Oil-Driven Recession Threatens

OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Crude Shock

Oil-Driven Recession Threatens

By PAUL KRUGMAN

o far, the current world oil crunch doesn't look at all like the crises of 1973 or 1979. That's why it's so scary.

The oil crises of the 1970's began with big supply disruptions: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war and the 1979 Iranian revolution. This time, despite the chaos in Iraq, nothing comparable has happened — yet. Nonetheless, because of rising demand that is led by soaring Chinese consumption, the world oil market is already stretched tight as a drum, and crude oil prices are $12 a barrel higher than they were a year ago. What if something really does go wrong?

Let me put it a bit differently: the last time oil prices were this high, on the eve of the 1991 gulf war, there was a lot of spare capacity in the world, so there was room to cope with a major supply disruption if it happened. This time there isn't.

The International Energy Agency estimates the world's spare oil production capacity at about 2.5 million barrels per day, almost all of it in the Persian Gulf region. It also predicts that global oil demand in 2004 will be, on average, 2 million barrels per day higher than in 2003. Now imagine what will happen if there are more successful insurgent attacks on Iraqi pipelines, or, perish the thought, instability in Saudi Arabia. In fact, even without a supply disruption, it's hard to see where the oil will come from to meet the growing demand.

But wait: basic economics says that markets deal handily with excesses of demand over supply. Prices rise, producers have an incentive to produce more while consumers have an incentive to consume less, and the market comes back into balance. Won't that happen with oil?

Yes, it will. The question is how long it will take, and how high prices will go in the meantime.

To see the problem, think about gasoline. Sustained high gasoline prices lead to more fuel-efficient cars: by 1990 the average American vehicle got 40 percent more miles per gallon than in 1973. But replacing old cars with new takes years. In their initial response to a shortfall in the gasoline supply, people must save gas by driving less, something they do only in the face of very, very high prices. So very, very high prices are what we'll get.

Increasing production capacity takes even longer than replacing old cars. Also, major new discoveries of oil have become increasingly rare (although in my last column on the subject, I forgot about two large fields in Kazakhstan, one discovered in 1979, the second in 2000).

Petroleum engineers continue to squeeze more oil out of known fields, but a repeat of the post-1973 experience, in which there was a big increase in non-OPEC production, seems unlikely.

So oil prices will stay high, and may go higher even in the absence of more bad news from the Middle East. And with more bad news, we'll be looking at a real crisis — one that could do a lot of economic damage. Each $10 per barrel increase in crude prices is like a $70 billion tax increase on American consumers, levied through inflation. The spurt in producer prices last month was a taste of what will happen if prices stay high. By the way, after the 1979 Iranian revolution world prices went to about $60 per barrel in today's prices.

Could an oil shock actually lead to 1970's-style stagflation — a combination of inflation and rising unemployment? Well, there are several comfort factors, reasons we're less vulnerable now than a generation ago. Despite the rise of the S.U.V., the U.S. consumes only about half as much oil per dollar of real G.D.P. as it did in 1973. Also, in the 1970's the economy was already primed for inflation: given the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in labor contracts and the experience of past inflation, oil price increases rapidly fed into a wage-price spiral. That's less likely to happen today.

Still, if there is a major supply disruption, the world will have to get by with less oil, and the only way that can happen in the short run is if there is a world economic slowdown. An oil-driven recession does not look at all far-fetched.

It is, all in all, an awkward time to be pursuing a foreign policy that promises a radical transformation of the Middle East — let alone to be botching the job so completely. source...

In a recent New York Times Magazine cover story about animal rights, journalist Michael Pollan reported that 51 percent of Americans believe that "primates are entitled to the same rights as human children." It was a surprising finding, but one that Pollan simply attributed to a "recent Zogby Poll." When Pollan's article came out, you can only imagine the celebration at the Doris Day Animal League, a group dedicated to establishing legal rights for chimpanzees. The league's role in commissioning the survey went entirely unmentioned in the Times story. By hiring the renowned pollster John Zogby, the group had essentially purchased an objective fact, one that entered into the conventional wisdom via the nation's leading Sunday magazine.

Whomever you blame for this small propaganda coup, it's hardly unique. Media coverage of polling results often neglects to mention the self-interestedness of the sponsor, and John Zogby is a leading enabler. Today, Zogby International's polling reputation may be second only to that of the hallowed Gallup Organization, which makes having a Zogby Poll extremely desirable for advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Animal rights is a lefty cause, but one recent Zogby Poll conducted for the libertarian Cato Institute found that "two-thirds of likely voters support personal Social Security accounts" -- i.e., partial privatization. Another, conducted in 1997 for the anti-tort group New Yorkers for Civil Justice Reform, found that Empire State citizens "overwhelmingly believe that the cost of lawsuit awards is too high." And a Newsmax.com/Zogby International Poll, conducted for the right-wing Newsmax Web site, found in late 1999 that two-thirds of Americans wanted Congress to consider a second impeachment proceeding against then-President Clinton. It helped that the poll primed respondents with speculative allegations that the president traded nuclear technology to the Chinese in exchange for campaign cash.

What these polls have in common is that they reveal "findings" that their sponsors wish the public to believe as facts. And Zogby's standing as a reputable pollster buys instant credibility.

There's nothing new about dubious surveys: An infamous Roper Poll released in 1992 came to the wild conclusion that 3.7 million Americans had likely been abducted by aliens. And Zogby International isn't the only firm available for advocacy groups, candidates and corporations in need of creatively framed findings and message testing. But among high-profile pollsters, Zogby is unusual in the extent to which he has blended partisan and interest-group polling with credibility-enhancing contracts for media outlets such as Reuters, NBC News, MSNBC, and numerous newspapers and television stations.

As Zogby himself acknowledges, the repute he derives from media polling helps him sell his services to more self-interested clients. The lucky groups end up with the Zogby brand name attached to findings that advance their agendas. "Media organizations should have people who absolutely aren't polling for interest groups," observes Robert Blendon, who directs Harvard University's Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy. Blendon notes that most major media polling conglomerates, such as the ABC News/Washington Post Poll, maintain firewalls between their work and outside interests.

Frequent Zogby collaborator John K. White of The Catholic University of America believes the pollster does his best to divine what the public really thinks, but, as Zogby himself concedes, the ultimate decision on whether to make public a particular poll rests with his clients. By contrast, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press notes that when he was president of the Gallup Organization, clients who sought surveys for public-relations purposes had to release the results no matter what they showed.

Gallup likewise doesn't work for political candidates. In the last election, however, John Zogby brazenly polled for a Democratic opponent to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), paying out of his own pocket because he wanted to provide a "fresh challenge" to the Republican House whip. Zogby also polled for New York's millionaire independent gubernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, declaring in late October, "I'm ready to mortgage my house and predict that Golisano comes in at least second, barring anything unforeseen." Golisano came in third with 14 percent of the vote.

In the past half-decade, meanwhile, numerous Zogby Polls for various special interests have relied on creative phrasing to give the impression of wide public support for the view that the given client is promoting. In response to a question about the wording of the Newsmax.com impeachment survey, Zogby responded, "If we had anything to do with the wording of that question, then I guess I have a problem with it." He telephoned back to add that it was "probably not the best wording, but, I mean, I think it's defensible." Zogby acknowledges that he retains control over question phrasing. Indeed, in the world of interest-group polling, clients often submit proposed questions or concepts, but much of what they are buying is the polling firm's expertise in devising wording that produces results.

Zogby protests that he can't control the misuse of sound survey data by interest groups and incautious journalists. And, in fairness, Zogby is just one link in a chain of misinformation. Any criticism of him is also, inevitably, a criticism of major media organizations whose skeptical faculties, when it comes to polling, are suspended.

The Gullible Media
Indeed, key to Zogby's success is a credulous media, particularly cable news. In the unregulated polling industry, journalists are, by default, the chief arbiters of quality. For years, Zogby has been regularly exalted as "the nation's most accurate pollster," in the words of FOX's Bill O'Reilly -- a distinction Zogby owes to his pinpoint prediction of the 1996 presidential outcome. It doesn't hurt that Zogby is a bright and charming television personality in a polling profession that has its share of geeks.

Because Zogby works for both left and right, it's often assumed that he serves the causes of truth and objectivity. Unlike partisan pollsters, who are known for giving their own parties some padding in surveys, Zogby is generally invited on the air without anyone from the "other side" for balance. "I can't think of any pollster other than Zogby who regularly works for people on both sides and is touted by people on both sides," notes University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. "That's quite an accomplishment. Whether it's good or bad is another question."

In the summer of 2001, journalist Cynthia Cooper alleged on Women's eNews that Zogby had conducted a poll for an "unidentified conservative client" that reached the questionable conclusion that a majority of Americans would support legislation requiring welfare recipients to use birth control in order to be eligible for benefits. Cooper also noted that Zogby's refusal to disclose the poll's sponsor violated the American Association for Public Opinion Research's (AAPOR) code of professional ethics and practices.

Zogby confirms that he did the poll. But he adds, "There is nothing that forces me to reveal [a sponsor's identity]. If I'm issuing that as a Zogby Poll, you know, then I'm fine and willing to take the heat." Zogby also opines, "The credibility is in the numbers, not the sponsorship." In fact, an advice sheet to journalists from the National Council on Public Polls (NCPP) warns otherwise. "You must know who paid for the survey," it reads, "because that tells you -- and your audience -- who thought these topics are important enough to spend money finding out what people think. This is central to the whole issue of why the poll was done."

Yet Zogby is right about his freedom from regulation; he is not compelled to reveal his sponsors. Because industry self-regulation is weak, self-interested polling is often mislabeled, and the media seem not to care.

