mr mahs

Those who oppose our successful efforts in Iraq and despise our commander in chief have found a new charge to level against President Bush. No, it's not the tried and true "He's a miserable failure." It's not "He doesn't work well with others." It's not "He didn't go to the United Nations before getting us involved in an unnecessary war." It's not even "He was SELECTED, not ELECTED, president in 2000." Those attacks have failed to move the president's disapproval rating out of the low 30s. In an effort to move that number in an upward direction, some have taken to blasting Bush for not attending the funerals of our servicemen and women who have been killed in Iraq. They have also attacked the president for not allowing TV cameras to be positioned at Dover Air Force Base, to record the coffins of those killed in action as they return home one final time. At least one man who lost his son in Iraq has had enough of the criticism of the president. "I'm the father of a soldier who was killed in Iraq on May 30 earlier this year." That's how Ron Griffin, who lost his 20-year-old son Kyle, began his phone call to me on my WABC Radio program in the wee hours of a New York morning. He had just heard Gen. Wesley Clark bring up the issues of the base at Dover and the funerals. He had also seen the issues raised as questions in a recent poll, where the majority of Americans answered that they thought President Bush should attend some of the funerals and should allow viewing of the returning dead soldiers. "Very simply, the media has no reason to be at Dover Air Force Base," he told me. "My son was killed with two of his best friends. If I was to sit and watch TV to see three soldiers coming off a plane, how do I know who is my son?" What about the 17 soldiers who were killed [in Somalia]? How do you have the media there?" Griffin told me that at first he wasn't going to go to pick up his son, but he did head out to meet his son at Dover. "We went to pick my son up. They hold a full military ceremony with honors. The old guard is there from Washington, D.C. It's all done in private with the soldiers and their family only. I was told very nicely by those in charge that they take care of their own." Ron Griffin says it would be impossible for President Bush to be at every military funeral. "The day that my son was buried, his two friends were buried the same day at the same time in different places. Two in Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey. How does the president pick and choose which one he goes to? Does he go to my son's and not his two friends? Or does he go to one of the friend's and leave my son out?" And then there is the possibility of turning the funerals into a media event. "If he would have showed up at my son's funeral, there would not have been any room at the church. So who gets kicked out?" Griffin wondered. "One of my son's friends?" Griffin says: "Bush is doing absolutely the right thing. We don't want a media circus. It would take away from everything the day was. It was a celebration of my son's life." Kyle Griffin, born on Sept. 11, 1982, was a long-range reconnaissance special operations soldier. He was killed in a traffic accident between Tikrit and Mosul. His dad, a Vietnam veteran, says that Kyle loved being in the military and knew that there was a chance he wouldn't return home. "I don't need somebody like Wesley Clark to tell me that I should be angry at George W. Bush because he doesn't attend funerals," Ron Griffin said. "I don't understand how people can use the death of somebody to their advantage." "My son and I talked about [u.N.] Resolution 1441. He wanted to be a soldier. He had no qualms about going to Iraq." The proud father added: "There are only about 450 families who are going through this. People don't understand what we're going through." I think that President Bush does, and you would think that the general would too

looks like a taureg..

Women and children are "guerilla combatants"??? This isn't a spelling B... euro trash...

http://www.thisislondon.com/til/jsp/modules/Article/print.jsp?itemId=8306085 UK cold snap kills 2,500 in a week By Alexa Baracaia, Evening Standard The cold spell has killed more than 2,500 people across England and Wales in the past week, experts today revealed. New research shows that a higher proportion of the British population dies as a direct result of winter weather than in Russia or Finland. Between 15 and 22 December there are estimated to have been more than 540 deaths in London and the South-East alone and it is predicted that the number of people dying " unnecessarily" from the cold could rise to 50,000 this season. "The UK remains one of the worst countries in the world at coping with unseasonal temperatures," said Professor Sian Griffiths, President of the Faculty of Public Health which carried out the study along with the Met Office. The findings come after it was revealed that an elderly couple in Tooting were found dead in their flat 13 weeks after their gas supply was cut off. The bodies of George Bates, 89, and his wife Gertrude, 86, were found huddled in the living room of the home they had shared for 64 years. British Gas, which was owed £140.62 by the couple, said the Data Protection Act had prevented them from passing information to social services. But David Hinchcliffe, chairman of the Government's health select committee, said: "I don't think there are any excuses." The new research, which calculates the number of deaths caused by the cold in England and Wales over the past week, claims that the victims will have died from treatable ailments. Professor Griffiths warned: "All of us must be vigilant to look out for family, friends and neighbours who may be suffering. Often illnesses develop after a cold snap has finished." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CLUELESS:laugh:

Yeah, tax cuts don't work EVIL BUSH and his tax cuts for "the rich"

TRUE...

