• Sophisticated missiles have made its specialty, aerial dogfighting, obsolete. Opposing aircraft target each other from miles away, often before the pilots can see each other except on radar.
• Precision bombing is the new priority, and despite modification, the Tomcat can't carry the loads of the new F/A-18 Super Hornet.
• It's too expensive in the long run. The jet that flew its first combat missions in September 1974 requires 50 hours of maintenance, compared with five to 10 hours for the Super Hornet, for each hour of flight time.

War is peace

"There is no peace in retreat."

Takes more imagination than I have to connect the two statements...

Freedom is slavery

"The terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America."

The first statement's a mere oxymoron. The second is a statement of fact. If Ryan has evidence that it's not true, then he should present it. I suspect he has nothing but his opinion and his hysteria.

Ignorance is strength

"... We have benefited from responsible criticism and counsel offered by members of Congress of both parties ... Yet, there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure."

There's nothing in there about ignorance. In fact, Bush was stating that he does receive advice, and that he discounts the nattering and the spew from dipshits like Ryan.

"Some 500 Muslims demonstrated Friday to protest the disappearance of a militant Muslim leader who went missing during a trip to Croatia last month. Spokesman Ahmed Abulaban said Egypt, the United States and Croatia "are the beneficiaries" of the disappearance of Talaat Fouad Qassem who has been living in Denmark since 1992 as a political refugee. Wanted by Egypt on charges of attempting to overthrow the secular government, Qassem was ordered out of Croatia on Sept. 18, and left for an unknown destination, according to Croatian officials.

Under President Clinton's anti-terrorism initiative, Qassem's name was put on a list of people to whom transfer of funds are to be blocked. The initiative also froze the U.S. assets of groups the U.S. deemed used terrorism to subvert peace activities. Qassem also appears on a U.S. Department of Justice list of possible co-conspirators to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader, and nine other Muslims who have been convicted of conspiring to bomb the United Nations and other buildings in New York. The demonstrators, including Qassem's pregnant wife Amani Farouk, went to the Croatian embassy where Abulaban, a Copenhagen imam, handed over a letter to a diplomat. Before dissolving, demonstrators raised their fists and shouted 'God is Great' outside the downtown Copenhagen building... Qassem, 38, co-founded the outlawed al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, which has been blamed for much of the violence in a three-year campaign by militants to restore strict Islamic rule."

Mobilizing the nation and Congress in support of investigations and the impeachment of President Bush is a critical task that has already begun, but it must intensify and grow. The American people stopped the Vietnam War--against the wishes of the President--and forced a reluctant Congress to act on the impeachment of President Nixon. And they can do the same with President Bush. The task has three elements: building public and Congressional support, getting Congress to undertake investigations into various aspects of presidential misconduct and changing the party makeup of Congress in the 2006 elections.

[I]t's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.

There are many reasons why it is crucial that the Democrats regain control of Congress in '06, but consider this one: If they do, there may be articles of impeachment introduced and the estimable John Conyers, who has led the fight to defend our constitution, would become Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Wouldn't that be a truly just response to the real high crimes and misdemeanors that this lawbreaking president has so clearly committed?

American Culture

This has always seemed to me somewhat of an oxymoron. 'America doesn't have a culture,' I think to myself. 'America is a patchwork of little bits of everyone else's culture.'

The little bits are what makes up the larger culture, like the little colored rocks in a mosaic make a picture. It's a process called synergy, where the whole is greater than the parts...

Do we here in America really have a culture?

I'm not sure about you, but I do...

We who have been here for longer than one or two generations, that is. We who don't live in culturally similar neighborhoods from where our ancestors called home but instead have neighbors we've never met and holidays we observe because we got to get out of school when we were kids... do we really have a culture of our own?

We have neighbors with whom we have shared beliefs and aspirations. The culture, even though it's shifting constantly, shares experiences going back to 1607. The fact that it's continuously shifting means it's alive, not pickled or preserved in amber...

My ancestors came from Northern Europe; Sweden, Scotland, and if I trace back far enough, Flanders in modern Belgium. I don't speak Swedish, Gaelic or Flemmish. I know some Scottish country dances that I learned in classes rather than in communities. I don't know what holidays my ancestors observed or even what religion they were. So, do I really have a culture?

