what a wonderful world it would be, if we did business in public. you could still steal from the tax man, support a secret mistress, bribe a politician- but it would be so hard and dangerous that virtue might be seen to be sensible.

if mccain suffers a major stroke two weeks before the convention, 'what's his name' will look like a lazy wimp for dropping out, and huck can demonstrate it's possible to do worse than goldwater and dukakis.

maybe you will find that depression, apathy, cynicism and corruption are the natural results of living on someone else's land, taken and held by militarism.

talk to hamas, find out if they are willing to share the land with you in a secular nation called palestine. if they are not, you are doomed.

the news reports explained about 'body-count' and 'free-fire zones', 'phoenix programs' and 'agent orange'. then calley got a couple of years confinement to barracks for mylai,and vietnam became a 'mistake'.

i formed the opinion then that the american electorate were not concerned about moral questions, as long as genocide didn't inconvenience them personally. things haven't changed.

the democrat leadership knows the caliber of the people who voted twice for george w bush. if they are told that they supported war crimes they will not fall to their knees and ask "where is salvation". if told they supported an incompetent who has gutted the nation's economy while soiling the nation's reputation, will they say: "my god! i was a fool!" nope. they'll cover their mistake with another.

pathetic as the dem congress may be, they could be right not to remark on the suppurating corpse of the bush administration. there's just too many americans who pulled the trigger, not least among the dem politicians..

'contractors' get high rates of pay, for the work they do. because they're working in the middle of a war.

there is no law where conflict is settled with a gun. a woman who enters this situation should pack a gun, and make will. and if she is groped, assaulted, or gang-raped, that's why the contract said arbitration, not litigation.

these women entered the contract, lost their bet, and only now discover they've been deprived of rights. tough!

a law which can't be enforced is merely a lie, perhaps a pious hope. a law which the competent authority will not enforce is a law with neither piety nor potency in it.

sexual assault happens in the usa in spite of relatively benign conditions for women. if you think going to iraq should, or can, provide equal conditions, you are a fool. i will even hazard a guess that the men you find working in a war zone include a higher percentage of marginal sociopaths than on american city streets.

signing a contract to participate in a war should have inspired careful reading of the contract, even if you are careless about your phone or credit card contracts. but if you decide to take the money after you have considered where you will be working, for whom you will be working, and with whom you will be working, then surely you should be unsurprised at the result.

nonetheless,i hope kbr is pursued through the courts. expecting morality from corporations is childish, so the only check on them is financial sanctions. i won't be surprised if the result is unsatisfying for you, american courts are not much refuge nowadays, and the purpose of these arbitration contracts is precisely to arm defense lawyers.

the nation that came up with 'body count', 'free-fire zones', and 'phoenix program' and characterized mylai as a minor case of over-zealous dissemination of democracy might not have all that high a reputation to begin with.

when, a few years back, sac reported they had succeeded in dropping a bomb on a wedding party in afghanistan because a member of alqaeda might have attended, the other 150 people became 'collateral damage', showing that the concept of 'free-fire zone' was not obsolete.

seeing what happened to most of the neighbors of the growing usa, and then the extension of 'neighbor' from puerto rico to laos, open-minded americans will understand that nothing you do causes any great surprise, any more.

reputation? you been watching too many john wayne movies.

the nation that gave us 'free-fire zones' and then moved up to 'collateral damage' is once again demonstrating the surgical precision of military justice.

why is no one saluting?

but you'll figure it out if you keep trying. have you got behind the 'initiative for democracy' yet? or are you going to wait for someone else to save the nation from 'americanism'?

h. l. mencken knew that when fascism came to america, it would be americanized.

if you go on voting for politicians, you're going to be ruled by politicians. complaining that they aren't honorable people is like complaining that whores ain't virgin, or hyenas ain't vegetarian.

there is an alternative, it's called democracy. google 'initiative for democracy',and see one suggestion as to how the citizens of america can vote for policies, for plans, and for laws, instead of politicians.

or go on complaining about the quality of pollies, that's really constructive.

a few years back, was redefined as putting the same input into the same system, and expecting a different result.

try real democracy, people, it'll clean out the beltway like a drano enema. you can get some at 'initiative for democracy'. it's relatively cheap, a few minutes at the keyboard, maybe a few bucks later on, and you get a nation honest people can be proud of, because it belongs to them.

and how would you know?

maintaining an organization for personal and clandestine murder kind of gets you off to a bad start in projecting an appearance of morality.

i'm still waiting for someone to hang for mylai, or cambodian carpet-bombing.

american justice is situational. it depends on who commits the crime.