Look more closely at the Doris Day Animal League survey. The New York Times Magazine report that 51 percent of Americans think "primates are entitled to the same rights as human children" goes far beyond anything in the actual poll. First, the poll didn't ask about primates -- a category including anything from pygmy mouse lemurs to gorillas -- but about chimpanzees. Second, the actual question gave respondents four options to choose from: In brief, they could say that chimps ought to be treated "like property," "similar to children," "the same as adults" or "not sure." Given this particular set of choices, option two was the obvious pick -- almost as if respondents were steered toward it. And after 51 percent had chosen "similar to children," the Zogby survey inexplicably translated "similar" into "the same" in its conclusions -- a very big difference. The Doris Day Animal League then reported this in its press materials.

Organizations such as the NCPP and the AAPOR have guidelines and standards stressing openness, balanced questions, transparency and so forth. But as self-regulators, they've rarely censured individual pollsters. One of the exceptions is Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who was reprimanded by the AAPOR in 1997 because he "repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on public attitudes about the Republicans' 'Contract with America.'" The AAPOR, however, has not taken on Zogby.

It wasn't always clear that John Zogby would end up a pollster: For a while he was a consumer activist in his hometown of Utica, N.Y., and at one point even ran for mayor. In the early 1980s, he was heavily involved, along with his brother James Zogby, in Arab-American political activism. But since the founding of his company in 1984, Zogby, a second generation Lebanese American, has become a dominant figure in the polling industry. Today no one doubts Zogby's political insightfulness, and the fact that he still works from Utica allows him to inject a helpful outside perspective into the cliquish world of Beltway politics.

Yet Zogby is also very much the businessman, one who has seen his firm grow steadily over the past several years into an outfit with some 500 full- and part-time employees. Roughly two-thirds of the 300 to 500 polling projects conducted each year by Zogby International are corporate or private-sector work; business clients run the gamut, from Coca-Cola to Philip Morris to Microsoft. Such corporate contracts, of course, tend to be the most lucrative in the polling business.

To a significant extent, the entire edifice rests upon Zogby's well-remembered success in the 1996 presidential race between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. "All hail Zogby, the pollster who conquered the 1996 election," wrote Washington Post pollster Richard Morin after the results came in. Zogby had forecast an 8.1 percent Clinton margin, and the actual margin was 8.4 percent. Most of Zogby's media-polling contracts date from 1996 and afterward. It didn't hurt that he was also quite accurate in the 2000 presidential contest. (Not that presidential races are necessarily the best way of judging pollster accuracy: By the end, most polls are within a few points of one another.)

Zogby does have has his detractors among the polling fraternity. "The pollsters have a view of Zogby that doesn't seem to be shared by the news organizations," observes Warren Mitofsky, who sits on the polling review board of the NCPP. Zogby's performance deteriorated somewhat in the 2002 elections (which he says prompted an internal audit). According to an NCPP postmortem, Zogby got five races wrong out of 17 polled on a nonpartisan basis. His final Colorado Senate poll, for instance, put Democratic challenger Tom Strickland ahead of Republican incumbent Wayne Allard by a margin of 49 percent to 44 percent. (Allard actually won with 51 percent to Strickland's 45 percent.) Following the election, Zogby put out a mea culpa comparing his firm to the New York Yankees, which despite failing to win the 2002 World Series was still "the best team in baseball."

Moving Right
Zogby describes his personal political history as "very left Democrat." His brother James, head of the Arab American Institute, was an adviser to Al Gore's presidential campaign. Yet 1996 helped establish John Zogby as a favorite pollster with the political right. This crossover potential has allowed him to work for groups from the Club for Growth to the National Environmental Trust while still being labeled objective by the media.

To see how Zogby earned his cachet with conservatives, consider the context of the 1996 elections. The year 1996 was a watershed one for polling because many mainstream media organizations, including the CBS News/New York Times Poll, significantly overstated Clinton's lead, predicting a double-digit victory. Following the election, Everett Carll Ladd Jr., director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, even wrote an influential article for The Chronicle of Higher Education (reprinted in The Wall Street Journal) titled, "The Election Polls: An American Waterloo." Ladd called the polling "so flawed that the entire enterprise should be reviewed by a blue-ribbon panel of experts." Though much overstated, Ladd's scathing critique -- especially its Wall Street Journal version -- fed into a widespread sense of disillusionment with polling among political conservatives. Republicans, argued Ladd, view polls as tools of the liberal media and are less likely to respond to them, creating a pro-Democrat bias of precisely the sort that plagued the 1996 election.

Into this breach stepped Zogby. Throughout the 1996 election season, his polls had shown a far closer race than others' had. Critics had expressed disbelief but he had been vindicated by the final election result. Zogby claimed to remedy the perceived problem of Democratic bias by weighting his data according to a previously determined distribution of party affiliation: 34.5 percent Democrats, 34 percent Republicans. This somewhat subjective approach gives some academic public-opinion specialists serious heartburn. As the University of Michigan political scientist Michael Traugott explains, "There's no known distribution of party identification in the sense that we think of a known distribution of sex or race. All we know comes from other survey data, so it has to be an estimate by definition."

Even if all of Zogby's techniques couldn't be taught in a university course, that critique seemed irrelevant after he called the election correctly. By February 1998, Zogby had been asked by Rush Limbaugh to do a poll on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, one that, by emphasizing moral questions, would differ from surveys showing widespread support for the president in the face of Kenneth Starr's inquiries. Zogby obliged. The five-question poll opened with the following: "Suppose you are ready to hire a candidate who is well-qualified for the job, but then you find out that they like to have consensual sex with subordinates. Still hire them?"

Another question asked whether it was "immoral" for a U.S. president to have "consensual sex with a 21-yr-old intern." Sure enough, two-thirds of respondents did indeed consider it immoral. Of course, their only other option was that such behavior was "acceptable," something even Clinton's defenders probably didn't agree with.

The Prospect's reviewer of the Limbaugh poll, Cornell University communications professor Dietram Scheufele, notes, "It is possible that the answers to some of these questions were influenced by questions that were asked before, i.e., by question-order effects." In other words, the premise of the first question could influence responses to subsequent questions. Unless the questions were randomly rotated, this would skew later answers.

Rush Limbaugh bestowed on Zogby the "my favorite pollster" mantle, a kind of calling card for use among political conservatives. By October of 1998, Zogby had reiterated in National Review his findings about the public's opinion of the Lewinsky affair. That year Zogby also did some 60 polls for the Republican Congressional Committee. It's no wonder that many today still think he's a Republican pollster.

More precisely, Zogby is a pollster who works with a lot of Republicans, and in ways that are not always disclosed. Most journalists were probably unaware that some of Zogby's so-called American Values Polls were a joint venture with an organization called Associated Television News, which has a very strong Republican pedigree. Associated Television News is run by Bradley O'Leary, a longtime Republican consultant known for his legendary fundraising abilities and for doing direct mail for the National Rifle Association (NRA). Zogby told the Prospect that O'Leary's role in the surveys wasn't always made apparent but, "Anyone who asked, to the best of my knowledge, was told." However, when columnist Arianna Huffington asked Zogby about the funder of an American Values Poll in April of 2000, according to her column, he responded, "I can't say who it is, but he publishes a newsletter in which he prints the poll's results." Presumably that newsletter would be the O'Leary Report.

The strongly Republican slant of the O'Leary-Zogby surveys is unmistakable. One released in October 2000 found that voters favored George W. Bush over Gore on "20 out of 25" campaign issues. Or, as the Zogby International/Associated Television News press release put it, "Bush Overwhelms Gore On Presidential Campaign's Major Public Policy Issues." That's a pretty convenient finding for a longtime Republican consultant just before a presidential election, which may be why Associated Television News was only identified in the release as an organization that "has covered domestic and international news for 20 years" while Zogby International was described as "a respected, non-partisan polling firm."

The poll contrasted purported candidate positions on different issues, and asked respondents to choose which they favored. Bush-Cheney always came first, Gore-Lieberman second. The poll used loaded language such as "partial-birth abortions" (a term coined by anti-abortionists) and tended to define the Gore-Lieberman position in a politically unappealing way. Cornell's Scheufele also notes that the poll created "false dichotomies" by forcing respondents to answer complicated public-policy questions in a simplistic either-or format. For example:

Unsurprisingly, with this framing, 53 percent approved the Bush-Cheney position to just 34 percent for the Gore-Lieberman position. Here's another: "Bush-Cheney say that tax refunds should be returned to those who were overtaxed. Gore-Lieberman say that tax refunds should be used to fund the federal government." Hanging the albatross of the "federal government" around Gore-Lieberman's neck -- while painting Bush-Cheney as the champion of the "overtaxed" -- sounds more like a Republican National Committee press release than a poll.

When the conservative Washington Times covered one of the polls, neither O'Leary's Republican efforts nor his NRA work was mentioned. On Zogby's Web site, meanwhile, a December 2000 American Values Poll with flattering results for the NRA also made no mention of O'Leary. Other American Values Poll results invariably favored conservatives. When asked to explain the striking Republican slant to these surveys, Zogby said: "Call Karl Rove at the White House and ask what he thinks of me. He'll tell you that he hates my guts."

Cato Calling
Among Zogby's more dubious findings have been his polls on Social Security for the libertarian Cato Institute. Academic research has shown that public opinion on Social Security reform varies greatly depending on the questions asked. If respondents are merely asked whether they think people should have the option of investing part of their Social Security income in private accounts, they approve by a margin of roughly 2-to-1. But the response changes dramatically if people are clearly warned that such privatization could have negative consequences, such as cuts in guaranteed benefits. "As soon as the public is given a sense of what the risks are that we entail to ourselves as individuals by partially privatizing Social Security, people then are against it," explains Fay Lomax Cook, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Zogby insists he asks "balanced questions" on Social Security, but consider his Cato polls. The latest, in the summer of 2002, began with this question: "There are some in government who advocate changing the Social Security system to give younger workers the choice to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through individual accounts similar to IRAs or 401(k) plans. Would you [support or oppose]?"