The middle east respects power... Real power that is not "Soft Power" or appeasment and prayers it will go away....

C'mon Igloo you know what "handelling their business" was.... Milosevic filling mass graves with women and children... It's the quivalent of us rounding every bodega & gas station owner and putting two in the head and burying them in LI... The guy is delllusional...

You're a mindless jerkoff can't you think for yourself? I said pick one that bother you and I will discredit your argument and expose your inferior understanding of economics and finance.... You will only amount to a pile of rechid anti-american scum... Keep printing those tie die shirts simpleton!!!!!

Huh?Dude were you dropped as a kid?

Oh here he goes again off on a tangent about war profits:confused: Go and handle your business dead beat... sell your computer you family is starving....

Trailer trash? Your mothers hole...punk!!!!

The only reason we aren't knee deep in Pakistan right now is because Masharef made a wise choice.. After 911 and also the recent events show they are a partner in the war on terror, he had an attempt on his life recently for his support he shows the "evil west".. Let say he was reluctant to help us.. Then you would have heard the same rhetoric as Iraq received.. The key word here is COOPERATION!!!

Eat a dick Euro trash....

Same here...

Thank GOD for the PATRIOT ACT & JOHN ASHCROFT

So you don't think Sadam coming out of a hole had anything to with pushing him over the top to comply?

Went right over your head... 2 million unemployed right? 9.2% productivity (highest in 20 years) from the people still working OK? Limit overtime pay... meaning the existing workforce, that employers have been working to the bone are not elligible and employers are forced to hire new workers... So if a portion of the 2million unemployed go back to work and start earning wagers again what happens then? c'mon you can do it sparky.... You guessed it junior, economic activty picks up even more from all the new people entering the workforce.... Brilliant and I'm one of the people effected by it...

Pick one short bus...

