JosephH

Enough to have the problem we're discussing - it's a big number and extends up to the Walmarts.

I'm sorry that you don't really have a response but that just shows your lack of creativity to me. No, that is the response, again your comment was either completely naive or incredibly stupid, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt at that, given this next beauty of a statement: Attempting to shut down the supply side of illegal immigration will work exactly as effectively as it has in the 'drug war', which is to say it will never, ever work. The only thing a wall will do is make us look like moronic incompetents and be an instant environmental disaster. Again, a barrier or wall is exactly the wrong solution. Unavoidable, punitive fines for each instance and every of hiring an illegal immigrant is the only - read that again - the only way to halt the problem. Illegal immigrants are not the problem - illegal employers are. Anyone who advocates going after any other target is either an employer of illegal aliens or allowed their victimal, white, male, latent racists buttons to be pushed yet again by the Rovian elements of the right. At some point you'd think the half of the public that allows allow those fear-based buttons to get pushed like so many rabbits would someday wake up and realize that illegal immigration, gay marriage, and abortion are really code words for 'let me suspend your rights, curtail your freedoms, and drain your bank account' while you are cluelessly thumping away with indignation...

Are you dense? Which part of the concept of demand completely eludes you? No employers > no work > no pay > no illegal immigration. It isn't rocket science - it's holding the true criminals involved in this issue responsible for their actions. Excuse me, but this statement is completely clueless. There is no physical barrier you can erect at the border which would stop illegal immigration while the demand remains unabated. In fact, the fact, any time a 'wall' is being built anywhere in the world a gross failure at of personal responsibility on a grand scale is taking place on the part of those building it. And this is too naive to merit a response....

Again, the problem isn't the workers - it's the employers. If one carried all the rightwing's irrational, patriotic bullshit to it's logical conclusion you would have to say the employers are traitors. The employers are the ones imposing on our education and health system by shifting labor costs off of themselves where they rightfully belong and onto us - the U.S. taxpayers. Hysterical rhetoric from the right is designed to keep the focus on the illegal aliens and off the employers and corporations who are the ones rapaciously screwing us at every turn.

- SD800 (better than the SD900 for climbing shots) - LowePro Revo 10 pouch case - Go to a locksmith and get one of those retractable deals to clip to something on you.

The South and West faces of Beacon are closed February 1st - July 15. The climber's Trail down to the South face is closed as well. The East face is closed permanently. The NW face is open.

Nope, got put to bed on the 1st...

Give a shout if you guys get together for a beer in town at all, I'll be down helping a friend move...

A president should have the power to deploy 20k troops and 10k support personnel for six months anywhere against a single threat on their own and be able to do so against more than one threat simultaneously. But one more day or one more body should require a formal declaration of war and the immediate imposition of the draft and a 10% federal VAT on all goods and services until there is a formal cessation of hostilities.

I have a single Pika a friend left and asked me to sell. I believe it has a fly...

K, dude, be careful man, you've said I agree with...

The whole issue is an emotionally-charged one that, because of that, is used by the right exactly as gay marriage - to incite people. A little reality check is in order, however, 'illegal immigration' is not a big problem and just those words imply the problem is with the Mexicans seeking work and a better life. That is just plain wrong as is the title of this thread. The real 'Illegals' in this saga are the employers and the real label we should be using for this problem is 'illegal employment'. But the problem with the term 'illegal employers', particularly for the right, is that it demands that we - U.S. citizens - take responsibility for our own actions. God forbid that should ever happen. Fine U.S. employers $2,000 per day per 'illegal employee' and enforce it, and there would be no 'Illegals ' problem. Anyone with a shred of common sense who looks at this issue and doesn't recognize it as one of us taking responsibility for our own actions and their consequences is kidding themselves - there is no 'illegal alien' problem and it isn't a problem with 'them', it's a problem with 'us'. If you think you're getting screwed by an 'illegal alien' directly or indirectly then you're really saying you're getting screwed by a fellow citizen and employer who is avoiding paying the true costs of employing labor by shifting the burden of those costs on to their local, state, and federal gov't and hence to you. They are the theives and the problem. And this is similar to the outsourcing and offshoring issues - the problem isn't 'the Chinese' or 'the Indians' it's with the corporations that send the work out of the country and us wanting to buy goods cheaply at Walmart.

Since you ask, 'Satan' is as infantile a concept as the 'tooth fairy' except of course, people don't use the 'tooth fairy' as an excuse to demonize and murder people.

