emptiedfull

if you do, where do you see their leadership taking us?

if you don't, what would subpoena power mean for democrats?

do you believe in faith, in a personal realtionship with god?

do you prefer the rigorous peer scrutiny that the scientific method provides for?

are you mostly just trying to be a good human being or citizen? do organized religions or religious authorities 'do it' for you?

if it ever came down to it, do you feel strongly enough about your 'beliefs' that you could give your life for your belief?

if you couldn't, would you stand by while others were asked to, and remain silent. would you feel compelled to speak out, one way or the other?

so five sentences is pretty rediculous, right?

would having democrats in control of one part of the congress be better or worse going forward?

we have more than two choices

we can stay on this rediculous course. we can get the heck out tomorrow. or we can redeploy out into the neighborhood in order to let the iraqis start to sort their future out by themselves and be on call should things get overwhelmingly out of control.

thank god for bush senior (i never thought i would type those words), the kuwaitis will still have us, and others. it would be the same old policy of containment, but this time we would be babysitting a civil war that we started from the sidelines.

this elected government will fall, and we do not yet know what will emerge.

we are better off helping from kuwait, containing from kuwait. and the international struggle against terrorism is better of fought with the willing support of the worlds countries we have been so dismissive of lately.

we need leaders who can play well with other world leaders.

other countries do it. like australia and they have a voting rate of 95%. we could have a natianal voting day HOLIDAY.

when everone is in the habit of voting, politicians tend NOT to pander to their extremist bases as that is a losing strategy. we would end up with a lot more moderates in congress and the white house and eventually in the supreme court, and a lot more compromise and a lot more useful congressional legislation, and quite likely fewer lobbyists inside the beltway writing things like american energy policy.

either vote by mail or show up at the polling station, either pick you best choices, or X your ballot out and vote for nothing as is your right.

but if you dont submit a ballot, then you pay a $20 fine. if you do it two years in a row, then a $30 fine, etc.

no matter which party leads the congress, no matter what party the newly elected president in 08 is a member of, and no matter how long this conservative supreme court might last ( without a vacancy). HOW MANY YEARS WILL OUR SOLDIERS CONTINUE TO FIGHT IN IRAQ? in order to simplify, i only ask for your best guess (in years), round your answer off to the nearest number of years, if you would please.

if we stay, our soldiers babysit a nation building exercise with no realistic plan for actual success. if we pull everbody out now, then the iraqis are left to fend for themselves, god forbid, and the non combatants will quite likely be slaughtered (while god and the world watches another american foreign policy failure). only to have iraqi neighbors roll in to salvage the ruined chunks which remain for their own national interest.

what a mess. if you aren't angry at this president's national defense policies, then you haven't been paying attention.

if a person knows that their childish, self-serving, knee-jerk reactions can catch up to them and actually cost them 'level points', maybe a disincentive like of that magnitude that begins to weed out some of the more reckless replies. what say you?

some attempt to weed out the waste in this website might be useful. less high school, fewer questions that are self absorbed, answers that are less of a one liner and more of a thoughtful, depthy reply would be better. right?

seems to me screening out the high school crowd might make for an evermore interesting website: fewer 'one-liner' responses, more reasoned out (substantive, thoughtful) replies, and a few more less self-absorbed questions. and then maybe a few more people that know how to use a spell check subroutine.... maybe i'm just dreamin. there'd be no way for yahoo to check id cards. but there must be some way to 'raise the bar' around here.

less garbage in, less garbage out?

the republican approach to international challenges has been to assert, and indeed try to impose, our democratic values by military means. should we feel enlightened enough to go ahead and just run the world, or should we spend more time defending ourselves and making a better case for our way of life before the world body of opinion, and wait until they get onboard willingly.

IS IT TIME FOR AMERICA TO GET OVER HIS 'SEX APPEAL'? is he a freak, or just typical hollywood hasbeen....?

it's hard for me to believe that don rumsfeld and karl rove and denny hastert anf bill frist and john mccain would have kept america on this 'just enough troops to lose' path unless they intended all along to be able to play the 'we're at war', 'you can't count on dems to fight', 'i'm a war president', 'we have to cut taxes for the REALLY wealthy to win this thing' cards in the next several election cycles. republicans believe that they are advantaged at the polls so long as america remains at war. not too much 'at war', but enough 'at war' so that we americans are always obliged to do a gut check ( and completely forget about the need for intelligent problem solving skills, which democrats tend to have at least some of) instead. they think we're idiots, republicans think we're idiots. why else do they think they can win elections with this crap?

the lebanese people are paying for the crimes of hezbollah, which they apparently allow to opperate in their midst. is this guilt by association? if the Lebanese government could not bring the military aspirations of hezbollah under control, then is their government ligitimate? only the state has the right to use deadly force within the bounds of its own country. independent militias either need to be their own country, or they need to submit to the political will of their capital. isreal had every right to destory hezbollah, so long as hezbollah feels free to operate outside of its country's control.