Gee that makes sense, the young people should be able to join the service and die for the country but not be allowed to vote

 

Uhhhhhhh.....I think being in the military would be considered having a job.

After all, it is an all volunteer military.

 

Sure it's all volunteer, tell that to the nurse I met in the hospital two days ago who's 50 something year old husband is being called to duty.
If you happen to be young and in college I guess those young people should be SOL too, afterall college isn't a job.

 

Her husband VOLUNTEERED! How many years has he been showing up for training and drawing the money for being there?

Your right, college is not a job. It's a place for training you to be able to get a job and not ride the welfare system.

 

Kinda long, but interesting and informative.................

Saddam, Syria Colluded Under U.N. Watch
Friday, October 15, 2004
By Claudia Rosett
STORIES BACKGROUND
•Unraveling the U.N. Oil-for-Food Scandal•U.S. Troops Take Fire from Syrian Border•U.N. Got Blunt Oil-For-Food Bribery Letter•Volcker Confident About Oil-for-Food Probe•Iraqis: U.S. Officials Stalling 'Oil-for-Food' Probe•Lawmaker Demands 'Oil-for-Food' Documents•U.N. Audit Found Early 'Oil-for-Food' Problems•Ex-Oil-for-Food Head Defiant to Questions•U.N. Warns Oil-for-Food Companies on Documents•Annan Blasts Oil-for-Food Critics•U.N. OKs Iraqi Oil-for-Food Probe
NEW YORK — For dirty deals done with Saddam Hussein, France and Russia may take the cake — but that’s just the beginning.

Packed into the Iraq Survey Group (search) report from CIA chief weapons sleuth Charles Duelfer is news that there were some mighty big crumbs for many more countries that loudly defended Saddam during last year’s debates at the United Nations. For a taste, take Syria.

During the U.N. showdown over Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, Syria held a seat and had a vote on the U.N. Security Council. From that world platform, in February 2003 — a month before the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq — Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Shara (search) pitched a high-minded plea that the only solution was not war, but yet more haggling by the UN: "We can achieve peace if we pursue it with determination and armed with political will."

Meanwhile, Syria was pulling in big bucks for arming not the United Nation's "political will" but Saddam himself.

The Duelfer report says that in that same month before the war, while Syria’s Al-Shara was arguing for "peace," Saddam’s government was signing contracts with a Syrian company owned by a relative of Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad (search). The contracts were to buy "portable air defense systems, Kornet antitank guided missiles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), heavy machine guns, and 20 million machinegun rounds for delivery to Iraq," according to a former high-ranking Iraqi official.


In the case of those particular munitions, delivery was apparently interrupted by the U.S.-led coalition's overthrow of Saddam’s regime. But plenty of forbidden items had poured through Syria to Iraq already, including munitions that may still be killing coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. For the final two years of Saddam’s regime, Duelfer’s report explains: "Syria was Iraq’s primary conduit for illicit imports," handling contracts for $1.2 billion worth of forbidden goods and services, including weapons and military technology.

This burst of Iraqi-Syrian commerce was no freelance spree. It came under the auspices of a formal trade protocol, signed in 2000 between the regimes of Saddam and Assad — a flagrant violation of U.N. sanctions. Under this government-to-government agreement, Syria re-opened the Iraq-Syria pipeline, which became Saddam’s prime conduit for smuggling out oil, and over the life of the protocol helped bring Saddam about $2.8 billion in illicit income.

Syria’s dirty traffic with Iraq included deals with state-owned firms in fellow dictatorships such as North Korea (global retailer of the covert missile market) and Belarus (one of Saddam’s financing and procurement hubs in the former Soviet bloc). Within Syria, according to Duelfer, such business involved a number of firms run by cronies or relatives of President Assad and entailed "support from agencies or personnel within the government itself."

For instance, one of Saddam’s regular dealers, signing some 257 illicit contracts with various Iraqi ministries, was SES International, a firm that Duelfer says was owned by the head of Syrian Presidential Security, Dhu al-Himma Shalish, and run by his nephew — both relatives of Syria’s president.

Through SES and similar Syrian companies, Saddam during his final years in power was busy procuring such stuff as surface-to-air missiles, missile navigation components from North Korea and laser and night-vision technology from China.

