Political leanings

[sukhumvitpoler]

Im a gay, mixed race, semi retarded nazi-jew, i have no idea where i fit in so i moved to bangkok and joined the red shirts

[anthony70]

id like to see all prisoners with head shaved, put out to work in the comunity in bright pink boiler suits.
to earn their keep.

id also like free NHS treatment withdrawn from the clinically obese.
discracefull people.

[sev7en]

(manarak @ May 06 2009,19:11) Maybe I'm wrong and it is no problem.

Yes.

[sev7en]

(pacman @ May 06 2009,19:28) I think sev7en is drawing a long bow again - he does love to be controversial.      

O paccie the defender of the lame.

You´re intelligent enough too see the connection of anti same sex marriage, anti abortion, anti gay... rightwingers trademark.


And you like to defend lbs, especially in chatrooms

[Lefty]

(manarak @ May 06 2009,05:11)

(sev7en @ May 06 2009,06:37)

(manarak @ May 05 2009,18:22) - no adoption for same-sex couples: just because I am against it.

Being a homophobe on a board like this?

I'm against it because I think children need parents of both sexes to grow up more or less "normally".

I have no idea what "normal" is, but I have an uneasy feeling when I think about children that have two daddies (or two mommies) that kiss each other.

Maybe I'm wrong and it is no problem.
Maybe I am right...

Do you want to do the experiment, or do you know the answer already?

The thing of it is, having one parent of each sex is no guarantee a kid will grow up normally. Look at most of us here.

Seriously though, plenty of kids grow up to be normal, whatever that is, in single parent households, one of each gender households, and same sex parents households.

Having gay parents in of itself won't make a kid grow up to be gay any more than having straight parents will cause a kid to grow up to be straight. If it mattered, then we here all must have had parents who loved ladyboys.

[Lefty]

(anthony70 @ May 06 2009,09:54) id like to see all prisoners with head shaved, put out to work in the comunity in bright pink boiler suits.
to earn their keep.

id also like free NHS treatment withdrawn from the clinically obese.
discracefull people.

You may appreciate some of the policies of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio

[JaiDee]

I like Sheriff Joe, he doesn't take any shit ....when he made  all his inmates dress in pink for a while that was awesome.


 RE,   same-sex marriage, check what "Joe The Plumber" said yesterday, it's funny as fuck;

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009....16.html

  Again, for you Repubs out there, and it's amazing that even 25% or so still identify themselves as Republicans these days after how Georgie and Dick ruined this country for a while,  THIS clown is another prominent face of the party!

 Amazing...... the new faces of the GOP are that empty pantsuit Sarah Palin, Joe the fucking plumber, Bernie Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, etc......even if I was still on the right I would never admit it these days.

[Lefty]

People who actually listen to and think Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity have a worthwhile thought ever exit their mouth just make me shake my head in disgust.
I'd like to slap the dog shit out of all 3 of them. One at a time, or all three together if they want to hold hands. Each one of them needs to have their ass kicked til their nose bleeds.

[El_hefe]

Where's the libertarian option? (Small "l" please, not utopian about it) Pretty liberal on social issues.

[pacman]

(manarak @ May 06 2009,22:33) My turn to be amazed: you never saw a 3 room unit?
and 2 room units don't get built?

Where do you live?

Me? Australia, land of wide open spaces...

I see where we differed, you don't count a bathroom as a room. So your 2 room is my 3 room, & yes, we have 'em, but they present problems for developers.

Many blocks of apartments are springing up in my home town & I know that the most sales resistance comes where the finished item is judged to be too small.

It will be a long while before the average Aussie accepts living in a Hong Kong style apartment. In fact, the future Aussies who make that transition will have been born in Hong Kong...

[pacman]

(JaiDee @ May 06 2009,22:30) Since there were no weapons of mass destruction  GW and his lackeys had to change the reason every day.... so what was the final one?

The final one was the same one it always was...

OIL!

Iraq sits on 1/5 of the world's oil reserves, but what was crucial to their future supply, they were unencumbered.

Saddam had not entered into agreements with any oil company. He kept that bargaining chip up his sleeve & the US had to kill him.

Manarak's point by point guide is the copy book example of just how the US has run its foreign affairs policy over the past century.

Except this time it has all blown up in their face. The Bush administration failed to learn from the history taught them by the US' disastrous intervention into Vietnam that determined locals fighting for what is just will eventually defeat the biggest of invasion forces.

We may not approve of the Taliban but from the Muslim's perspective, the invader is the US, Iraq is an Islamic state & why wouldn't they want to control the destiny of their own oil reserves?

Please, please, please read John Perkins book - "The Confessions of an Economic Hitman"

I'm sure Barack Obama has.

[pacman]

(sev7en @ May 07 2009,00:17) O paccie the defender of the lame.

You´re intelligent enough too see the connection of anti same sex marriage, anti abortion, anti gay... rightwingers trademark.


And you like to defend lbs, especially  in chatrooms

I am intelligent enough to understand the difference between disapprove & hate. Please don't try to mark me as some right wing nutter simply because I dared to speak up for a little intellectual freedom of thought.

And I will continue to defend whomever I see fit. I can't be sure I won't offend you in the future, c'est la vie...

As to the charge of defending the lame, I remember speaking up for you one time,

and you can't get lamer than that...        