Sure enough, without any mention of risk, 68.1 percent of the 1,109 likely voters sampled vouched their support. The same Cato poll even managed to use the Enron scandal to demonstrate support for privatization:

Here 63.3 percent chose option B, perhaps because A did such a poor job of framing the argument that business scandals should cause wariness about privatization. Who could object to "more choice and more control"?

Other pollsters have approached Social Security questions more carefully. A December 2002 Los Angeles Times Poll presented the complexities of Social Security privatization and found that 55 percent disapproved of "allowing younger workers to divert their payroll tax money from Social Security into private investment accounts." In the Los Angeles Times Poll, those who approved of partial privatization -- just 38 percent -- were subsequently asked a follow-up question: "Would you still support this proposal if it meant a reduction in the guaranteed benefits retirees receive through the Social Security system?" Thirty-nine percent of the sub-group then said they would be opposed.

Later questions in Zogby's poll made some slight allusion to privatization's risks but no mention of the possibility of a reduction in guaranteed benefits for retirees. Cato relentlessly publicized the finding from the first Zogby question. "Two-Thirds of Likely Voters Support Personal Social Security Accounts," announced Cato's Web site, citing the "respected independent polling firm Zogby International." Zogby protests that he has no control over how his clients and the media cite his results, but he certainly appeared to lend his endorsement by attending Cato press conferences and other events to discuss his findings. United Press International headlined its story about the survey, "Poll says majority wants Soc. Sec. reform," which quoted Zogby on the alleged popularity of the Cato program. "Republicans should wake up and realize they have a winner," Zogby said.

Afterward, supporters of partial privatization had Zogby's poll to cite. In a December 2002 Weekly Standard article arguing that Social Security reform was still very much on President Bush's agenda, Fred Barnes referred to Zogby's Social Security polling as if it came from an objective source rather than a pollster employed by Cato. In a National Review Online article published in September 2002, meanwhile, Stephen Moore and Thomas L. Rhodes of the conservative Club for Growth -- which, as previously mentioned, has also used Zogby's polling -- cited the 68 percent figure. Moore and Rhodes did disclose Cato's role in the poll but didn't mention that Zogby's question omitted possible risks of privatization.

Finally, consider an August 2001 Zogby poll for the conservative Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which advances the theory of "Intelligent Design" (ID), a more subtle successor to Biblical creationism, as a rival to evolution in high-school science classes. The Zogby Poll asked:

An impressive 78 percent of respondents agreed with the statement; 53 percent of them strongly agreed. At first glance this might seem innocuous enough -- who could oppose the teaching of scientific evidence? But how many respondents grasped that "intelligent design of life" is used as a synonym for divine creation? Also, as Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education points out, the premise that scientific evidence supporting ID actually exists is a highly dubious one. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has specifically stated that ID is not science.

As with his polling for Cato, Zogby's Discovery Institute work has been widely cited by ID proponents. In part, Zogby is just testing messages for interest groups, which he reasonably calls a "legitimately defined methodology." But Zogby is also trading on his reputation as a legitimate, media-certified pollster to help groups disseminate inflated claims about public opinion based on inventive wording. In his defense, Zogby says he has refused to work for some clients, including ones who were pro-Confederate Flag and militantly anti-gay, and emphasizes that he ultimately controls question wording. "Apparently this doesn't pass your smell test," he says. "I'm telling you, it passes mine."

Name:

PWT

Message:
Caroline Baum is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.

Taking Some of the `Shock' Out of Oil Prices: Caroline Baum May 12 (Bloomberg) -- It didn't take long. No sooner did job growth disappear as a stumbling block to a self-sustaining economic expansion than oil prices spread a viscous slick on global growth.

``The track record of oil shocks is close to perfect,'' writes Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. ``In the United States, each of the five recessions since the early 1970s has been preceded by an oil shock.''

Not so fast. Revisionist history on the first Gulf War is incorrect. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 1, 1990. Crude oil futures, which settled at a benign $20.69 on July 31, rose to $27.32 by the end of August, pierced $30 in September, and touched $40 briefly in early October before retreating as fast as they had climbed.

Oil prices slid back to $20 a barrel following the onset of hostilities in January 1991, when coalition forces ousted the Iraqi dictator from neighboring Kuwait.

The problem with attributing the 1991 recession to the spike in oil prices is the niggling matter of timing. The recession started in July, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee. The rise in oil prices was neither coincident with nor causative to the July 1990 to March 1991 recession.

Even if you ignore the timing issue, linking recessions to oil prices ignores one not-so-small piece of the puzzle: how the central bank reacts.

The Fed pushed the federal funds rate up from 6.5-6.625 percent in March 1988 to 9.75-9.875 percent in February 1989. (There were ranges in those days because the funds rate target was a closely guarded secret.) The banking system was reeling under the weight of bad real estate loans, reducing financial institutions' ability to lend.

In spite of the Fed's subsequent aggressive effort to stimulate the economy -- it lowered the funds rate from 9.875 percent in June 1989 to 3 percent in September 1992 -- the early 1990s witnessed the slowest broad money growth in history. The temporary jump in oil prices months after the recession started was the least of the economy's worries.

Oil prices hit $40 a barrel last Friday, a 52 percent increase from a year ago. However shocking the price is -- remember the Economist Magazine's ``$5 Oil'' cover on March 6, 1999? -- it's hard to make a case for a supply shock when both OPEC and non-OPEC producers have been increasing production. (In an e-mail response to questions, Roach clarified that ``$40 is high but the shock comes at $50.'')

A supply shock is a specific microeconomic phenomenon expressed by a shift inward (to the left) in the supply curve, which is upward sloping: The quantity supplied by producers is higher at higher prices.

``If there's no fall in the quantity, it's not a supply shock,'' says Bob Laurent, professor of economics and finance at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Stuart School of Business.

The implications of a rise in price coming from reduced supply are different than those coming from increased demand. A supply shock means higher prices and lower output. A demand- driven price increase augurs higher prices and higher output.

Total world oil supply rose to 82.1 million barrels a day in the first quarter of 2004 from 78.8 million in the first quarter of 2003, according to the International Energy Agency. OPEC output rose 1.3 million barrels a day over that time.

``Despite official announcements of OPEC production cuts and adherence to targets, OPEC members excluding Iraq produced close to 25.8 million barrels a day for the sixth straight month'' in March, the IEA said in its monthly oil market report.

On Monday, Saudi Arabia, which produces more than a third of the world's oil and is one of a handful of countries with excess capacity, encouraged OPEC to increase production quotas by 1.5 million barrels a day from the current 23.5 million. OPEC pumped 25.85 million barrels of oil a day in April, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Almost all of the commentary on the impact of higher oil prices on the economy restricts itself to one side of the equation: Higher oil prices impinge on consumers' discretionary income and raise companies' cost of production.

Never is any consideration given to who benefits: oil producers and their shareholders, many of whom are consumers.

``The U.S. consumes just under 20 million barrels of oil per day, so the increase from last year's average oil price of just over $31 to $40 would cost American households and companies some $65 billion over a full year,'' says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York. ``That's about 0.6 percentage point of GDP.''

But the hit to national income is less, Shepherdson says, because the U.S. produces about 30 percent of the oil it consumes.

``U.S. producers are enjoying a windfall benefit amounting to about $20 billion at an annualized pace,'' he says.

And that's not the end of it. Even the revenue sent overseas to buy oil imports doesn't disappear. It comes back to the U.S. in the form of purchases of goods and services or foreign direct investment. All is not lost from higher oil prices.

Besides, oil prices, like the prices of other industrial commodities, are highly cyclical.

``A cyclical rise in oil prices is normal,'' Shepherdson says. ``You can't turn around and say it subverts the cycle.''

China accounts for about 7 percent of total global demand but is responsible for most of the growth, according to the IEA. Demand from China surged 18 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

So U.S. consumers are being presented with higher energy prices that aren't the result of their own appetite. The rise in price still doesn't qualify as a supply shock.

And don't forget the increase in energy efficiency following the oil shocks of the 1970s.

``The quantity of crude needed to produce a dollar of real GDP has fallen by more than half since its peak in the early 1970s,'' Shepherdson says.

Oil prices aren't going to kill the economy, given the considerable stimulus and momentum already in place. When history is rewritten, don't be surprised if oil takes the rap for the next recession.

Name:	38th Bagatelle
To:	Individual
Re:	Devious political hackery from the Kerryist fake pastor's assistant

In response to:
Bush has bungled the war on terrorism. He went after Iraq when they were not a threat to us--at all. They were not connected to the 9-11 disaster at all.

Message:
This is one of your favorite lies, Individual. Iraq was a safe harbor, supply point, training ground, and "hole in the wall" for terrorists of several nationalities. It no longer is.

Terrorists from all over are flocking to Iraq to wage Jihad against the Coalition. They are being met by armed Coalition military personel and by Iraqi armed services.

You like to pretend that Iraq was Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, but that is just more of your tinhorn political hackery. Tootle away, pissant, you are doing a stellar job of killing the Donkey.

(Too bad about the United Nations Oil For The United Nations programme, Individual. The rotten, corrupt U.N. really had a sweet little deal going with Saddam Hussein, didn't they?)

WASHINGTON, 29 April 2004 — Officials from Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and the international petroleum organizations shocked a gathering of foreign policy experts in Washington yesterday with an announcement that the Kingdom’s previous estimate of 261 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum has now more than tripled, to 1.2 trillion barrels.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia’s key oil and finance ministers assured the audience — which included US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — that the Kingdom has the capability to quickly double its oil output and sustain such a production surge for as long as 50 years.

Russia’s proven oil reserves may be much higher than was previously thought, reported British Financial Times newspaper in reference to several market analysts.

In particular the newspaper pointed to the announcement of Yukos oil major which was made last month. On news of difficult political situation around the company and its imprisoned founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the announcement went virtually unnoticed, but was very important, because Yukos declared a considerable increase in proven reserves. Under the strict standards set by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Yukos oil reserves increased from 11.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2002 to 13 billion barrels at the end of 2003.

