away, now, from this untenable position.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Now I can kinda see why Gore liked Dean.

no worries! i heard gore was just yelling on the half-block where the cameras could see him, then he turned the corner and got back in his limo.