Syria also served as an illicit banker for Baghdad, with the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria laundering hundreds of millions in Saddam’s secret funds, and by some accounts channeling Saddam’s stash onward via a CBS subsidiary in Beirut, capital of Syria’s vassal state, Lebanon.

Saddam’s shady business with the Commercial Bank of Syria is all the more disturbing given that this past May the U.S. Treasury designated this bank as a conduit for "numerous transactions that may be indicative of terrorist financing," including "two accounts at CBS that reference a reputed financier for Usama bin Laden."

So flagrant was Syria’s cooperation with Saddam that in October, 2002, while the U.S. was trying to reason with the U.N. Security Council, Syria, according to the Duelfer report, was helping Saddam import from a Ukrainian military manufacturer an entire massive pontoon bridge set.

All this was made much easier by a setup in which, despite the reassuring label of sanctions on Iraq, the United Nations in practice did nothing to police the Iraqi-Syrian border. Under the 1996-2003 Oil-for-Food program, which was supposed to restrict Saddam’s trade exclusively to humanitarian goods (expanded early on to include oil industry equipment), the U.N. Secretariat collected $1.4 billion in commissions on Saddam’s oil sales, to monitor and ensure the integrity of the U.N. program.

But, as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search) ran the program, the U.N.-hired inspectors were tasked only to check whether shipments into Iraq qualified for payment from U.N.-held escrow accounts for Iraq — not to stop contraband. Under the U.N. setup, it turns out, there was nothing to prevent trucks filled with forbidden munitions rolling from Syria into Iraq. And that, it seems, is what happened.

The Duelfer report, in hundreds more pages, lays out details of more than a dozen countries involved in Saddam’s illicit arms deals, including other nations in which the government played a direct role: "Belarus, North Korea, former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Yemen and possibly Russia."

All this was part of a deliberate strategy by Saddam to corrupt the United Nations debates, erode sanctions, and re-arm his regime. The multi-billion-dollar bonanza of sanctions-busting business Saddam lavished on Syria was just one slice of such stuff, but it’s enough to give a pretty good idea of the realities behind the U.N. debates over peace and political will in dealing with Saddam.

Claudia Rosett is Journalist-in-Residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and writes a column, "The Real World," on issues of tyranny and human rights, especially as these relate to the war on terror, for The Wall Street Journal’s Opinionjournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe. Previously, Ms. Rosett has served as a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in New York, as bureau chief in The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow Bureau and as editorial-page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal. For her on-site coverage of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, Ms. Rosett won an Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence.

 

Not sure how the welfare system got in here but I guess it would be ok for college students to vote.
I don't know how long her hubby has been training or collecting a check, she didn't go into detail. It just struck me as odd, I'm thinking someone in their 50's would be looking at retirement not going to war.

 

It's a fact........most people with a college education are not dependent on government support or "welfare".

HE MADE THE CHOICE to be in the military at 50 years old!

 

No actualy that would be like not allowing the other team to play because they opose the team you are cheering for..........

 

We will not have to worry abouth this kind of issue by the next election, all the kids who are not left behind will be of voting age and surely be more informed.

 

Wrote a long one, got mad erased it. I dream of the America I grew up in. Like the hotrods of the '60s, it is gone. Free Love Hippies like Fonda and Kerry sat in their multi-million dollar resort in France and figured out how to end it. I'm wrong somewhat, Fonda's mansion was in Beverly Hills. They should have been hung for treason. Kerry for President is the sickest joke ever on the American people.

 

You know Bill, I dream of the America you grew up in too. Where did it go? Where were we, that we let it go? Although we see some things differently, I ask you: Do you think that Bush can bring it back? I do not think anybody can bring it back, yet I hope because that is what we have to do. Now that I think about it, I think that if anyone can ever bring it back it will have to be us the Americans. I tell you this: Of all the things that brought me here (yea the material things and shinny stuff too) it was the notion of "We the people..." which I was told is true only here.

Peter

 

I feel like I've tried to do my part. For years I have voted against things I though were wrong and have sent numerous letters and emails to politicians on all levels.

I may not have changed anything, but at least I had me say.