TNK-BP oil giant also announced that its current reserves of 6.1 billion barrels could rise to 9 billion barrels in the short term and up to 30 billion barrels in the longer term.

Leftist press? Suspicions right ; Reporters working in Washington acknowledge liberal leanings in poll

The wide majority of Washington newspaper reporters and news bureau chiefs consider themselves liberals or moderates and voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, according to a poll released yesterday by the Freedom Forum.

The survey of 139 journalists shows that 89 percent voted for Mr. Clinton, who received 43 percent of the vote nationwide in the presidential election, and 7 percent backed George Bush.

Fifty percent are registered Democrats, and 37 percent are independents. Ninety-one percent describe themselves as liberal or moderate.

To conservatives and Republicans, who now control Congress, the poll supports a long-held suspicion that a liberal media bias makes it doubly difficult to get their message from Washington to voters.

The Freedom Forum, which published the poll numbers as part of a 217-page report on Congress and the media, assessed the overall findings this way:

"Reporters and editors are so cynical about Congress that they neglect to give news consumers what they want: more stories about how congressional decisions will affect them. And members of Congress are so cynical about the institution in which they serve that they are a major reason the public has so little respect for Congress."

House Speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday told a luncheon gathering of the nation's newspaper editors it is time for them to reassess their coverage.

"I unequivocally believe, as a Republican activist, that the core of the news media is biased, that the bias is amazing," the Georgia Republican said at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE).

He criticized the way reporters wrote about Democrats' ethics complaints against him and about the House GOP's "Contract With America."

"I mean, don't take Newt Gingrich," he said. "Go talk to any set of serious conservatives in America and ask them whether or not they think the media is slanted. And then at some point if you're really serious about this, rather than just being defensive, you might say to yourself, 'Gee, what if it's true?' "

Three percent of the journalists in the Freedom Forum poll said the Contract was a "serious reform proposal," while 59 percent said it was an "election-year ploy." The Contract called for a balanced budget, tax cuts, welfare reform and increased defense spending, all of which were passed and sent to President Clinton.

The Freedom Forum released its report, "Partners & Adversaries: The Contentious Connection Between Congress and the Media," at the ASNE gathering in Washington. Elaine Povich, the report's author and a former Capitol Hill reporter for the Chicago Tribune, denied that the poll confirms a liberal bias in the news media.

"One of the things about being a professional is that you attempt to leave your personal feelings aside as you do your work," Mrs. Povich said in an interview. "What I think is true, more people who are of a liberal persuasion go into reporting simply because they believe in the ethics and ideals," she said. "Now that sounds kind of Pollyanna. A lot of conservatives go into the private sector, go into Wall Street, go into banking. You find people who are idealistic tending toward the reporting end."

But Mrs. Povich said she sees more "conservative-leaning" reporters arriving in Washington. "It's incumbent upon the conservatives to go out there and make their case," she said. "And if the reporters are professional at all, they will have to take into account what the conservatives are saying. It's the other side of the story."

The Freedom Forum and the Roper Center collected mailed surveys from 139 Washington reporters and news bureau chiefs during November and December - the heat of the budget battle between Mr. Clinton and congressional Republicans.

The pollsters used a similar method to question 100 editors nationally. Republicans fared somewhat better in that survey.

Fourteen percent of the editors are registered Republicans, and 31 percent are Democrats. Sixty percent voted for Mr. Clinton, 22 percent for Mr. Bush. The questionnaires revealed that newspaper editors do not harbor a great deal of confidence in any major U.S. institutions, including newspapers.

Asked to grade their confidence in 13 institutions, 25 percent had a "great deal" of confidence in newspapers, while 64 percent had "some" confidence.

The Freedom Forum's report quoted Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, as saying: "I do not remember a time when the press was as negative as it is. I am now enjoying the best press of my life. And it's because I am attacking people and being negative. I get much more attention for three wisecracks and a point of order than I get for a full compromise to a difficult legislative solution."

At a panel discussion yesterday, Linda Grist Cunningham, executive editor of the Rockford Register Star in Illinois, said, "We've gone from being skeptics to being cynics."

Referring to that morning's opening ceremony, she added: "The American flag comes through, and there's pomp and circumstance. Less than half of the audience put their hand over their heart. What is wrong with us? We've gone from being skeptical to being cynical, and I think that's bad."

Name:

Da Nuze

In response to:
Leftist press? Suspicions right ; Reporters working in Washington acknowledge liberal leanings in poll

Name:	magpie
To:	gene

In response to:
"Your dog, however, can walk side by side, your dog is allowed to have its own dog house... you can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff - none of the women have that advantage."

Name:

Individual

In response to:
Nobody that understands the facts agrees with you.

Message:
You right wing extremists talk funny. "Understand the facts?" What does that mean? Do you mean "know the facts?" I don't know what facts you are talking about. Please enlighten me.

Name:	Individual
Re:	Zogby

Message:
I've heard a bunch of bad things about Zogby before. The trouble is, in the last two elections, his has been one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate, polls going. Can't argue with results like that.

Name:

Individual

In response to:
Individual, why did you put news conference in quotes?

Message:
Because I understood that there was going to be a news conference. But I never heard about it even on FOX news or other right wing outlets such as the Washington Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, etc.

The horrific slaughter of Nick Berg should be compulsory viewing for those who seem to have forgotten who our real enemy is.

IT took a long, long time to saw off the head of Nick Berg, and for nearly a third of it you could hear the 26-year-old American screaming and gurgling. I know that because I saw the video his five killers – Islamic terrorists – made of his murder.

It is God-awful to watch, and ends with one of these animals holding up as a trophy Berg's severed head, eyes staring in shock. The video was then rushed to an al-Qaida-linked website, which gleefully published it.

The ABC seemed annoyed to have had this interruption to its wall-to-prison-wall coverage of the "torture" of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

"Beheading deflects focus from Iraq prison scandal," sighed the headline of the ABC Online report.

Sorry, but shouldn't that have read: "Beheading puts Iraq prison 'scandal' in focus?" After all this hysteria over pictures of Iraqi prisoners being made to pose naked, there's nothing like a live-on-video decapitation to remind us what real evil looks like, and to make us ask if a media that forgot the difference helped to kill Nick Berg.

It was probably about the very time this video of Berg's murder was being sent to the al-Qaida site that I found myself in a heated argument on ABC TV's Insiders program.

I'd dared to say that much of the coverage of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail was an irresponsible attempt by anti-war commentators to use the, yes, disgusting behaviour of a few out-of-control American soldiers to vilify not just the US army, but America itself, and to discredit the liberation of Iraq.

And I asked whether it was dangerous for media outlets to so lavishly run photographs of that abuse if they honestly believed what they were saying – that these pictures were a recruiting tool for al-Qaida.

After all, the Age's Washington correspondent co-authored a piece that approvingly quoted a critic saying: "If you want recruitment tools, these are the best anyone could imagine."

The Australian's Washington correspondent exclaimed: "What a recruitment poster for the Iraqi resistance, never mind Osama bin Laden." ("Resistance"? These throat-cutters are to be honoured as the "resistance"?)

Yet what do these and so many media outlets from London to Sydney do with their "recruitment posters" for Osama bin Laden?

Why, they run them again and again. They run them huge on their front pages, and put them on their websites. And their commentators droolingly describe them as horrific, proof of Yankee bestiality, and ample excuse for the Iraqi "resistance" to strike back.

Islamic terrorists got the hint. Berg's killers read out a long statement as he sat on the floor before them, waiting to die, saying they were about to punish the US for its sins at Abu Ghraib, as revealed by the pictures in the Western media.

"How can a free Muslim sleep as he sees Islam slaughtered and its dignity bleeding, and the pictures of shame and the news of the devilish scorn of the people of Islam – men and women – in the prison of Abu Ghraib," their leader shouted.

So, was it worth publishing those photographs now that Nick Berg has had his head hacked off? And remember, these photos were first published at least three days after the US army publicly revealed details of the abuse and charged – as is necessary – the allegedly guilty soldiers.

Of course, when I suggested on TV the media reconsider the wisdom of repeatedly publishing their "recruitment posters for al-Qaida", I was shouted down by the other panellists. That's the way a free media in a free society works, I was instructed.

Actually, it's not the way the free media works if the facts don't fit their agenda.

The media didn't endlessly show the video of the 2002 beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl by al-Qaida operatives, or scream for apologies from al-Qaida's backers in the Saudi Arabian Government.

Nor did they endlessly run the video the Iraqi "resistance" made last month of Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi being shot in the head by his captors.

Why weren't we shown it? Too shocking? Too likely to get us angry with the Iraqi "resistance"? Too likely to give us the "wrong idea"?

That last excuse, by the way, was the one SBS gave us for not screening the tape it shot of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj El-Din El-Hilali, praising suicide bombers in his mosque.

Nor did many Western correspondents in Saddam's Iraq bother us too much with the ugly truth.

The admired John F. Burns of The New York Times last year accused correspondents who reported alongside him from Saddam's Iraq of having "behaved as if they were in Belgium", rather than in a tyranny: "The essential truth (about Saddam's genocidal regime) was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here."

As CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted only after Saddam was toppled, his network refused to tell us of staff who were tortured, of assassinations planned by Saddam's sons, and of a woman torn apart "limb from limb" by police, and then dumped in bits on her father's doorstep. None of this CNN had reported, Jordan said, because "doing so would have jeopardised the lives of Iraqis".

But there's no such fear of telling the dirty truth – painted in darkest black – about the US. And there's sure no concern that "doing so would have jeopardised the lives" of not Iraqis, but Americans like Nick Berg. Or that exaggerated criticism of America would give us the "wrong idea".

But that's the Western media, too often aiding al-Qaida by exaggerating the regretted mistakes of the US while going soft on the unapologetic barbarism of its foes.

