Considering the recent party-line travesties (with a few traitorous ship-jumping "Dems" -- you all know who I'm talking about -- thrown in for good measure), there can be absolutely no doubt that a vote for a Republican this November is a vote AGAINST a minimum wage raise and a vote FOR torture. It's just that simple.

The list, of course, goes on and on. Corruption, mismanagement, lies, short-sightedness, pandering to major corporations. But these two things are so clear and cut & dried that they serve as shorthand for all the rest. Anyone who votes for a Party Line Republican in 2006 should be very, very ashamed.

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Fellow Floridians and other states with traitorous Dems:
I can no longer even pretend to support my Dem Senator Bill Nelson. And I am asking you to check out independent candidates in your states.

Here in Florida we haveBrian Moore Independent candidate for U.S. Senate.
www.votebrianmoore.com

Last night, our "Democratic" Senator Bill Nelson voted YEA for S.3930 granting this President and his administration a virtual "free pass" to torture, suspend habeas corpus, with a retroactive clause to protect him from prosecution for war crimes. But this bill provides NO LEGAL PROTECTIONS to American Citizens.

He voted like Martinez, like Santorum like the rest of the robotic reuplicans. How could Floridians still consider him a Democrat. He WILL NOT have my vote.

Of all the catastrophic votes that Nelson has made THIS, THIS, is inexcusable. Torture?! Suspension of Habeas?! Legalized Brutality?!

We have a choice. We must vote our morals, our values. We must vote for our soldiers, we must vote for our poor, our sickly, our bankrupt, our children's future and for peace. If we still want to be considered Americans then we'd damn well better vote like Americans.

Put your heart into your decision. Vote your conscience as an American, a Patriot, and a defender of the Constitution.

When the Democratic Party has absolutly no respect for the voters, when our elected Dems have no respect for their constituents, voting for a Democrat is not just the lesser of two evils, it IS evil.

I'm always asked "But what can I do". Well, when you're done screaming and tearing your burning hair out (I'm just about done with that), CALL - (don't write or e-mail) CALL the editor of your local newspaper. Leave messages if necessary. CALL - the News Director at your local TV outlet. Leave messages if necessary. CALL - every radio station you know of, even the right wingers. Ask to speak to the Station Manager. Don't even bother trying to get "on air". Leave messages if you have to.

Go to www.worldcantwait.org and try to participate OCTOBER 5 in over 100 cities across American. Join in the last Mass Protest before the election. And perhaps the last Mass Protest this administration will allow.

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With regards to going back on 900 years of Habeas Corpus and a century of (at-least-on-paper) commitment to things like not torturing people, it is obvious that the moral argument is the most important: We Just Should Not Even Be Debating This. However, some people are (who knows why) and so we should have another argument to add to the mix just for them: FAIR TRIALS ARE HOW YOU GET THE D**N TERRORISTS PUT AWAY!

Have any of these torture-supporters ever watched a crime show on TV for God's sake? And not "24"-- "24" is completely unrealistic. Say "CSI" most nights, or that show about freeing innocent people. Why is it important to get evidence that proves exactly, in fascinating forensic detail, why the Bad Guy did the killing? Partly because it's the right thing to do, all that "innocent until proven guilty" stuff, but also because if you convict an innocent person, the murderer is still out there, waiting to strike again. DUH! The only way to know if you have a terrorist is to try them fairly-- otherwise you could be convicting Mohammed Shmo who runs the Halal meat market on 15th Avenue, while meanwhile the REAL terrorist is plotting to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge in an unmarked warehouse across the street. And then the words "TO BE CONTINUED" appear on the screen and they cut to commercial-- it's such an obvious plotline anybody should be able to call it to mind.

Going back to the real world, there is also that little problem that eventually (one hopes) unconstitutional methods will be forced to end by the Supreme Court. In which case all the torture-based "evidence" on both the innocent and the guilty will have to be thrown out of court. Also they need to get their damning evidence fast, before the trail goes cold, just like the heroes on CSI. They won't be able to get any evidence at all if, three years after locking somebody up and torturing them, they FINALLY decide to say "whoah, maybe we should look around for some actual evidence." DUH. So what will happen? THE ACTUAL TERRORISTS WILL GO FREE! When we finally get our wits about us on the nature of Constitutional government, we will be between a rock and a hard place, because there will be NO WAY to try and convict any of the terrorists!

