posted on August 14, 2005 06:03:19 PM new
You call yourself a democrat helen. WHAT A LAUGH....you embarass good democrats by putting your extremism in with their party. Although I am aware that the American Socialist Party and The American Communist Party do side/and vote for the dem party.
You, imo, are from the party/group of Karl Marx supporters. Without a doubt.
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
And why the American Voters chose to RE-elect President Bush to four more years. YES!!!
posted on August 14, 2005 06:11:06 PM new
LindaFascistTwelveK says, """You call yourself a democrat helen. WHAT A LAUGH....you embarass good democrats by putting your extremism in with their party. Although I am aware that the American Socialist Party and The American Communist Party do side/and vote for the dem party.
You, imo, are from the party/group of Karl Marx supporters. Without a doubt. """
OK, Big Mouth, point out ONE even ONE of the 14 points that don't fit YOU!
C'mon, I DARE YA! Try and find ONE that doesn't apply to you.
posted on August 14, 2005 06:17:05 PM new
Poor old linda. She probably didn't even know that she was a fascist until I defined the term for her. I believe that she has agreed with all of the fourteen characteristics of Fascism on the previous page...at one time or another. Now she is trying to call me a Communist. LOL!
Bush has led so many poor souls astray with the skillful use of propaganda. Goebbels would be proud of the Bushies.
posted on August 14, 2005 06:29:31 PM new
I think LindaTwelveK is very ignorant of any political terms or she would know she's a fascist and Helen is most certainly NOT a communist.
But LindaTwelveK has shown her all around ignorance and lack of education in so many fields....like history , for one.
Calling someone a communist is what neocons do when backed into a corner and faced with the truth...it's automatic, like a child having a tantrum and throwing it's food on the floor.
EDITED TO ADD:
She also disappears when there's more than one Liberal on here at a time
posted on August 14, 2005 07:55:29 PM new
Poor old Linda_K looks to be loosing it again. Poor Old Linda_K isn't dancing in the streets any longer. BOY-O-BOY what a difference in Linda_K's personally in just a couple months.
Whats the matter old girl are you getting that sinking feeling?
posted on August 14, 2005 08:08:46 PM new
Not at all peepa. Because MY guy is going to remain President for 3 years and 4 months. THAT alone gives me reason to be thankful.
While you anti-Bush haters will be whining and crying and sniveling ALL that WHOLE time.....
...and I can just sit here and watch you spend each and every one of those 3 years and 4 months having your typical liberal hissy fits.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
And why the American Voters chose to RE-elect President Bush to four more years. YES!!!
[ edited by Linda_K on Aug 14, 2005 08:14 PM ]
posted on August 14, 2005 08:16:29 PM new
""" THAT alone gives me my to be thankful for.""
Well, despite the bad wording I know what you mean and it does prove your ignorance...you don't care what bush does or what happens to America...all you care about is gloating because your dictator bush won an election.
How you must hate America !
Now I want to give a big ol' LindaTwelveK dramatic sigh.........
posted on August 14, 2005 08:34:50 PM new
Linda_K calls a LAME DUCK a President. Sure Linda_K sure. Linda_K you of all people know the difference between a Lame Duck and a real President and so doesn't nearly 2/3 of the American people.
BTW since I am so uninformed I can't wait to become better informed by your "good news" posts. Linda_K "bring them on".
I even learned something just today about your mentor Karl Rove. You know the guy you learned all your key words from on how to describe democrats. All along I thought he spelled his name Carl not Karl.
posted on August 14, 2005 09:06:41 PM new
peepa....your statements continue to show your own ignorance.
No lame duck in this WH....three big bills that he wanted passed ...have passed very recently.
And karl rove, MY mentor.....see more proof of stupidity coming from your corner.
get a grip man....you make a fool of yourself with each and every post you make. You haven't been right YET about any of your 'predictions'. One would think by now...you'd get a clue....but you're still clueless.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." --Ann Coulter
And why the American Voters chose to RE-elect President Bush to four more years. YES!!!
[ edited by Linda_K on Aug 14, 2005 09:08 PM ]
posted on August 15, 2005 02:27:00 AM new
Linda_K, "I am staying the course". I don't like people with your mindset. I find people like you that lie and twist the truth repulsive. I will slam and expose your lies and twisted truths every chance I get.
You use Karl Rove's and the G.O.P. key words in describing liberals or anyone that exposes your lies and twisted truths like a parrot.