So should the media keep publishing pictures likely to incite terrorists, both overseas and here at home?

Probably not if they truly believe these are recruitment posters for terrorists who'll kill us in "revenge". Why not just describe the pictures in words? How many beheadings is a lurid photo spread really worth?

But there is one compelling excuse for running the pictures from Abu Ghraib (although without the hype and endless repeats), and it's time more journalists and commentators used it.

The fact is that such photographs in themselves do relatively little to recruit terrorists to al-Qaida, whose members want to kill us no matter what we do. Who want to kill us whether the guards at Abu Ghraib were mean or mice.

If that's the excuse, then let's not have these ludicrous claims that the terrorists kill only because we drive them to it through some wickedness of ours.

Let's not have headlines like The Sydney Morning Herald's yesterday that described Nick Berg's murder as "Chilling pay back over abuse" – falsely implying, yet again, that we just brought this terrorism on ourselves through our sins.

Let's not have Islamic terrorism excused as the understandable acts of men driven mad by American or "Zionist" crimes. Let's not have the Bali bombing blamed on our liberation of Afghanistan.

As we've already seen from the video executions of Daniel Pearl and Fabrizio Quattrocchi, al-Qaida and its allies didn't need the excuse of Abu Ghraib to film its killing of hostages.

As we saw this week from the video of Hamas gunmen posing with the body parts of six Israeli soldiers, and offering to "trade" them, Islamic terrorist groups have invented obscenities that far surpass in evil any offence we may have caused. And we should remember, too, that al-Qaida and its friends have being blowing up people for years – Americans, Kenyans, Tanzanians, Saudi Arabians, Turks, Moroccans, Iraqis, UN officials, Red Cross workers, Jews, Christians, Masons, Australians and so many more.

They started their terror long before the "torture" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and long before the liberation of Iraq or Afghanistan.

The murder of Nick Berg is just the latest atrocity of an enemy of matchless savagery, and many more people will yet die in this war with a rising militant Islam.

It's time more in the media realised just who our greatest enemy really is – and trust me, it isn't America or a handful of its prison guard bullies.

If the media must publish pictures from this war on terror, let them include plenty of our real enemy and its satanic deeds. Then the abuse at Abu Ghraib will be put in the focus that's been all too deliberately blurred.

Name:	Darmond Derailleur
To:	Individual

In response to:
I've heard a bunch of bad things about Zogby before. The trouble is, in the last two elections, his has been one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate, polls going. Can't argue with results like that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Message:
He has changed his career focus from polling to predicting the future. As for YOU, you have reached your ink-squirting phase early today.

Name:

Bystander

In response to:
The trouble is, in the last two elections, his has been one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate, polls going. Can't argue with results like that.

Name:	Djbouti Goat Powered Taxi
Re:	The worm squirms...

In response to:
Individual ink-squirting phase? See example below.

You right wing extremists talk funny. "Understand the facts?" What does that mean? Do you mean "know the facts?" I don't know what facts you are talking about. Please enlighten me.

Name:

Individual

In response to:
Leftist press? Suspicions right ; Reporters working in Washington acknowledge liberal leanings in poll. The wide majority of Washington newspaper reporters and news bureau chiefs consider themselves liberals or moderates and voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, according to a poll released yesterday by the Freedom Forum.

Message:
Typical Washington Times piece of sh!t. In the headline, the quotes are "leftist press" and "liberal leanings." In the body of the story, we get the real truth: "wide majority consider themselves liberals or moderates..."

Obviously, the writer is a right wing extremist and won't provide that information. We can't use the word, "moderate," because it is not inflammatory enough for Limbaugh and his ilk.

Message:
Sorry. My mistake. I should have said last two presidential elections. But, of course, I am sure you knew what I meant.

Name:	Forum Fan
To:	Individual
Re:	Are you sure you actually checked

In response to:
Because I understood that there was going to be a news conference. But I never heard about it even on FOX news or other right wing outlets such as the Washington Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, etc

Nineteen of the 23 officers who served with John Kerry and every one of his commanding officers in Vietnam have signed a letter that says he is not fit to be commander in chief. In a press conference yesterday, members of The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released the letter criticizing Mr. Kerry's slanderous statements about alleged widespread atrocities by American soldiers during the war. Being on the defense against fellow veterans could do serious damage to the Kerry campaign, especially as the country is at war again. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could have impact because of the impressive number of veterans involved. Hundreds of Vietnam vets, from admirals to seamen, have signed the letter. According to John O'Neill, who was in Mr. Kerry's unit during the war, "[The signers] run across the entire spectrum of politics, specialities and political feelings about the war." This large group goes a long way toward countering the handful of veterans who have defended Mr. Kerry in commercials and on the stump. The latest offensive comes as the Kerry campaign begins a $25 million advertising blitz touting Mr. Kerry's "lifetime of service and strength" and his tour in Vietnam. Widespread opposition to his campaign by Vietnam veterans shows they have neither forgotten nor forgiven his disgraceful allegations against his fellow GIs. The resentment could grow into a serious political force. The VietnamVeteransAgainstJohnKerry.org Web site claims to have received more than 10 million hits in 90 days. Veterans groups across the country are organizing protests to target the candidate's campaign stops. Mr. Kerry's problem with veterans comes at a time when his campaign is foundering. Prominent Democrats have complained that their prospective nominee is allowing the Bush campaign to control the agenda and successfully label Mr. Kerry as weak on defense issues. Of late, the senator has responded by getting increasingly personal in attacks on President Bush. Under these circumstances, going negative so early in a campaign can be seen as a sign of weakness. Taking incoming fire from veterans around the country should make Mr. Kerry feel even more imperiled as he attempts to become commander of America's armed forces.

Name:	Forum Fan
Re:	Looks like the number could be has high as 200

Message:
This is how the Left Wing Media tried to twist the story (of course even this story was buried)

WASHINGTON, May 4 — A group of Vietnam veterans tried to pick apart Senator John Kerry's war-hero biography on Tuesday, questioning a combat wound and denouncing his antiwar activities as a betrayal that should disqualify him to be commander in chief.

The group cited a document from a doctor who said that in December 1968 he treated the wound for which Mr. Kerry received the first of his three Purple Hearts and that it probably resulted from an accident, not hostile fire.

"Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore," wrote the doctor, Louis Letson of Scottsboro, Ala., a member of the group. "The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks. That seemed to fit the injury which I treated."

Dr. Letson's group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, seeks to discredit Mr. Kerry. It was organized by John O'Neill of Houston, who was recruited by the Nixon administration three decades ago to debate Mr. Kerry about the conduct of service members in Vietnam.

The group says it represents 200 men who, like Mr. Kerry, saw combat on Navy Swift boats. (The Swift Boat Sailors Association, a nonpartisan veterans group, estimates the total number of men assigned to the boats at 3,000 to 3,500.) Swift Boat Veterans for Truth held its first news conference here just a day after Mr. Kerry unveiled a $27 million advertising campaign highlighting his Vietnam service.

"Senator Kerry is not fit for command," said Adm. Roy Hoffman, retired, the leader of the group.

Steve Gardner, who served under Mr. Kerry, called him indecisive in combat, a description sharply at odds with evaluations by Mr. Kerry's commanders.

"If a man like that can't handle that six-man boat, how can you expect him to be our commander in chief?" asked Mr. Gardner, one of about two dozen veterans who flew here to discredit Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Kerry aides immediately dismissed the new group as a tool of President Bush's re-election campaign and accused it of engaging in "Nixonian dirty tricks."

Name:	Lac Bleu
Re:	What crisis? Just the media-manufactured one, I guess...

In response to:
Gasoline Prices

Message:
According to an ABC News story the other day, gasoline prices today approximate those of 1954 when adjusted for inflation. Most vehicles today get better mileage than most vehicles in use in 1954 did, too.

Name:	Forum Fan
To:	Individual

WASHINGTON -- A group of former officers who commanded John F. Kerry in Vietnam more than three decades ago declared yesterday that they oppose his candidacy for president, challenged him to release more of his military and medical records, and said Kerry should be denied the White House because of his 1971 allegations that some superiors had committed ''war crimes."

Kerry has since said his accusation about war crimes and atrocities was too harsh, but many of his former commanders contended yesterday that they believed the allegations were aimed at them.

''I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be commander in chief," said retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, who helped organize the news conference and oversaw all of the swift boats in Vietnam at the time Kerry commanded one of those crafts. ''This is not a political issue; it is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust -- all absolute tenets of command."

The Kerry campaign, seeking to control the political damage on a day when a new batch of biographical ads touting Kerry's military service was hitting the airwaves, arranged for two of Kerry's crewmates to appear at a later news conference and declare that Kerry was a consummate leader who braved bullets and aggressively took on the enemy. The Kerry campaign also handed out documents it said showed that the news conference was handled by a public relations firm with ties to the Republican Party and President Bush.

One of Kerry's fellow patrol boat skippers, Wade Sanders, defended Kerry and compared the statements of Kerry's commanders to the investigations of suspected communists by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, saying the commanders should be asked, ''Have you no decency?"

We write from our common heritage as veterans of duty aboard Swift Boats in the Vietnam War. Indeed, you should note that a substantial number of those men who served directly with you during your four month tour in Vietnam have signed this letter.

It is our collective judgment that, upon your return from Vietnam, you grossly and knowingly distorted the conduct of the American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen of that war (including a betrayal of many of us, without regard for the danger your actions caused us). Further, we believe that you have withheld and/or distorted material facts as to your own conduct in this war.

We believe you continue this conduct today, albeit by changing from an anti-war to a "war hero" status. You now seek to clad yourself in the very medals that you disdainfully threw away in the early years of your political career. In the process, we believe you continue a deception as to your own conduct through such tactics as the disclosure of only carefully screened portions of your military records. Both then and now, we have concluded that you have deceived the public, and in the process have betrayed honorable men, to further your personal political goals.