You have an American culture. My ancestors came from England and Scotland on one hand, Italy on another, and someplace in Siberia on yet another. I know how to foxtrot and waltz and when I was a tad I knew how to dance a tarantella. I'm agnostic but I observe Christmas with my family and I give cards on Valentine's Day. I know, and I'm comfortable with, people whose ancestors came from Africa, from Spain, from other parts of Europe, and from various parts of Asia. I eat American food: roast beef, pork chops, spaghetti and meatballs, General Tso's chicken, tacos, enchiladas, and hamburgers.

When peoples of old immigrated, they would travel in large groups often of multiple families. They would settle together and raise their children together and speak their native languages, even if they learned the language and customs of the land they settled in. But when I was born, my aunts and uncles weren't next door or often even in the same towns. My grandparents came from other states. My great-grandparents came from I do not know where.

When I was a little fellow, we lived back in the hills, in Hatfield and McCoy country. Everyone had come from the same area, everyone was related, and the culture was homogenous. We moved to Pennsylvania, where people were for the most part either Italians or Pennsylvania Dutchmen, with the occasional Croation or Hungarian thrown in for flavor. We played baseball and football and bocce, even the Hungarians.

I speak English because I was raised in a nation where the native language is English. I have a religion that I feel is right, but do I only have it because my mother taught it to me? I watch old documentaries of World War II and learn about the military units from Hawaii where the men all had the same culture, shared the same songs and dances and same native language.

My Dad was drafted in 1942. He was 32 years old at the time, and it was the first time he'd been out of the hills. He was thrown in with thousands of other men, from all over the eastern seaboard. They all spoke the same language and the time they spent fighting Hitler and his superior German culture knocked the edges off their own cultural differences.

I could not go next door and find someone who knows the dances I know, or sings the folk songs of ages past.

But you could find lots of other things you have in common, starting with a common history, through the books you read, the movies you see, the teevee you watch.

I could find someone who has heard about the latest movie that has been released, rave about their favorite singer and find those who dress in Levi jeans and Kalvin Klein, but how does that bind us as a community into a culture?

Those are the things you share. Back in Flanders your ancestors wore wooden shoes and loose trousers. They spoke Flemish and sang Flemish songs. Now you wear jeans and a tee shirt and sneakers, speak English, and you probably know most of the words to "Yellow Rose of Texas."

Looking around at the nation I live in, I see a culture of superficiality.

I see a varied, colorful culture, that's growing in six different directions at once...

We may speak English, but we don't speak the same language. We may both buy our clothes from Wal*Mart but we don't share the same fashion. We both have expectations, but we do not necessarily share the same ones. There is nothing that binds me to my neighbors more than the location we live in.

Sounds like the only thing that keeps you apart from your neighbors is your own self-absorption. Careful you don't fall into your navel.

There is no depth to American 'culture'. No history.

Virginia Dare. John Smith. Powhattan. John Winthrop. Roger Smith. Peter Stuyvesant. George Washington. None of them count? The Whisky Rebellion? Ben Franklin? Big and Little Harp? Simon Girty? Not even whisps of memory. James Monroe. Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, the 49ers, the Sydney Ducks. Jenny Lind. P.T. Barnum. I'd put our history up against that of most European countries just as a matter of what's interesting.

No reality. It is like smoke, swirling about and always changing, never to be grasped. American Culture is about fitting in rather than carrying on. It is about looks rather than substance. It is about now rather than history.

History's the handle that sets the direction of "now." If you're not aware of it, it's for the same reason a fish isn't aware of the water around it.

I lament; for in America, I have no culture.

Maybe you don't, but the rest of us do.

Local transporters had been protesting the permission granted to the South Korean company Daewoo to run their buses on various routes within the province. Since the company provides quality service, commuters preferred Daewoo to local bus services on long routes. The protesters, led allegedly by some local transport union leaders, went to the Daewoo bus stand and set busses and coaches on fire causing a loss of millions of rupees. “The company suffered a loss of between Rs 250 million and Rs 300 million,” the manager of the company told reporters.