 

You wrote; "Where were we, that we let it go?" This is the maybe the crux of the entire debate and where you guys (the Americans country) are maybe headed even more so unless you take some positive action.
Where were you indeed!
There are probably a page or two of reasons, but maybe I can just suggest a few that caused you to lose the America you grew up in and if not very quickly corrected will now cause you to lose the farm also;
- You chose not to vote.
- You relied on the other guy to take care of things
- You believed the media lies and distortions.
- You elected too many self serving politicians.
- You allowed lawyers and politicians to make too many self serving and unecessary changes.
- You allowed God to be trodden down and overruled. You turned your back on the One whom your forefathers relied so much on.
- You allowed .... better stop before I get on my soap box.

I have posted this in the past, but the following may answer some of "were were we" and what you allowed to happen;

Interview of Billy Graham's daughter
Finally, The Truth on National TV

Billy Graham's daughter was being interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God let something like this happen?" And Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response.

She said, "I believe that God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman that He is, I believe that He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God give us His blessing and His protection if we demand that He leave us alone?"

I know there's been a lot of emails' going around in regards to 9/11/01, but this really makes you think. If you don't have time, at least skim through it, but the bottom line is something to think about...In light of recent events...terrorists' attack, school shootings, etc.

Let's see, I think it started when Madeline Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body was found recently) complained she didn't want any prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then, someone said you better not read the Bible in school...the Bible that says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said, OK.

Then, Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide) and we said, an expert should know what he's talking about so we said, OK.

Then, someone said teachers and principals better not discipline our children when they misbehave. And the school administrators said no faculty member in this school better touch a student when they misbehave because we don't want any bad publicity, and we surely don't want to be sued

(There's big difference between disciplining and touching, beating, smacking, humiliating, kicking, etc.) And we said, OK.

Then someone said, let's let our daughters have abortions if they want, and they won't even have to tell their parents. And we said, OK.

Then some wise school board member said, since boys will be boys and they're going to do it anyway, let's give our sons all the condoms they want, so they can have all the fun they desire, and we won't have to tell their parents they got them at school. And we said, OK.

Then some of our top elected officials said it doesn't matter what we do in private as long as we do our jobs. And agreeing with them, we said it doesn't matter to me what anyone, including the President, does in private as long as I have a job and the economy is good.

And then someone said let's print magazines with pictures of nude women and call it wholesome, down-to-earth appreciation for the beauty of the female body. And we said, OK.

And then someone else took that appreciation a step further and published pictures of nude children and then stepped further still by making them available on the internet. And we said OK; they're entitled to their free speech.

And then the entertainment industry said; let's make TV shows and movies that promote profanity, violence, and illicit sex. And let's record music that encourages rape, drugs, murder, suicide, and satanic themes. And we said its just entertainment, it has no adverse effect, and nobody takes it seriously anyway, so go right ahead.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out.

I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."

"Dear God, Why didn't you save the little girl killed in her classroom?" Sincerely, Concerned Student

... AND THE REPLY

"Dear Concerned Student, I am not allowed in schools". Sincerely, God.

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell.

Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

Funny how everyone wants to go to heaven provided they do not have to believe, think, say, or do anything the Bible says.

Funny how someone can say "I believe in God" but still follow Satan who, by the way, also "believes" in God.

Funny how we are quick to judge but not to be judged.

Funny how you can send a thousand 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.

Funny how the lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but the public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Funny how someone can be so fired up for Christ on Sunday, but be an invisible Christian the rest of the week.

Are you laughing?

Funny how when you go to forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it to them.

Funny how I can be more worried about what other people think of me than what God thinks of me.

Are you thinking?

Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it.... no one will know that you did. But, if you discard this thought process, then don't sit back and complain about what a bad shape the world is in!


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"But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied. They also that render evil for good are mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is."(Psalms 38:19 & 20)


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God Bless You

 

I just got back from voting, and it was great! There was about 100 people in line. It was a pretty good mix of young and old. Due to the time of day, I'd say most were probably over fifty.

The best part.........there was no harassment, and there were no armed guards and no suicide bombers around.


Ain't America Great!

 

Sorry to butt in right in the middle of nap time. I heard this address on the local rock music radio station today. Found it interesting.

http://www.mediafund04.org/saudis/