Your conduct is such as to raise substantive concerns as to your honesty and your ability to serve, as you currently seek, as Commander-in-Chief of the military services.

It is vital that the American public have as much information as possible about candidates for President of the United States. In various ways, you have rightly called upon President Bush to be fully accountable and to provide full disclosure. In the same spirit, now that you are the presumptive nominee of your Party, we believe it is incumbent upon you to make your total military record open to the American people.

Specifically, we the undersigned formally request that you authorize the Department of the Navy to independently release your military records (through your execution of Standard Form 180), complete and unaltered, including your military medical records. Further, we call upon you to correct the misconceptions your campaign seeks to create as to your conduct while in Vietnam. Permit the American public the opportunity to assess your military performance upon the record, and not upon campaign rhetoric.

Senator Kerry, we were there. We know the truth. We have been silent long enough. The stakes are too great, not only for America in general but, most importantly, for those who have followed us into service in Iraq and Afghanistan. We call upon you to provide a full, accurate accounting of your conduct in Vietnam.

Name:	Forum Fan
To:	Individual

In response to:
You right wing extremists talk funny. "Understand the facts?" What does that mean? Do you mean "know the facts?" I don't know what facts you are talking about. Please enlighten me.

Message:
I meant exactly what I said. Is English your second language? I will help you out.

Understand - To perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of; grasp.

Name:	Fact Checker
To:	Individual

In response to:
Typical Washington Times piece of sh!t. In the headline, the quotes are "leftist press" and "liberal leanings." In the body of the story, we get the real truth: "wide majority consider themselves liberals or moderates..." Question number 1: Do you see the word "moderate" in the headline? Question number 2: Do you see the breakdown between "liberal" and "moderate?" Obviously, the writer is a right wing extremist and won't provide that information. We can't use the word, "moderate," because it is not inflammatory enough for Limbaugh and his ilk.

The survey of 139 journalists shows that 89 percent voted for Mr. Clinton, who received 43 percent of the vote nationwide in the presidential election, and 7 percent backed George Bush.

Two percent of the reporters identify themselves as conservative, and 4 percent are registered Republicans, according to the survey conducted by the Freedom Forum, a First Amendment foundation, and the Roper Center, a polling firm. Fifty percent are registered Democrats, and 37 percent are independents. Ninety-one percent describe themselves as liberal or moderate.

Name:	Sul Rost
To:	Last Visable Dog
Re:	Let's hope Gene has baddest Body Guards

In response to:
"Extremism believes that it's okay to strap bombs on to your children and send them to paradise and whatever else and to behead people," he said yesterday. The Israeli-born US musician went on to say Islam was a "vile culture" that treated women worse than dogs.

Message:
Keyword Israli, favorite Muslim victim is a Jew or Israli. Berb may be a regular Germanic-named victim but his name sounds like he was a Jew. It would be swell if Berg , the elder was a Billionaire who could hire pilots to do "Death From Above" along the Iraqi border once we leave June 30,2004. As soon as we vacate, the vacuum will attract every Muslim extremist for a thousand miles, toughs and many Guchie mooch weekend playboys who want to brag that they killed someone in battle even if they cut a throat from behind at a slumber party for little girls!

Name:

Hope the Left Wing Media is happy

Message:
Hope the Left Wing Media is happy:

Name:	Grand Ballou
Re:	Individual is a hack who uses every old, timeworn trick.

In response to:
Obviously, the writer is a right wing extremist and won't provide that information. We can't use the word, "moderate," because it is not inflammatory enough for Limbaugh and his ilk.

Message:
The word "moderate" is often used by Leftists to cover their sometimes extreme Leftism without actually denying it. It is also frequently used by Leftist media hacks to distort public perceptions of elected officials. For instance, Leftist media hacks like to refer to the extreme Leftwing fringe of elected Republican congressmembers as "moderate Republican Rep. ________"

Name:	Editor
To:	Bystander
Re:	ENDING THE ILLEGAL OPIUM TRADE IS VERY EASY!!

In response to:
How is Kerry going to clean up the Opium trade?

The illegal opium trade bring in huge sums of money to the terrorists for weapons and funding to kill us, and also to control Afghanistan. If we are to have peace in that area we must stop it now.

It takes only a few minutes to stop it. All we have to do is to declare the opium trade in Afghanistan legal. Just that simple and thousands of lives are saved. Afghanistan can be brought under control and flourish economically from the sale of legal opium.

Let the opium addicts do what they always do, but give the good folks in Afghanistan the opportunity to have a life free of opium wars.

Name:

Individual

In response to:
"If the provisional government asks us to leave we will leave," Bremer said, referring to an Iraqi administration due to take power June 30. "I don't think that will happen, but obviously we don't stay in countries where we're not welcome."

Message:
Biggest flip-flop in the history of the world. Cut and run just like Reagan. The difference is that Reagan didn't pledge to stay the course the way Bush has.

Name:

WTFO?

Message:
"Democratic parties in 15 states and Puerto Rico have set numerical goals for gays and delegates at the party's national convention this summer," the Associated Press reports. A sidebar lists the states and their goals. Example:

Do the Democrats really intend to quiz would-be delegates about their sexual orientation? Whatever happened to the right of privacy?

Name:

Individual

In response to:
WASHINGTON - Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) on Friday collected the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, a police union that backed President Bush (news - web sites) in the 2000 election. "After three and a half years of disappointing leadership under George Bush, we need to change course in November and elect a president with a real record of supporting police officers and a lifetime of standing with law enforcement," IBPO President David Holway said ...

Name:

...

In response to:
If I were Bush I'd ask Kerry for a favor and have him jump over there to baghdad to fix this prisoner abuse thing. He's the only member of the senate who has the experience of torturing and killing the ememy and all. I think he said personally and widespread. He's the man for the job of regaining our moral status in the region. along with the UN.

Name:

Individual

In response to:
The word "moderate" is often used by Leftists to cover their sometimes extreme Leftism without actually denying it.

Message:
Typical right wing extremist. Fact: The word "moderate" was used in the poll. Why wasn't it used in the headline?

Name:

BTW didja know he served in NAM?

Message:
Kerry could torture the detainees with his service record and how he "earned" his PurpleHearts. Three hours alone with him and the Iraqis would be gouging their own eyes out...

Name:	The TRUTH & the FACTS
To:	Fact Checker

In response to:
POLLS are only very "poor" tools to ATTEMPT to figure out the opinions of the people. Also their results are often expressed as "statistics", which attempt to define the percentage of people who believe any given statement, idea, or description.

Message:
However, POLLS are very easily "skewed" to get the results that are PAID for. So very closely watch the organizations that are funding the poll. The other day, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show that he had PAID for a question to be placed on a prominent poll. And you can bet the results would favor right wing ideas, when that occurred.

I took (and Aced) Statistics in college, as part of my degree in Psych. We not only had to study the art of data collecting, but we had to design and create experiments, & present the results in statistically accurate format. We also had potential error rates (alpha = 3.5%), & they had to reach a certain level of "significance" before we could report them.

In order to be even slightly accurate & "significant" the results of a poll has to follow certain guidelines:

You have to have a high number of respondents, at least over 1,000 --- and in the case of a National Poll, that should be increased to about 50,000.

The respondents should be balanced in proportion to the general population in regards to these criteria: (a) gender (b) age (c) social status (d) education level (e) income (f) registered voter (g) citizen or immigrant (h) religion

As you can see, it is nearly impossible to achieve that high level of PERFECTION in finding those whom you question. So most polls are not actually done anywhere near that level of accuracy. (no adequate proportionality).

Next, if the questions are not rotated, or asked in a neutral manner, then the answers are "skewed" to begin with, & are not an accurate reflection of most opinions.

A person could quite easily "skew" the results of any poll, & manipulate the questions to get the answers that they want. Hence, most statistical polls are worthless.

I always remember what George Bush (SR) said during the Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas scandal --- "Polls can be made to say ANYTHING YOU WANT". (unquote) - He should know.

Name:	Editor
To:	magpie
Re:	Your meanspirited posts are not welcome here.

In response to:
Wrong again you bigoted little twit. Turkey. You really are a small minded little bigot. Iran is a great country. People do the same things there as we do here. democrats like YOU-larry flynt-madonna-michael jackson and other leftist deviants aren't welcome there. It's their business. Of course you're a little leftist ayatollah busy body and won't rest till the get tax payer funded abortion on demand. no wonder the liberals get made fun of. they very rarely give solutions other than creating programs and raising taxes. the only ideas i ever heard from them is sideway elevators (buss ...

Message:
We decided on the last forum that posters whose sick hatred and loathing of other fellow Americans must stop. These are not good times. Your vile contempt for me and other members on the left does not bring goodwill to this forum.

You have taken hatred to new heights of vilification. There is enough hatred in the world without you adding your poisonous venom to it. We are sick of it. If you are not capable of debating respectfully please find another forum. Your meanspirited posts are not welcome here.

Your constant need to insult me and liberals is so great that I question your sanity. Your knee-jerk derision of any position taken by the left is a repulsive, obsessive abomination that you seem unable to stop no matter how often I have brought it to your attention.

Name:	Grand Ballou
To:	Individual Hack
Re:	Kohn Kerry Can't con most Democrats

In response to:
Things are getting better all the time. Go Kerry.

Message:
He's just about gone, Individual. The Democratic party is not going to sacrifice itself for this vain, devious, selfish fop that the media has foisted upon them. I think the Donkey just may throw J.Kohn Kerry and kick his useless ass into Boston Harbor. The brain-dead Leftist media and extremist hacks, such as yourself, continue to promote him, but in spite of all that I don't see any significant support for him from real people. He does have the support of knee-jerk yellowdogs, extremist Bush-haters, and media flacks and parrot-hacks like you.

Name:	Boston Tea Party
Re:	Hey John, Feel a Pain Between Your Shoulder Blades?