Republicans: The party that wants to torture the terrorists and then let them go free. How's that for a campaign slogan?

Dave

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I used to admire John McCain for what I thought was his integrity. Turns out, he has no more integrity that Dick Cheney.

How could a man who was tortured vote for a bill that allows torture go in front of a camera to say that he was supporting "a good bill"?

He's made us all characters in a Greek tragedy.

Any reading of how the Bush administration operates prepared us for its insistence this week that Congress essentially suspend the Constitution, eliminate fundamental rights such as habeas corpus, legalise torture and allow the president to toss anyone in the clink without a charge but enabling torture to obtain evidence that can be used against them.

My working assumption since at least 9/11 was that agencies occasionally were checking everyone’s e-mail and phone calls. I didn’t know how prescient I was.

Not since my parents ended up on one of Nixon’s infamous enemies lists and had their mail opened and taxes audited repeatedly, has anyone warned me about the perils of disagreeing publicly with the government. My parents irritated The White House in 1972 because my father sponsored an anti-Viet Nam war resolution when he was a delegate to a Democratic Party county convention. Mother wrote several anti-Nixon and anti-war letters to the local newspaper. My crime in 2006 is reporting that the president’s pants are on fire because of his outrageous and repeated lying.

There is ample evidence of the lengths to which Bush storm troopers will go to intimidate into silence the ordinary, peace-minded soldiers fighting the war on freedom being waged by The White House with much more vigour than it employs pretending to fight the war on terror. Sadly, soldiers being blown up in Iraq have much less armour than the Bush Boys have wrapped around themselves in waging a war against the country’s own citizens thanks to the new law.

Since I started doing reporting in 2005 for a series of articles that exposed a wide range of illegal activities by the administration – from 9/11 to the Iraq war – my telephones have been tapped, e-mails were intercepted and my snail mail opened and read. Although I’ve lived in Canada for 16 years, the bank holding the mortgage on my home, and which happens to own banks in the US subject to Washington’s politically-appointed regulators, tried to foreclose based on fabricated allegations that I was not meeting some term of the loan; thanks to fast and deft footwork by my lawyers, the bank was check-mated. Files in my office were rifled on at least two occasions; again, in so deliberately clumsy a fashion I would know at a glance the files were being read.

Once I knew I was a target, I stopped trusting my phone and e-mail. I did interviews using prepaid phone cards bought with cash, calling from phone booths selected at random. I kept creating fictitious, new e-mail accounts when I had to write to a source, and switched e-mail boxes frequently. I stopped using my home computer for research, accessing the web from a different internet cafes; I never worked out of the same café twice.

"Be careful," contacts in intelligence agencies warned me. "These people will do anything. Use pay phones, send e-mails from internet cafes and never use the same café. When walking on a street, reverse direction suddenly and check whether anyone either ducks in a doorway or for no apparent reason stops walking and suddenly is looking in a shop window. Avoid entering the US. Find ways of knowing whether your house has been entered."

They weren't paranoid. Legislation waiting the president’s signature (and a signing statement that thumbs its nose at what little protection is in the bill) has shattered a number of legal protections for anyone Bush says is an enemy.

If I go missing tomorrow, please call John McCain and ask him where I am.

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The Neo-Cons keep referencing the morals of WWII comparing the Taliban and Sadam Hussien to Nazis. I think others should be compared, and will be with a little time. This is what happens when we trust leaders with no "moral compass". All hail the mighty dollar.

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Does this mean we get to beat him with the pairs of flip-flops we'll be sending? It's not torture if he deserves it.

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There is a sickness in Washington that is taking us down a rathole of greed, filth and corruption. As I have stated, and will continue to say: THERE IS NO WAR ON TERROR...it is a fiction used by an evil administration as a pretext to create fear and, in doing so, unleash yet another kind of terror, the terror of lies and willful disinformation that has become the ugly reality we are seeing today in Washington, in Iraq, and US meddling around the world.

It will take an ungodly amount of time and resources to undo the irrepairable damage Bush and his henchmen have committed. It's certainly not going to get any better as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, let alone invade Iran! It is a reckless, destructive foreign policy that is taking us to World War.