It's really been a sad and remarkable transformation of the right in the past few years. In a stroke they've completely swept aside almost every tenant of traditional conservatism - small gov't, fiscal conservatism, no nation building, gov't out of our lives, right to privacy - you name it and it's been thrown under the train by the conjoined nightmare of corporate pirates and their willing and witless tools - the religious right and evangelical base. Every erosion of privacy and civil rights promulgated by this administration is one that would have had Eisenhower himself marching in the street - as it is he's turning in his grave.

That's the plan or so I hear - someone should let Jim know...

Excuse me - we were all at 9/11. So far, in six short years, fundamentalist christians have wreaked havoc on every institution within the federal goverment from corrupting the Executive branch, to undermining the constitution, to taking policy from the hands of career experts in all agencies and turning it over to nepotistic administration policy drones in a scene straight out of Stalin's Soviet Union. At every turn science - and particularly health science - is undermined for neanderthal dogma. 'Faith-based initiatives' - please, as code word it is a master stroke, as a policy a tragedy. Privacy - apparently not in a christian society. In five short years christians have done more damage to our Constitution, our government, and our nation than radical islamic terrorists could ever hope to dream of - if anything they've done more to enable and fulfill OBL's dream of destroying our nation and our values than anything his own people could ever have accomplished alone.

Actually, when you total up the disasterously deleterious effects religion has had on our government and country in the past six years alone it's clear that even 'mainstream' evangelical christianity represents a 'clear and present danger' to our nation. I consider fundamentalism the true enemy of freedom and regard christian fundamentalists within our borders more of a threat than radical islam outside them. That, anyway, is the source of my particular 'discomfort'.

No shit, as a hunter so did I, my point exactly - but my lot was loading a 5" gun, where you couldn't even see outside the smoking box you were in. We were loading shells and powders made in 1938 that were blowing up mounts right and left. We facelessly killed any number of civilians over that year primarily due to bad targeting by our gunnery officers. In '72 we were never in the 'rear' - again, we were always within three miles of the North Vietnamese beach and usually .25-.5 miles off the beach and taking mortar rounds and light arms fire half the time. In the '72 there was damn little of that type of photography going, though I did manage to take the last picture of Adm. Robinson alive the day before he and the only other Adm. killed in the war both died when their helo missed the landing and tipped into the fantail just below our helo pad one night in rough seas. The rotor turned to shrapnel almost killing about fourteen us doing the op outright had we not dived behind the missile ejectors or overboard. We lost a few folks from the helo and one of us that night who were never recovered given the conditions. In '73 there was nothing but intel briefs. As for the rest of your post - the only draft dodgers and treasonous felons so far have been inhabiting the Whitehouse, the Executive Mansion, and the Pentagon. The military incompetence of everyone involved has been beyond belief. This crew of felons has relentlessly screwed the military at every turn not to mention dismantling the Guard and Reserve system. But hey, maybe you're another merc, I mean contractor, making out big time and couldn't really give a fuck... ============================================================= The incompetent cheerleaders for war (basically the entire right...) ============================================================= George W. Bush -- family connections to get into the Air National Guard then "deserted" his post for two years. None of George W. Bush's three brothers, Jeb, Marvin, or Neil served. Dick Cheney -- sought graduate school deferment, (too smart to die). Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor. Kenneth Starr : sought deferment (for psoriasis). Ted Olson, (Starr's assistand, and since Solictor General) Bill Bennett : sought graduate school deferment, (too smart to die). Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base. Karl Rove: did not serve. Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve. Richard Perle: did not serve. Douglas Feith: did not serve. Eliot Abrams: did not serve. Ari Fleischer: did not serve. Andrew Card: did not serve. Ken Adelman: did not serve. Don Evans: did not serve. Michael Ledeen: did not serve. Elliott Abrams: did not serve. John Bolton: did not serve. Rudy Giuliani: did not serve. George Pataki: did not serve. Kenneth Starr: did not serve. John G. Roberts, Jr.: did not serve. Samuel Alito: did not serve. Antonin Scalia: did not serve. Clarence Thomas: did not serve. Trent Lott : avoided the draft, did not serve. Bill Frist: did not serve. John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments, to teach business. Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee" He defeated tripelegic Democratic war hero Max Cleland by questioning his patriotism! Don Nickles: did not serve. Mitch McConnell: did not serve. Rick Santorum: did not serve. Richard Shelby: did not serve. Phil Gramm: did not serve. Spencer Abraham: did not serve. Jon Kyl: did not serve. John Engler: did not serve. Newt Gingrich -- sought graduate school deferment, (too smart to die). Dick Armey - avoided the draft, did not serve. Tom Delay - avoided the draft, did not serve. John A. Boehner - did not serve. Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," but played in NFL for 8 years. Roy Blunt: did not serve. Bob Ney: did not serve. David Dreier: did not serve. Tim Hutchison: did not serve. Christopher Cox: did not serve. Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve. John M. McHugh: did not serve. JC Watts: did not serve. Vin Weber: did not serve. Bob Barr: did not serve. Mark Souder: did not serve. Walter Jones: did not serve. Katherine Harris: did not serve. . Rush Limbaugh -- sought deferment (because of a cyst on his tail end). George Will -- sought graduate school deferment, (too smart to die). Pat Buchanan -- sought deferment (for bad knee). Pat Robertson -- his US Senator father got him out of Korea as soon as the shooting began. John Wayne -- sought deferment (to further acting career). Sean Hannity: did not serve. Bill O'Reilly: did not serve. Chris Matthews: did not serve. Matt Drudge: did not serve. Steve Forbes: did not serve. Tony Snow: did not serve. Michael "Savage" Weiner: did not serve. Brit Hume: did not serve. Roger Ailes: did not serve. Paul Gigot: did not serve. Bill Kristol: did not serve. Ralph Reed: did not serve. Michael Medved: did not serve. Charlie Daniels: did not serve. Anne Coulter: did not serve. Jerry Falwell: did not serve. Alan Keyes : did not serve. - The lot are an embarassment to everyone who is or has served for us from Desert Storm on...