In response to:
Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry

Message:
That's if the DNC doesn't pull another Toricelli maneuver...and nominate someone else in violation of the law...

Name:	Speak Yerkish to Telemarketers!
Re:	Laws?

In response to:
That's if the DNC doesn't pull another Toricelli maneuver...and nominate someone else in violation of the law... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Message:
Kerry isn't yet the nominee of the Democratic party. He is currently the Leftist media nominee.

Name:

Bystander

In response to:
Biggest flip-flop in the history of the world. Cut and run just like Reagan. The difference is that Reagan didn't pledge to stay the course the way Bush has.

Name:	Last Visible Dog
To:	ET

In response to:
Your vile contempt for me and other members on the left does not bring goodwill to this forum.

Message:
Come on. Magpie is just being Magpie. I really don't think it is "vile contempt" and clearly Magpie is no worse than Individual. If we are not going to go after Individual, it would not be fair to go after Magpie. I understand it is a bit more personal since Magpie is targeting you and Individual is not. But Individual's "hatrid" is every bit as bad as Magpie's.

I would love to an end to the nonsense insults on forum but don't only go after non-left-wing-insulters

When it seemed this week that the pictures from Abu Ghraib couldn't get any worse, the beheading of a 26-year-old American from Philadelphia put things in perspective. Nick Berg was killed to exploit a news cycle.

Let's be clear: The trouble at Abu Ghraib has become a legitimate bonfire because we let ourselves down and tarnished the principles we are trying to export to suffering corners of the world. But we can stop imagining that any such delicate sensibility ought to be applied to the Arab street, or to homicidal militants with chef's knives and video cameras.

The hooded men who sawed Berg's neck for the cameras didn't do it because they were shocked or outraged by our treatment of prisoners. (Does anyone take this idea seriously?) They executed him because we were shocked and outraged and because they hoped that, wallowing in our own scandal, we would blame ourselves for his death.

Those recriminations, they figured, would weaken us further. And just to make sure, they even read a slavering statement making the murder's connection with Abu Ghraib explicit.

Hey, it worked with Spain, didn't it? There, following the deadly train bombing in Madrid, more than a few citizens took the bait the terrorists intended: that the country had been a target because of its participation in Iraq. Staging their slaughter a few days before the elections, the terrorists correctly predicted it would create a miniwave of self doubt sufficient to elect a government more to al-Qaida's liking.

Then, as now, the murders weren't just about retribution but about using us against ourselves. And lo, within hours of the news of the beheading on Tuesday, analysts were all over television lapping up the suggestion that this was the first fallout from making prisoners wear underwear on their heads. The networks may pat themselves on the back for following the script. No one else should.

Nick Berg, let's remember, had been missing since April 9. Operating under the assumption that he didn't spend several weeks wandering Iraq unmolested, his kidnapping occurred well before the depravity of Abu Ghraib came to light. His killing also was a direct replay of Daniel Pearl's, which took place long before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

This doesn't mean that the Iraqis who saw us as liberators weren't offended by the treatment of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. But it's no accident that our prisoner abuses have been met with a deafening silence by the leaders in the Middle East. As was laid out on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the Saudis aren't above torturing innocent Westerners to find scapegoats for the Islamic terrorism in their midst. Libya is on the verge of executing a group of foreign doctors and nurses for failures of the Libyan health-care system.

For our part, what's troubling Americans now is partly a sense of loss of purpose. When the original case for war — Saddam Hussein's danger to the broader world — was diluted by the absence of weapons stockpiles, we focused on liberation. It's in this context that the recent troubles have chafed. Reports that Iraqi polls find large numbers angry with the occupation, or scenes of rioting militants burning American soldiers and vehicles, have created a bout of navel-gazing. What if the Iraqis don't like us after all?

It bears repeating that winning Iraqi hearts and minds was never a necessary precondition to accomplishing our real goal of stability in the region. Iraqis just needed to be convinced that we were strong enough to prevail and it would behoove them to go along.

Intelligent Iraqis know that if we fail, that's when their real troubles begin. Women and children were among the thousand or so who demonstrated publicly in Najaf this week, demanding that Muqtada al-Sadr's insurgents leave the city and stop using it as a base to attack Americans.

Meanwhile, in Washington, when Sen. Jim Inhofe dared to suggest that the prisoner abuses needed to be kept in some perspective, his words were met with staged outrage. Sen. John McCain showily marched out while he was speaking and others quickly denounced his comments as unhelpful. In fact, they were just unnecessary.

The nature of our culture thrives on seamy secrets: We revel in our own warts. We spend millions on tabloids and breaking news and tell-all autobiographies. But there is also a steadfastness that the butchers underestimate. In one of the worst weeks of the war thus far, public opinion polls are telling a more subtle story. Despite revulsion at the Abu Ghraib photos, over 60 percent rejected the suggestion that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign.

Partly because most Americans don't feed as frenetically at the 24-hour news channels the way Beltway pundits do, the average voter still has possession of his senses. Americans know that even Abu Ghraib, as offensive as the scandal is, doesn't compare to the fate of two nations, ours and the Iraqis'. Berg's murder — and what it tells us about our enemy — reminds us how important it is that we win.

Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com

Name:	Melanie
To:	LVD

In response to:
If you guys are good, tonight when I get home I will post a picture of me with Gene Simmons makeup on circa 1977 from my high school yearbook.

Message:
I have been waiting all day to see this picture, You are such a tease. I'm so wet now that I have to sit on a towel.

Name:

magpie

In response to:
Heck, we would ALL love to know WHAT DIET CAN YOU GO ON and lose about 90 to 100 pounds in ONE MONTH?

Message:
the new latest best low carb low protien low vitamin low nutrition 'you are one dumb sumbeach' diet. what are you saying nutball? that it really was paul wolfowitz under that hood?

If anybody wants to present conspiracy theories about the Berg murder, you will have to present some kind of supporting evidence. If somebody wants to make up stories or spew lies about the Berg murder (whatever the case may be), the post will be removed. The big food fight cesspool on this forum a day or so ago started with somebody posting completely unsupported provocative crap about the Berg murder. We are not going to go there again.

Name:	Last Visible Dog
To:	Melanie

In response to:
I have been waiting all day to see this picture, You are such a tease. I'm so wet now that I have to sit on a towel.

Message:
I think I wrote a letter to Penthouse that has a similar theme. Oh if only it were true. So I am picturing you as an Anna Nicole Smith bodydouble (the new thinner version) Right?

Name:	Da Nuze
To:	ET
Re:	Some Light In This Dark Week

Message:
Want a Different Abu Ghraib Story? Try This One Saddam had their hands cut off. America gave them new ones.

By now, some Americans may feel the need for respite from the images of Abu Ghraib and the five hooded barbarians standing behind Nick Berg. This week's column will try to provide some measure of respite.

It is the story of Americans, in and out of the U.S. government, who moved mountains to help seven horribly maimed Iraqi men. It is not always pleasant reading, but there are rewards to staying with it, especially now.

Quite obviously it has been decided, as the handling of the Abu Ghraib story makes plain, that when America stumbles, we are going to have our faces rubbed in it. And rubbed in it and rubbed in it. As far as I can make out, the purpose of this two weeks of media humiliation is that we--the president, all of us--are being asked to morally prostrate ourselves before the rest of the world. Some may choose to do so, but this story should make a few Americans want to simply stand up straight again.

As perfect justice, the story in fact begins in Abu Ghraib prison, in 1995. With Iraq's economy in a tailspin, Saddam arrested nine Iraqi businessmen to scapegoat them as dollar traders. They got a 30-minute "trial," and were sentenced, after a year's imprisonment, to have their right hands surgically cut off at Abu Ghraib prison.

The amputations were performed, over two days, by a Baghdad anesthesiologist, a surgeon and medical staff. We know this because Saddam had a videotape made of each procedure. He had the hands brought to him in formalin and then returned to Abu Ghraib. Oh, one more thing: The surgeon carved an X of shame into the forehead of each man. And the authorities charged the men $50.

Last year, after we liberated Iraq, a veteran TV news producer named Don North--who has worked for major U.S. broadcasters--was in Baghdad with the U.S. to restore TV service. Iraqi contacts there brought him a tape of the men's amputations. Mr. North says dismemberment was common in Saddam's Iraq and that if one walks down a crowded Baghdad street one may see a half-dozen people missing an ear, eye, limb or tongue. He decided to seek out the men whose stubbed arms represented the civilized world's lowest act--the perversion of medicine.

He found seven. Mr. North determined to make a documentary of their story and get medical help for them. How he found that help, if one may still use this phrase, is an all-American story.

An oil engineer from Houston, named Roger Brown, overheard Mr. North's tale in a Baghdad café. He suggested Don North get in touch with a famed Houston TV newsman named Marvin Zindler. Mr. Zindler put him in touch with Dr. Joe Agris, a Houston reconstructive surgeon, who has worked in postwar Vietnam and Nicaragua repairing children.

Mr. North sent Dr. Agris a copy of the videotape of the surgical atrocities, and Dr. Agris said: Send me the men; I will fix them.

But flying seven Iraqi men out of Baghdad is easier said than done. In this case, prodded by Don North and government friends, the famous U.S. bureaucracy gave itself a day off. Paul Bremer wrote a memo authorizing their departure. Paul Wolfowitz told the Air Force it could fly them to Frankfurt. Homeland Security waived visa requirements.

Continental Airlines donated passage to Houston. There, Dr. Agris enlisted a fellow surgeon, Fred Kestler, to assist. The Methodist Hospital donated facilities, and the men arrived in Houston in early April.

Dr. Agris saw that the Abu Ghraib "surgeries" were a botch. They'd cut through the joining of the wrist's carpal bones, "like carving a Turkey leg." Saddam's doctors did nothing to repair the nerve endings, which left the men with constant real and "phantom" pain. Drs. Agris and Kestler had two preliminary tasks: Repair the nerves, and, alas, take another inch off the men's lower arms, to leave a smooth surface for attaching their new prosthetic "hands." They worked for two days operating on the seven men, who then took a week to recover before receiving their new hands.