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/apostolou200312220001.asp Libya's announcement that it will close down its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs is an important vindication of American and British foreign policy. After nine months of talks, Colonel Khaddafi's regime has acknowledged the existence of weapons that were long denied. According to initial reports, Libya had the ability to manufacture chemical weapons, had attempted to acquire the ability to produce both nuclear and biological weapons and had ballistic-missile programs. The American-intelligence assessment that Libya was up to no good has been proved correct. Israeli intelligence, which had long been dismissed for pointing to Khaddafi's nuclear ambitions, has chalked up a much-needed success. The initial reaction of many pundits to the Libya announcement has been and will be both predictable and mistaken. There will be some breast-beating from hawks, who will hint that there has been appeasement of a repressive dictator with a notable record of terrorism. While the hawks are right to ask questions and subject the deal to rigorous scrutiny, it is implausible that either George Bush or Tony Blair would make such dramatic announcements without making a genuine breakthrough. In one important sense, the hawks have emerged smelling of roses. A key criticism of the hawks, that they and President Bush regard armed force as the only foreign-policy tool, that we are now in an era of permanent war, has been disproved, exposed as nonsense by Colonel Khaddafi. An excessively critical attitude from the hawks will simply hand the argument to the "antiwar" commentators and the advocates of uncritical engagement for whom the fault always lies with the U.S. and her allies. These engagement advocates are already claiming that the negotiated deal with Libya shows that the war in Iraq was unnecessary, that polite conversation can secure disarmament. The myth that they are already spinning is that the Libyan statement foreswearing WMDs on December 19, 2003, resulted from a decade of alleged reforms and attempts to integrate Libya back into the international community. Rather than congratulate the Bush administration for a remarkable diplomatic coup, they are chiding it for waiting too long to press the flesh with Khaddafi. Yet the evidence indicates that what brought Libya to the table was not multilateral engagement, but the brave and much criticized strategy of forcing terrorism sponsoring dictatorships to meet their obligations or meet their Maker. Indeed, the Libyans appear to have boosted rather than curbed their WMD ambitions after the U.N. suspended sanctions in 1999. The appeal of WMDs for Khaddafi and others was their potential value, not just as weapons with which to attack or deter, but also as bargaining chips. WMDs were hooks upon which to catch credulous foreigners looking for dialogue and oil contracts. The announcement of Libyan disarmament could not have happened without the liberation of Iraq. That the deal was concluded just days after the capture of Saddam Hussein was a happy coincidence. What made all the difference, however, was that Bush and Blair enforced the U.N. resolutions on Iraq, ending the defiance of Saddam Hussein and the torment of the peoples of Iraq. Bush and Blair have turned the threat back onto the dictators, treating the WMD programs as the death warrants for these wicked regimes, not their tickets to survival. The liberation of Iraq communicated the simple point that international obligations are to be observed; they are not an initial negotiating position with which one quibbles, negotiates over, and ultimately evades. While many in the think-tank lunch circuit in Washington, D.C. may find it hard to grasp, this message has been received loud and clear in Tripoli. As importantly, the agreement to disarm Libya was achieved by a cooperative Anglo-American approach and without the involvement of such bodies and the United Nations (U.N.) or the European Union (EU). Multilateral bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will now play a role in dismantling the Libyan nuclear program, but their utility in negotiating with such regimes is limited. The fact that France, Germany, and Russia were not directly involved in the contacts with Libya was also a key element in their success. We can only imagine the diplomatic fiasco that would have resulted from the French, German, or Russian foreign ministers landing in Tripoli to invite themselves into the negotiations as intermediaries. These supposed friends of the U.S. would have sent muddled signals to Khaddafi. Instead of facing a firm, but fair, Anglo-American position, the Libyan dictator would have ended up deluding himself — something that he does not find difficult — into believing that was an alternative to full compliance with his international obligations. Perhaps now is the time for that other victim of an overly active imagination, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, to confine himself to literature. In coming months, the U.S. and Britain will have to ensure that there is no backsliding on Libya disarmament and should demand political reform in Khaddafi's highly repressive state. President Bush spoke on December 19, 2003 of "internal reform" and a Libya that could become "more free." The Libyan people should not be asked to pay the price for Khaddafi's decision to come clean on WMDs by being condemned to his regime, nor should they suffer his buffoonish sons as their future overlords. Rapprochement should not just mean visits to the State Department, but a concern for the welfare of the much-ignored Libyan people. Within one week, Saddam Hussein has been captured despite his vow to fight to the death, Iran has grudgingly signed up for additional nuclear inspections that it once called a violation of its national sovereignty, and Libya has agreed to surrender WMDs that it officially never had. After months of mistakes and misguided panic over postwar Iraq, the new British-American grand alliance confronting the terrorism supporting dictators has shown that it is both working and winning.

How did I know.... The limit of overtime pay are for "WHITE COLLAR" workers that are making over 65k, not the poor kid flipping hamburgers at McDonalds... With productivity per worker at a all time high of 9.2% and a sluggish labor market but hightened production better known to you carpers as the "Jobless Recovery"wouldn't it make sense to limit over time pay so employers are forced to hire new workers?? What are you guys complaining about 65k+ are the infamous "Rich" that so called benefitted the most from the tax cuts.... Do you see the hypocrisy? What else do you got for me Hippie?

No idiot boy please chose the one you feel is SO bad.. I know the benefits of all these measures taken but the lefty loon that wrote this is better educated in printing GREEN DAY T-shirts then economics and finance.... So again because I have work to do and don't have time to pull apart and disect the idiocy of this clown, point to the one that gets YOU all rilled up.. be my guest!

If you think that AlQeada isn't actively planning attacks agains all democratic free loving countries you are naive... I was only pointing out HIS error in drawing the conclusion that a non-incident equals protection....

Please point to one thing Bush did on the list that you disagree with my little "What importance is in the GDP number" social misfit... Please show me something, anything and I will garuntee it will expose your idiocy.....