This is MADNESS! It will only get worse. Our "mission" there is so faulty, so politically perverted that the ONLY ones who gain out of this are the crooked, dishonest WAR PROFITEERS...while Bush sends our young American service men and women to go over there and die...so he and his war-monger cronies can fill their filthy bank accounts!! And Big Oil can continue to rip us off, because it is all about control of oil.

The blind, partisan-crazed Republican leadership adds to the damage to America...or as some call it, AmeriKKa...by passage of Constitutionally questionable suspension of all habeas corpus rights of detainees, of warrantless surveillance on Americans. Well, what is the bottom line? Simple. NO ONE WILL BE SAFE IN AMERICA, because ANYONE, including US cititzens, can be handcuffed and hauled away to Guantanamo or some CIA detention center only on suspicion, even faulty evidence, or even NO evidence at all...and we will be unable to challenge our arrest, or even know why!!

In other words, those fucking Republican fools in Congress have just given Bush the powers to carry on a virtual, if not yet quite real, dictatorship in America! And I am seriously considering leaving the US because it appears US citizenship is utterly meaningless!

This is none other than NAZISM! Just different players, in a different time in history, while Bush...similar to Hitler...carries on a modern version of a personal witch hunt for "terrorists" that his own policies have created, as the insanity in Washington spreads like a plague...filled with more and more evil!

I am pissed, I am outraged, and I am frightned! I fear the evil in Washington far more than any Jihad or insurgency used by this administration as the political scapegoat to deflect blame by this absolutely corrupt administration. This is not to suggest terrorism doesn't exist; it does. But when do we wake up and see that the worst forms of it have manifested themselves inside the sick minds inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on down, and in the foolishness that is the partisan blindness that sanctions it in Congress.

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"Making peace with torture. A man once tortured turns into a torturer. If there is a better definition of tragedy, I'd like to see it in comments."

Although I'd not be bold enough to propose a definition at all (I'd defer to Nietszche, among others for those things), once we place this in the context of the conditions prevailing nowadays here in the USA, there's also tragedy in the fact that by even being discussed at all levels and integrating it into the realm of 'law', it is being unavoidably attached to such phrases as 'the American way' and 'our values'. Mr McCain seems to have displayed an even more dire tendency: the bankruptcy of an ethics. I'd not restrict myself to particularizing only the good Senator however... . "An eye for an eye makes everyone blind". A sober and thoughtful contemplation of the noun 'civilization' is long overdue, and not only in the USA. Perhaps that would glean more helpful and useful information than water-boarding? There is no 'torture' as such, only human beings who apply their conceptions to others.

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Look for McCain, who is embracing Falwell, Bob Jones U, and other fundamentalist leaders and groups, to be delivering speeches for Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, as the former Pres GHW Bush has done.

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Ruled by an ignorant Dictator and his crony administrators, the weak minded and immoral legislators continued to cripple the personal rights of the masses of citizens and to fund and support the illegal war started by the Dictator as a feeding of his need to be a "Macho" commander in chief. Using his power as the "Decider", Mr.Dictator decided to trample the nation's constitution and thumb his cowboy nose at the Geneva Conventions. This was a decision he made every morning after ignoring warnings of increased terrorist activity in foreign lands and his losing policy in the conduct of his own personal war. The country began it's slow but inevitable sinking into the quicksand of history, into a pit filled with the dead corpses of so many nations who once proclaimed themselves as the world's super power. And the humans who had sacrificed and given all , for the developement of this civilization, now a Dictatorship, were sorely shamed and greviously disrespected. And who will be left to remember??

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So much for the Geneva Convention and the protest against premitting torture by McCain, Graham, and Warner! Little Georgy throws a tantrum and gets what he wants ANYWAY! The only way to get this country back on track is to vote out this rubberstamping Repug Congress and voting for IMPEACHMENT and IMPRISONMENT of Bush and Cheney!

Just waiting for more Diebold and Repug monkeyshines in this upcoming election. Do we have to have a bloody REVOLUTION to dislodge this crowd?

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And fuck John McCain. I never liked him for a minute. You gotta go with your gut (like the Decider) - McCain's got those beady eyes, and his face is too fat for his own good. He's a dick.

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