When Bush got re-elected and the republicans took control of both houses. I predicted this country would wind up in a big mess under their leadership. I also predicted the working and middle would get poorer while the rich would get richer.
Today almost 2/3 of the American people believe the same way.
Sorry old girl your CON and LIES as in the wacko right wing conservative mindset isn't working any longer. Leaders and people of your mindset had your chance and have failed the majority in America.
posted on August 15, 2005 08:16:16 AM new
Thanks Helenjw, but your the Dragon Slayer not me. You and several others have a much better way with words than I do. Almost every time Linda_K posts her LIES,TWISTED TRUTHS AND CONS. You and several others expose her for the OLD WINDBAG LIAR she is.
Its true in just a few months Linda_K has gone from dancing in the streets to 100% full time trying fruitlessly to defend Bush's failures.
Lately Linda_K has a tag team partner dblfogger9. When together they just pass a whole lot of warm smelly gas. Between the 2 of them they pass enough gas to fuel a small city.
posted on August 16, 2005 07:08:40 AM new
More Bad News.
U.S. Struggling to Get Soldiers Updated Armor
By Michael Moss
Aug.14, 2005 NYT
For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents.
The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon's procurement system.
The effort to replace the armor began in May 2004, just months after the Pentagon finished supplying troops with the original plates - a process also plagued by delays. The officials disclosed the new armor effort Wednesday after questioning by The New York Times, and acknowledged that it would take several more months or longer to complete.
Citing security concerns, the officials declined to say exactly how many more of the stronger plates were needed, or how much armor had already been shipped to Iraq.
"We are working as fast as we can to complete it as soon as we can," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sorenson, the Army's deputy for acquisition and systems management, said Wednesday in an interview at the Pentagon.
While much of the focus on casualties in Iraq has been on soldiers killed by explosive devices aimed at vehicles, body armor remains critical to the military's goals in Iraq. Gunfire has killed at least 325 troops, about half the number killed by bombs, according to the Pentagon.
Among the problems contributing to the delays in getting the stronger body armor, the Pentagon is relying on a cottage industry of small armor makers with limited production capacity. In addition, each company must independently come up with its own design for the plates, which then undergo military testing. Just four vendors have begun making the enhanced armor, according to military and industry officials. Two more companies are expected to receive contracts by next month, while 20 or more others have plates that are still being tested.
An important material that strengthens the ceramic plates also remains in short supply despite a federal initiative aimed at prodding private industry into meeting the growing demand, military officials said.
"Nobody is happy we haven't been able to do it faster," Maj. Gen. William D. Catto, head of the Marine Corps Systems Command, said Wednesday in the interview.
"If I had the capability, I'd like to see everybody that needs enhanced SAPI to have it and at the rate we have now, we're going to have months before we get the kind of aggregate numbers we want to have," General Catto said, referring to the thicker plates, known as the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert. "That's just a fact of life because of the raw materials paucity and the industrial base."
Throughout the war, the military's procurement system has struggled to stay ahead of the insurgency. Most notably, efforts by the Defense Department to add armor to the Humvee - a vehicle never intended for combat - often have been undermined by the insurgents' relentless ability to build more powerful bombs.
Military officials say they have kept the effort to supply troops with the stronger body armor quiet to avoid alerting the insurgency, which they say is adept at mining news media reports for any evidence of weaknesses in the American force. At the request of the Pentagon, The Times has omitted from this article details that would expose vulnerabilities in the original armor and the types of munitions that the original plates cannot repel.
Upgrading the plates for American troops in Iraq will cost at least $160 million, according to industry estimates.
Body armor arose as an issue in Iraq shortly after the invasion in March 2003, when insurgents began attacking American troops who had been given only vests and not bullet-resistant plates. The Army had planned to give the plates only to frontline soldiers. Officials now concede that they underestimated the insurgency's strength and commitment to fighting a war in which there are no back lines.
The ensuing scramble to produce more plates was marred by a series of missteps in which the Pentagon gave one contract to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He was allowed to struggle with production for a year before he gave up. An outdated delivery plan slowed the arrival of plates that were made. In all, the war was 10 months old before every soldier in Iraq had plates in late January 2004.
Four months later, the Pentagon quietly issued a solicitation for the enhanced plates that would resist stronger attacks. At the same time, it worked to make improvements to the vests, including adding shoulder and side protection.
