Interesting little read about George Dubya being a little bit pissed about claims that he lied about the war. As shown by the links in the below article there is plenty of support for those claims.

War Marketing:

Today Mr. Bush has excoriated his opponents for claiming that he lied them into war. The President said: “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.” Well I’m neither a Democrat nor really anti-war, but yep, that’s the claim. (By the way, he’s being fact-checked.) That claim is pretty convincing, particularly to anyone who’s actually read the 521-page Senate Report on Intelligence Failures (highlights here), or the Downing Street Memo. If you want a more scholarly version of Mr. Bush’s complaint, check out Norman Podhoretz in Commentary; he is convincingly demolished by Kevin Drum. Why am I so upset about this? Because I thought that taking out Saddam was a moral act, something worth doing for its own sake, a chance to prove that Arabs don’t have to live in dictatorships where there are torturers in the jails, that Western Civilization is capable of moral action. Instead, the war was sold based on conventional marketing wisdom: pick a couple of simple messages and stay on them. I was watching TV and reading the papers, and all the war marketers were saying, over and over, was “He’ll have nukes soon!” and “He’s Osama’s buddy!” Both false; and there are still torturers in the jails. I’m sufficiently irritated that I don’t mind saying “I told you so”, which I did in February and March of 2003. Feh. I hate lies.

Everyone has heard of Pat Robertson, even us Aussies. He is a US TV Evangelist who not so long ago called for the assassination of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez because he is a vocal opponent to George W Bush.

Well now he has come out and told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania that if you have a disaster in your area you better not ask for God’s help or guidance because they have voted against the teaching of Intelligent Design in the their local school district.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city,” Mr Robertson said on The 700 Club.

“God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in His eye forever,” Mr Robertson said.
“If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”

Supporters of Intelligent Design claim that the universe to complex to have occurred over time and must have had assistance from a higher being.

I for one don’t believe that and neither do the people of Dover it seems. The opposite is true in Kansas where their school district have approved the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Isn’t America a wonderful place to live?

Court Finds For Student In Web FOS Case:

An anonymous reader writes “A student who brought a suit against his middle school has been awarded a settlement after two years of legal battles. USAToday reports that the suit was brought after the school leveled harsh disciplinary measures against the student, based entirely on comments made to his website guestbook.� From the article: “Grayson Barber, who handled the case on behalf of the ACLU, said the school presented no evidence that Dwyer’s comments were threatening or disruptive of school activities. ‘Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression.’�

Apparently the NJ Board of Education had to pay-out $117,500USD to this kid for what they did to him. Apparently he had been suspended, benched in his baseball team and banned him from a class trip. They accused him of having Anti-Sematic postings in his guest-book which is what other people use to send messages to the author of the site. He denies the comments were there. The school have also never given an explanation of what rule or policy he apparently broke. The weirdest thing is that this a blog he ran himself, not hosted by the school, on his own time and on his own home computer.

The school deserves everything it got in this case and should make other schools think twice about censoring students on the net instead of offering free speech and collaborating in discussion groups and classes.

My friend Cameron Reilly from The Podcast Network recent interviewed one of the world’s leading thinkers of the 20th Century Professor Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately due to time constraints the interview is only about 30 minutes long but Professor Chomsky discusses political issues since World War 2 and other interesting topics.

Listen and maybe learn something and maybe even think. Maybe he will say something that will make you take a look at the world around you and investigate it further.

You can listen to the interview here, Noam Chomsky interview

Ongoing blog author Tom Bray was going through his daily RSS news aggregator and found two MSNBC articles next to each other.

Item: “The Senate voted for the second time this month against providing more money to help low-income families heat their homes.� Item: “Congress on Thursday passed a bill protecting the firearms industry from massive lawsuits brought by crime victims, and President Bush was expected to sign it into law.�

It is so interesting to see where government policies lay at the moment. Help people survive by providing heating to the poor who can’t afford heating in rundown apartments blocks usually owned by slumlords who most likely would rather tear down buildings and sell to corporations and investorsfor a huge profit than to refurbish the existing property or protect the people who make firearms from what they consider frivilous lawsuits against them.

I know that people kill people, not guns but the way some guns are made nowadays some of them are easy to modify to become semi-automatic or even fully automatic which just turns them into tools for killing. This isn’t about the right to bear arms but the right for people to sue firearms companies from making their guns so easy to modify. I am sure there is more to it than that also but why should these people be protected when they makes something whose only use is to injure and kill. There are more illegal weapons on the streets than legal at the moment and that isn’t right.

I am including Australia in this rant also not just the USA whose gunlaws seem to revolve around a constitution 200 yrs old written in a time of war.