Right, if that's your read on '72 you're pretty fucking stupid. I grew up running loose and hunting more or less every day and I'd have traded what I did, the infested ratholes, and the total lack of personal control over my fate it entailed, for a grunt role on the ground in-country in the South any day of the week. You have no idea how many chopper crews or gun crews we lost that year. How many [hostile] flights over North Vietnam did you pull? I logged a bunch of them and did over four hundred shore bombardments in the turret in a year-long, 6-on-6-off rotation at a time when 5" mounts were going off like so much popcorn. I spent the entire year in a band from two miles off shore to four miles onshore from the Quang Tri to north to Haiphong - fuck you asshole - that second year, I earned it...

Well, once again, not sure whom I'm talking with, but both then now and several times I've related my role. At no point have I ever claimed to be SPECOPS. I was a navy combat photographer. In '72 my main job, most of the time, that year was flying with marine helo pilots into N. Vietnam looking for SAM sites for naval gunfire 'freedom train' runs into the beach at night (not to be confused with the 'Operation Freedom Train' the concurrent naval and AF air strikes). I flew missions from the DMZ to Haiphong and took part in the only raid on Haiphong Harbor. When I wasn't in the helo I was in the 5" turret at nights for the strikes due to a long string of 'personnel problems', or serving Admirals Robinson or Holloway when they were around. In '73 I was assigned off the line to the support the head of the Office Naval Intelligence / Pacific Fleet and served him personally producing his briefings to the combined Pacwest taskgroup - a daily briefing to a combined senior Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force staffs (head of Pacfleet and a general from each of the other services onboard the USS Blue Ridge, the pac intel/command ship). I saw the same daily intel the senior staffs saw from the DIA, CIA, NSA, and all the other defense intel agencies as well as the Brits, Japanese, Korean, and a smattering of French intel. If the senior combined staff saw it, I saw it. The ONI commander for some reason took a liking to me and sometimes rehearsed his briefs with me - go figure. Again, never was or claimed to be SPECOPS, but I had complete access to what was going on and have a fairly sound understanding of how shit happens - then and now. In particular, little ditties like General Van Riper and the 2002 Millenium Challenge tell me little at all has changed at the command / staff levels relative to how things get played out.

As someone who has had a rack ripped off all I can say is way to go tvashtarkatena!!!

Exactly what is it you're asking now or then?

So, are you actually attempting to claim there was a shred of legitimacy around Fieth's or the OoSP's activities? Because if that's the case, Dorothy, you really need to click those red heels three times. It's exactly the sort of activities the right used to warn about before they all rolled over into government stooges...

I use a Metolius 'Big Wall Gear Sling' all the time and the LowePro Revo 10 case attaches to the sholder strap great. I attach the key retractor dealy just below that and the camera is right there when I need it and I can just drop it if I ever have to (I have). The SD800 is a pretty fabulous unit and the wide angle setting is a nice extra that I use a lot.

Rumsfeld set Feith and Co. up and created the "Office of Special Plans" specifically to 'wash' and manufacture intelligence after career DIA and CIA officers refused to do it for him...