Pentagon officials said they had been hampered in their efforts by the need to make the armor as light as possible.
"You can trace this back to the early centuries ago when they started wearing body armor to the point they couldn't get on the horse," General Sorenson said. "We are doing the same sort of thing. You can only put so much armor on a soldier to the point where they can't move."
The new enhanced SAPI plates weigh about one pound more than the original plates, bringing the total body armor system with vest to about 18 pounds, military officials said.
Among the first soldiers to use the stronger armor were the military's special forces, who are known to cut the handles off their toothbrushes to reduce the weight of their packs.
Shortly after the Iraq war began, insurgents began attacking American soldiers engaged in stationary tasks like directing traffic or less arduous combat operations.
Cpl. Nicholas Roberts, 23, a marine from Colorado, was wounded last December in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, when his armor plates failed to deflect an insurgent's attack. He just started walking again this summer after nine operations. In wearing the armor, he said, "you know your risks, that it's not going to stop everything."
"Unfortunately," he added, when told about the enhanced plates, "they didn't have that when I was in."
Among the first companies to begin making enhanced SAPI for the military was Simula, a safety technology company based in Phoenix, military contracting records show. It was awarded a contract in August 2004, and received a new $12 million order this month.
Armor Holdings, a company based in Jacksonville, Fla., that owns Simula, has an exclusive contract to armor the military's Humvees. The company stirred some concern in the Pentagon in January when it balked at selling its legal rights to the Humvee armor, which the military wanted so it could involve additional manufacturers.
Col. Bruce D. Jette, who directed a special unit at the Pentagon known as the Rapid Equipping Force until he retired last fall, said the military's reliance on small companies to make body armor succeeded in spurring innovation. But in failing to acquire the rights to those designs, the military may be passing up an opportunity to increase production, he added.
Pentagon officials said the pending addition of two more vendors to the four that are now producing enhanced SAPI would increase production to 25,000 sets of the plates a month from 20,000. Each vest requires two plates. Worldwide, the Army would need nearly 2 million plates to supply all 996,000 troops using body armor with the enhanced plates.
Industry officials say they are charging the military roughly $600 each for enhanced SAPI plates, compared with $400 for the original plate.
Cercom, an advanced materials company based in Vista, Calif., began making enhanced plates for the Pentagon this summer and said it was working round the clock to fill its part of the military order. To go even faster, Richard J. Palicka, Cercom's president, said it would "need additional furnace capacity and that's expensive."
But industry and military officials say production is also constrained by a lingering shortage of an advanced fiber used to make the plates.
The material is made by only two companies, Honeywell and DSM, a Dutch concern. DSM, which built a new plant in Greenville, N.C., last year at the military's urging, and Honeywell say they are continuing to step up production. DSM said it planned to add another production line next year.
Mike Ryan, a Honeywell executive, said his company was meeting the demand for its version of this material, known as Spectra Shield, until just last month when orders from plate makers surged. "There is a learning curve here that we are trying to come up," Mr. Ryan said.
The military is still trying to assess just how well body armor is working. Pentagon officials said Wednesday during the interview that numerous lives had been saved. To emphasize the point, they played a video taken recently by an Iraqi insurgent in which an American soldier - knocked down by a bullet striking his vest - got back on his feet unharmed and took cover.
The Armed Forces Medical Examiner's Office which has undertaken a number of initiatives in the Iraq war to reduce casualties, has urged the Pentagon to have field commanders return the body armor of slain soldiers so it can be examined along with their wounds. Earlier in the war, the military medical corps helped spur improvements in eye protection and set off an examination of the Army's new helmet by studying wound patterns.
But in interviews this spring, the Medical Examiner's Office said it was receiving only about 10 percent of the vests worn by slain soldiers, too few to get a complete picture of the armor's performance.
Meanwhile, a burst of research is under way to develop even stronger body armor, though some earlier efforts appear to have slipped through the cracks. At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stephen D. Nunn said his group formulated a polymer that can be added to the ceramic plates to increase their strength. "Our material and assembly seems to perform better than anything else I've read about," he said.
But the group's contract was limited to fortifying helicopters. When that project ended in 2001, there was no money to extend the work to body armor, Mr. Nunn said.
At the behest of the military, researchers are also studying how to make body armor more resistant to explosive devices. In a recent technical paper, one scientist, Thomas Friend, said that more work needed to be done on analyzing the shock waves produced by these blasts and how they interact with the body and the armor.
