Contributors

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Childish Understanding of the Region

The sad and unbelievable truth as seen through the eyes of people who have actually been there...

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kind of like a Kaleidoscope, isn’t it? Take a bit of news, a bunch of pictures & sound bites, twist them all…

Mark Ward said...

I think you need to watch the film and then judge for yourself because from where I stand...the things I see...the things that American media choose to show me...the kaleidoscope works in favor of President Bush.

Anonymous said...

That's the take on it, I would have guessed. As mentioned previously, it would be (yet another) interesting experiment to watch the news together and/or get a transcript to see the differences in how we both look at the same coverage. Currently, when we see an apple, we both think we see the apple for what it is and the other guy sees an orange. Who knows, maybe I’m the one seeing an orange and you’re seeing a plumb and nobody is seeing things for what they are.

…hmm, not a bad idea... Say, we look at the New York Times for a week; see what’s on the front page (web edition) each day and get our take on that.

(I watched the clip but I'm not keen on my dollars going to films like that. Ditto Michael Moore stuff.)

Mark Ward said...

Dave,

You are welcome to watch it at my pad, beers provided by myself, anytime you want..along with any Michael Moore film (have them all of course)

Actually, I have a non political thing to talk to you about as well. I lost your email so if you could drop me one at

solidbondinyourheart@comcast.net

Let's do the experiment sometime in the next couple of weeks or so. We would have to pick the same stories and then judge them from our individual perspectives.

Anonymous said...

Dang it, when I’m right, I’m just right. Not more than a couple months after my posting stating that Ms. Diggs' NSA rejection would be overturned, and so it is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/washington/06cnd-nsa.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Now, picture Dave doing an Ace Ventura hip thrust…”…can you feel that!! Huh!! Huh!! Huh!!”
(...ok, that's getting a bit carried away...)

Mark, I’ll drop you a line…

Anonymous said...

Y'all thought you got Scooter.

Y'all thought you got GWB on the NSA spying program.

Think again. It's kind of like those old Dallas episodes,

"Nobody messes with ol' JR Ewing".

AHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAA

Mark Ward said...

Guys, why exactly are you so excited? Aren't conservatives supposed to be about LESS government intrusion? You got me on this one...

Also, didn't Ashcroft, from his sickbed, change much of the program so it was more legal anyway..much to the chagrin of Gonzalez and Card.

And "the appeals judge who wrote the lead opinion, Alice M. Batchelder, said the case provoked “a cascade of serious questions.” Those questions included whether the program violated a 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, along with the Constitution’s First and Fourth Amendments.

So regardless of the ruling, this program is going to be more scrutinzed and I am glad for it.

Anonymous said...

What can I say?...I’m very pleased to add one in the win column for the good guys.

I have no problem w/ oversight. To my knowledge, there has not been a case of this program being used maliciously against the innocent. And sadly, my telephone conversations aren’t so exciting as the keep VP Cheney interested for too long. So, since I’m not dialing up terrorists on a regular basis, I’m not overly concerned about someone listening in on my conversations.

Anonymous said...

Your not having a life JD and not caring one way or the other if your privacy is invaded, does not justify one iota arbitrary and widespread bs wiretapping on the "T" word suspicion, by the biggest "T"s in the world, really just using a wide net fishing exercise to spy on rivals and critics cause you're so darned unpopular at home (not to mention abroad,) but thankfully loved by patriots who give the green light for criminal behaviour like yourself, and doesn't justify infringing on my inalienable and sacred rights or any other citizens by violating constitutional amendments, the most important of which was that a man's home and privacy IS sacred according to the founding fathers who quoted the British saying of a man and his castle, when they enshrined it into law.

Mark Ward said...

Dave, I am going to go on record and say that somehow...someway..karma is going to bite you for thinking that this is a win for the "good guys."

A man's home is, in fact, his castle. I thought you being a conservative would understand this. You do realize that the next step is the guns--how would you feel about that?

Anonymous said...

Mark, I’m intimately familiar with the ‘slippery slope’ axioms, and though history may prove me wrong, I don’t think this is the case. The thing is, there’s no benefit to the gov’t listening in on my conversations so I don’t believe they will. I simply do not believe that they are listening to get their jollies, to gain a political advantage or any other sinister motive so any eavesdropping would quickly end once they discovered I’m not a terrorist.