Those devices were donated by the German-American prosthetic company Otto Bock, at a cost of $50,000 each. They are state-of-the-art electronic hands, with fingers, which respond to trained muscular movements. The rehabilitation and training is being donated by two other Houston companies, TIRR and Dynamic Orthotics. The Iraqi men are in Houston now, spending five hours a day learning to use their new right hands. And oh yes, the brands on their heads were removed.

Don North completed his documentary on what happened to these men in Iraq. I watched "Remembering Saddam" this week. Several of the men insisted on seeing Saddam's home video of the atrocity, and so it's in the film--a bizarre, almost dainty image of forceps, scalpel, surgical gloves and green operating-room garments. Nothing like it since Dr. Mengele. Watching his hand come off, Baasim Al Fadhly says: "Look at this doctor, who considers his career noble and swears to God to be a noble person. Let everyone see this film."

This crime deserves condemnation from international medical societies, such as the U.N.'s World Health Organization, or the Red Cross. And Don North's film indeed should be seen--but may not be. After two months of trying, no U.S. broadcast or cable network will take it. This is incredible. TV can run Abu Ghraib photos 24/7 but can't find 55 minutes for Saddam's crimes against humanity?

On May 23, the American Foreign Policy Council will bring the restored men to Washington. They will visit maimed GIs at Walter Reed Army Hospital. It wouldn't be surprising if they said something positive about the U.S. soldiers who have not been on television the past two weeks.

Then Don North and Joe Agris will fly with the men back to Iraq, to survey the rest of Saddam's dismembered population. "The practice of prosthetics is very archaic," Mr. North says,"for a country where this is such an affliction." Dr. Agris hopes to survey the hospitals and bring in some modern equipment and supplies. "If they let me, I'll do some of the kids," he says. "Let's show the good side of what we can do."

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Name:

magpie

In response to:
I have NOTED QUITE WELL how you did NOT censor magpie or any right winger at all. So NOW you DARE to judge what any liberal posts on here?

Name:

Last Visible Dog

Message:
The rules are simple: If you want to present a conspicuity theory, you must provide some supporting evidence. If you can't find any supporting evidence, your conspiracy theory is most likely a lie.

We are in no mood from brain-dead unsupported conspiracy theories about the tragic murder of an American by Islamic terrorists.

Name:	Last Visible Dog
To:	magpie, curious

In response to:
get off your victim schtick. my best stuff was snuffed.

Message:
We are just trying to bring back a little restraint to the forum. Work with us. Just don’t insult anybody and don't post conspiracy theories if you can not find any supporting evidence. This is not that tough.

Message:
I won't take all that they hand me down,
And make out a smile, though I wear a frown,
And I won't take it all lying down,
'Cause once I get started I go to town.

'Cause I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else.

And I don't want to ball about like everybody else,
And I don't want to be destroyed by everybody else,
And I won't say that I feel fine like everybody else,
'Cause I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else.

But darling, you know that I love you true,
Do anything that you want me to,
Confess all my sins like you want me to,
There's one thing that I will say to you,
I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else.

I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else
And I don't want to ball about like everybody else,
And I don't want to be destoyed by everybody else,
And I won't say that I feel fine like everybody else,
'Cause I'm not like everybody else,
I'm not like everybody else.
Like everybody else, Like everybody else, Like everybody else, Like everybody else.

Name:	Right Wing Pirahna #3
To:	magpie

In response to:
"I'm not like everybody else..."

Name:	Last Visible Dog
To:	Curious

Message:
Curious, do you think the rules don't apply to you? No supporting evidence - no conspiracy theory.

HINT: If you can't find any supporting evidence for your claim, it is most likely bullsh!t.

You say everybody that served with Kerry supports him. The facts as presented on this forum prove you wrong. By all means please post what evidence you have but stop posting wild-assed accusations without any supporting evidence.

You are the one the started the food fight that turned this forum into cesspool with your silly and completely unsupported by the facts conspiracy theory about the death of Berg. That is why you are on a short leash. All I ask is you BACK UP your statement with some form of supporting evidence - like a source!

When you post crap without supporting evidence it is clear you are just trying to pick a fight.

If what you say is true, why do you find it impossible to provide a source or supporting evidence?

Name:	Last Visible Dog
Re:	This is what supporting evidence looks like

In response to:
As told on every TV news today, Nick Berg's parents sued our own Defense Dept, (Rumsfeld) for keeping their son in US custody over in Iraq.

WASHINGTON — Before his grisly execution, American businessman Nick Berg reportedly refused U.S. offers of assistance to leave Iraq, U.S. military and federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

Coalition authorities feared that deteriorating security throughout the nation placed Berg, an independent telecommunications expert, at risk, federal authorities said. Berg, 26, was encouraged to accept offers of safe passage out of Iraq as U.S. officials were assisting his release on April 6 from the custody of Iraqi police in Mosul, north of the capital.

"Mr. Berg refused these offers," the FBI said in a written statement Wednesday. "He also refused government offers to advise his family and friends of his status."

Berg's family has maintained that U.S. officials unlawfully detained the Pennsylvania man in March, causing him to miss his planned return home later that month. The Berg family in West Chester, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, was not available for comment Wednesday evening, according to an unidentified woman who answered the phone at the family's home. But Berg's father, Michael, told the Associated Press, "The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do, the FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they're kidding?"

Berg was detained March 24 by Iraqi police who were suspicious of the young American and feared for his safety while he wandered Mosul's unruly streets with no job and no local means of support, a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the case said Wednesday. Western aid workers have been frequent targets for kidnapping and attacks.

Berg spent 13 days in custody and was interviewed three times by FBI agents seeking to confirm his status as an independent contractor. Once freed, agents urged Berg to accept the assistance of coalition authorities to leave the country.

The FBI became involved after the U.S. military in Mosul notified the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad that Berg was being held by Iraqi police, the bureau said Wednesday.

Berg's whereabouts remain unclear between the time of his release on April 6, a day after Berg's family sued the government claiming Berg was being held illegally, and May 8, when U.S. military authorities discovered Berg's decapitated body in Baghdad.

For three days after his release, Berg called or e-mailed family members, saying he was searching for the safest way out of Iraq.

Berg's last known communication came on April 10, when Berg spoke with a State Department consular officer in Baghdad. Berg told the officer he was planning to get out of Iraq through Kuwait. It remains unclear, authorities said Wednesday, when Berg was abducted by the masked men pictured in the grainy video that showed his execution.

Berg's body was due to arrive as early as Wednesday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, a day after the video was aired on a militant Islamic Web site.

President Bush said there was "no justification" for killing the idealistic businessman who went to Iraq in search of communication-tower repair jobs.

And United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "horrified" by the beheading.

The video clip of the beheading had a statement saying a group linked to al-Qaeda did it in revenge for the abuse of imprisoned Iraqis by U.S. troops.

The videotape also carried a statement said to be from al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which said Berg's killing was in reprisal for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and ridiculed Muslim leaders for their failure to free Iraq. The FBI said that it had opened an investigation into the murder and would attempt to determine whether al-Zarqawi was one of the men in the video.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters Thursday in Baghdad that it appears al-Zarqawi was responsible, the Associated Press reported.

Asked whether he meant al-Zarqawi personally carried out the execution, Sanchez said, "All indications are he did it." Asked about al-Zarqawi's whereabouts, he said, "We believe he's moving around the country."

Later, however, Sanchez said it wasn't clear that Zarqawi was present at the killing. "I don't know whether he was personally holding the knife or in the room," Sanchez said. "I do not know that."

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said earlier it was likely that al-Zarqawi himself was "the lead perpetrator."

Some Arabs said al-Zarqawi had failed the very people he said he was avenging by strengthening the U.S. hand in Iraq.

"I want to say this action was bad because it makes Arabs look like barbarians, but that's what the Americans think anyway," said Mamdouh, an Egyptian pharmacy student who did not want to give his full name.

"Zarqawi is an enemy of the Arab and Muslim nation because he distorted their image and portrayed Islam in an incorrect manner," said Hasan Ahmad Jarallah, 41, a Saudi government employee, who had seen the tape on the Internet

Berg's father said earlier Wednesday that his son was a practicing Jew and that "there's a better chance than not" that his captors knew it. "If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him, that probably clinched it, I'm guessing," Michael Berg said.

Berg, a dedicated weight lifter and amateur comedian, had a desire to help people around the world, his family and friends said. Berg played tuba and saxophone, was in the National Honor Society and participated in the Science Olympiad, said Michael Dibartolomeo, who was principal at West Chester Henderson High School when Berg graduated in 1996. "I will tell you that you will not find a nicer young man than Nick Berg," Dibartolomeo said.

Name:

Support Evidence

Message:
On April 5, the Bergs sued the government in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally. In a writ filed April 5 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, the Bergs said the State Department told them their son "is currently detained in Mosul, Iraq, by the United States military" and that American diplomats "no longer" had "any authority or power to intervene" on his behalf.

Berg was released the day after the suit was filed. His family said he told them he had not been mistreated. They did not hear from him after April 9 -- when violence flared in Iraq because of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah and a Shiite uprising in the south.

They tried to sue the GOVENMENT for his release but there was nothing the government could do.

Name:

Right Wing Pirahna #3

In response to:
"His family said he told them he had not been mistreated."

Name:	Doug French
To:	Forum

Message:
We really need some help on this poll, so far we are losing almost 3 to 1. I think everyone is aware how much mileage the folks at CNN are going to try and get out of this if in fact the results show the majority of people want the AWB extended. Please take a minute to go to the site by using the link below and cast your vote http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/05/09/gun.control.rally.ap/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/05/09/gun.control.rally.ap/index.html