[alan1chef]

The US went into Iraq to expand their empire???? LOL....do you REALLY believe that? If so, then I have some beachfront property in Arizona you'll love! Also, anyone who says we went into Iraq because of the oil has succumbed to the worn out cliche used by liberals for the last 40 years. When you cannot find the real reason...or don't want to believe the real reason...or just want to be loved by your fellow liberals...you say OIL...over and over and over again.

[Tomcat]

(pacman @ May 07 2009,08:28) The final one was the same one it always was...
OIL!

I thought that was obvious anyway. Sadaam did admit that he had weapons of mass destruction and had used them in Iran. They had the UN resolution as well

If you look any War the History teachers will tell you than the blame can be laid on several doors and no one country is blameless.

They are still arguing over who was responsible for WW1 and WW2

[PigDogg]

(alan1chef @ May 06 2009,23:59) OIL...

If one takes off their partisan blinders then the following might make sense..........

February 24, 2006
Guest Columnist
Will Fight for Oil
By TED KOPPEL
The American people ... know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people.

€” President Bush, Jan. 10

Washington

Let us, as lawyers say, stipulate that the Bush administration was genuinely concerned that weapons of mass destruction, which they firmly believed to be in Saddam Hussein's arsenal, might be shared with the same Qaeda leadership that planned the horrific events of 9/11. That would have been a reasonable motive for invading Iraq; but surely now, three years later, when the existence of those weapons is no longer an issue, it would be insufficient reason for the United States to remain there.

Let us further acknowledge that continuing to put American lives at risk in Iraq purely for the protection of Israel would arouse, in some quarters, anti-Semitic murmurs, if not growls.

But the Bush administration's touchiness about charges that we acted €” and are still acting €” in Iraq "because of oil"? Now that's curious. Keeping oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than a half-century.

Fifty-three years ago, British and American intelligence officers conspired to help bring about the overthrow of Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh's shortcomings, in the eyes of Whitehall and the State Department, were an unseemly affinity for the Tudeh Party (the Iranian Communists) and his plans to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. The prospect of the British oil industry being forced to give way to Soviet influence over the Iranian oil spigot called for drastic action. Following a military coup, Mossadegh was arrested, imprisoned for three years and then held under house arrest until his death in 1967. Power was then effectively concentrated in the hands of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The shah's unswerving commitment to the free flow and marketing of Iranian oil would, by the end of the 1960's, become a central pillar of the so-called Nixon Doctrine, in which American allies were tapped to be regional surrogates to maintain peace and security. The sales of sophisticated American weapons to Iran served the twin purposes of sopping up billions of what came to be known as "petro-dollars," while equipping (in particular) the shah's air force.

That reliance on Iran to maintain stability in the Persian Gulf enjoyed bipartisan support. On New Year's Eve in 1977, President Jimmy Carter, visiting the shah in Tehran, toasted his great leadership, which he said had made Iran "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas in the world." By January 1980, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had driven the shah from the Peacock Throne, President Carter made absolutely clear in his final State of the Union address that one aspect of our foreign policy remained unchanged:

"An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

The Reagan administration announced its intention to continue defending the free flow of Middle East oil, by whatever means necessary. In March 1981, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger clearly signaled that the United States was seeking a new base of operations in the Persian Gulf:

"We need some facilities and additional men and materiel there or nearby, to act as a deterrent to any Soviet hopes of seizing the oil fields or interdicting the line."

Subsequently, the United States began establishing military bases in Saudi Arabia and, to much criticism, selling Awacs aircraft to the Saudi government. In 1990, when Saddam Hussein appeared likely to follow his invasion of Kuwait by crossing into Saudi Arabia, the defense secretary at the time, Dick Cheney, laid out Washington's concerns:

"We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil, and whoever controls the supply of oil, especially if it were a man like Saddam Hussein, with a large army and sophisticated weapons, would have a stranglehold on the American economy and on €” indeed on the world economy."

What Mr. Cheney said was correct then and remains correct now. The world's oil producers pump approximately 80 million barrels a day. The world's oil consumers, joined today by an increasingly oil-hungry India and China, purchase 80 million barrels a day. Were production from the Persian Gulf to be disrupted because of civil war in Iraq, the freezing of Iranian sales or political instability in Saudi Arabia, the global supply would be diminished. The impact on the American economy and, indeed, on the world economy would be as devastating today as in 1990.

If those considerations did not enter into the Bush administration's calculations when the president ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it would have been the first time in more than 50 years that the uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil was not a central element of American foreign policy.

That is not to say that the United States invaded Iraq to take over its oil supply. But the construction of American military bases inside Iraq, bases that can be maintained long after the bulk of our military forces are ultimately withdrawn, will serve to replace the bases that the United States has lost in Saudi Arabia. There may be other national security reasons that the United States cannot now precipitously withdraw its forces from Iraq, including the danger that the country would become a regional terrorist base; but none is greater than forestalling the ensuing power vacuum and regional instability, and the impact this would have on oil production.

H. L. Mencken is said to have noted that "when someone says it's not about the money €” it's about the money." Arguing in support of his fellow Arkansan during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, former Senator Dale Bumpers offered a variation on that theme: "When someone says it's not about the sex €” it's about the sex."

Perhaps the day will come when the United States is no longer addicted to imported oil; but that day is still many years off. For now, the reason for America's rapt attention to the security of the Persian Gulf is what it has always been. It's about the oil.

Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of the Discovery Channel.