Some armor, he warned, could aggravate the damage from blasts by twisting the waves as they pass through the body.
posted on August 17, 2005 08:12:15 AM new
3 Car Bombings Kill 43, Wound 89 in Iraq
Updated 10:46 AM ET August 17, 2005
By ANTONIO CASTANEDA
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Three car bombs exploded near a bus station and hospital in Baghdad Wednesday, killing at least 43 people and wounding 89 in the deadliest attacks in the capital in weeks, police said. Survivors searched charred buses and cars for signs of relatives.
The violence came as Iraq's leaders resumed negotiations on a draft of a new constitution, a charter they hope will bring stability and help end the insurgency. The document was to be finished Monday, but the deadline was extended one week.
A suicide car bomber targeting policemen detonated his vehicle outside the Nahda bus station in central Baghdad, one of the city's major transit points, the U.S. military said.
A second car exploded in the open-air station's parking lot near buses that carry passengers to Amarah and Basra, Shiite-dominated cities in southern Iraq, police Capt. Nabil Abdul-Qader said.
About 30 minutes later, a suicide bomber exploded his vehicle near the Kindi Hospital as many of the wounded were arriving for treatment, police said. It was unclear if the hospital was targeted in the blast.
Abdul-Qader said 43 people died and 85 were wounded in the attacks.
It was the deadliest series of single-day suicide bombings in Baghdad in weeks, although suicide attacks with far lower death tolls occur here regularly.
Twenty-five people died in a suicide blast July 10 at an army recruiting center in Baghdad. On July 13 a car bomb in Baghdad killed 27 people, 18 of them teenagers or children and one American soldier.
Also, two U.S. soldiers were killed, the military said Wednesday. One was killed Tuesday when a roadside bomb exploded near his patrol in southwest Baghdad and another was killed in an insurgent attack in northern Iraq.
The latest attacks occurred shortly before Iraqi leaders started a meeting Wednesday to try to finish the new constitution. A Shiite negotiator, Khalid al-Attiyah, said talks were going so well that the document might be ready for parliament Wednesday.
The blasts left several mutilated bodies strewn across the station parking lot and a large plume of black smoke visible throughout the capital as many traveled to work in the morning. Over a dozen cars and at least two buses were destroyed, leaving only rows of seat frames inside a bare metal hull.
Several weeping men hugged beside a young boy inside the open-air terminal. One man searched through the charred buses for signs of his brother and cousin who were both at the station in the morning.
Elsewhere, six new Iraqi soldier recruits were killed execution-style after gunmen stopped their minibus near Hawija, 30 miles southwest of Kirkuk, Iraqi Army Brig. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin said. The killed Iraqis were traveling to a training camp in Kirkuk.
One of the stumbling blocks in the constitution debate was Kurdish demands for self-determination, which would give them the right to secede.
On Tuesday, Kurdish leaders said they had no plans to break away from Iraq even through they wanted the right enshrined in the constitution.
"There are rumors that the Kurds want to secede, but they are for unity," President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, told reporters Tuesday. He said he expected the constitution to be finished before the deadline.
Other Kurds defended their self-determination demand, although they insisted they have no plans to secede.
Iraqi leaders expressed confidence on Tuesday that they would overcome differences over remaining issues by the new deadline. If no agreement can be reached this time, the interim constitution requires that parliament be dissolved.
Different groups gave conflicting information on what had been resolved and what stood in the way of a deal.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, said the unresolved issues were federalism, the election law and the formula for distributing revenue from oil and other natural resources. Kurdish leaders said they objected to a proposal to grant special legal status to the Shiite clerical hierarchy in Najaf.
Sunni Arab negotiator Mohammed Abed-Rabbou said "the most important point is federalism," underscoring Sunni concerns that a constitution that grants regional autonomy could eventually divide the country.
Al-Jaafari said disagreements were largely over details and he expressed confidence that Iraq's constitution could be finished within a week.
"I hope that we will not need another extension. The pending points do not need too much time and God willing we will finish it on time," he said Tuesday.
The delay was an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which insisted that the original deadline be met to maintain political momentum and blunt Iraq's deadly insurgency.
If agreement on a constitution is reached, Iraqis will vote around Oct. 15 to accept or reject the charter, leading to more elections in December for the country's first fully constitutional government since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