Anonymous… Yawn…You’ll have to try harder next time. Here's a good link to save. It's the Constitution of the United States.

http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html

You can read it. Or do a quick "search" if it’s easier for you, but you will not find the term "privacy" or any "right to privacy" there. Here ends today’s lesson.

Anonymous said...

Getting back to your original comment, jd, this clip shows testimony of people that have been there that confirm everything markadelphia has been saying all along. I guess I just don't get how you can't admit that a guy like Ben Busch, seen in this clip, is "twisting" things. If anyone is twisiting things, it's you, again confirming that the words "we failed" are not in conservative vocabulary.

Conservatives: Of course it couldn't possibly be our fault...it's the liberals....yeah, that's it..they twist things all the time....

Anonymous said...

Oops...it should be "how can you say that a guy like Ben Busch is twisting things." I am a poor typist.

Anonymous said...

Yawning right back at you JD, i guess we're not overly familiar with the parts of the constitution we don't like.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED, and NO WARRANTS SHALL ISSUE BUT UPON PROBABLE CAUSE, supported by Oath or Affirmation (***NONE OF THAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW, this is a period of secret police era warrantless courtless and unaccountable searches first authorised post 9/11 by John Ashcroft***) and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

the word 'privacy' isn't in there, so to you that makes my point above meaningless and irrelevant to ongoing and INCREASING violations of the ocnstitution...by your white hats.

Anonymous said...

Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark.

Anonymous said...

Ouch! Ooph! You got me! My bad; maybe I misread that amendment; I’m not a Constitutional scholar, you know. I mean, jiminy cricket, Constitutional lawyers and really smart people argue for months & years over this kind of stuff so perhaps I didn’t get it just right on first reading; let me just read this again, from a layman’s perspective. Hmmmm… Uh huh… uh huh… …nope, still sounds like I’m pretty close here. Are you sure ‘you’re’ reading this correctly?

The dissimilarity is that I choose to place the capital letters & bold print on a few different words than you do. “Unreasonable” comes to mind… “Probable cause” comes to mind as well. I don’t think the founders were just tossing those words in there for filler. I suspect they might have actually meant something by them. And if they actually did mean something by choosing those words, then as much as you’d like to re-write the Constitution, you can’t just choose to ignore words that you don’t like.

You see, it doesn’t state that a person’s home shall not be violated, “absolutely”. It states that it cannot be violated unreasonably, and without probable cause. So, as a layman, I might infer that to mean if someone’s overstayed their visa, is up to some suspicious activity and is getting calls from Islamabad on a regular basis, it would seem pretty reasonable, from my chair, to warrant such surveillance.

There’s of course case law and precedent supporting it, and the fact that congress cannot take away from the President what the Constitution has expressly given, but I don’t sound convincing citing laws, not being a Constitutional lawyer and all. I can say that, of course, I’m right, because why else would anyone have even heard of a no-name like Taylor Diggs in the first place? If there was truly a problem w/ this, it would have been struck down, tossed out, de-funded, binned, a long time ago. But, don’t take my word for it. Let’s go to tape and listen to the words of a Conservative giant, John Kerry.

“Asked on ABC's This Week to respond to a Karl Rove speech saying that Democrats disagree with President Bush that al Qaeda members should be monitored when they call somebody in America, Sen. John Kerry declared, "We don't disagree with him at all." But he went on to blast the NSA program as illegal. Why not, therefore, cut off funding for it? "That's premature," Kerry insisted.”

So…if it’s sooooooooo illegal, why is it happening? Why is the American public fairly comfortable w/ terrorists being monitored? Why was even John Kerry unwilling to scrap the program? I seem to have a lot of people (admittedly strange bedfellows) on my side. You seem to have Osama on yours…

johnwaxey said...

Just Dave...i think the point is that just because you are okay with someone wiretapping your phone, doesn't mean everyone else is good with it too. Not to mention that you seem to trust the government to have established probable cause before instituting the tap. I do not trust the government and neither should you . By having judicial oversight, there is at least one more step in the process to protect individual rights.

As for John Kerry, I don't give a rat's ass for what he says or does or what he finds value in. I think it is ridiculous to put Kerry up as a poster-child for liberals or democrats to emulate.