What this should have said is “When you have an enemy, who’s ideology is counter, that has declared war on your belief or ideology of life and it’s inherent “rights”, then you must declare a war, to to allow your belif or iedology to preval.”

Sorry for the late proof reading. Bb

9/11 was bad..

We should expect that our govt. would find a way to make another attack far less likely. We should expect it to be taken seriously.

We should not expect it to be used to excuse a brainfart war- or to excuse tearing up the bill of rights.
…

Slightly OT:

I think you’re seeing this from your own typical Dem viewpoint and missing that the Republican culture and world-view has moved off in a different direction. I think they’re quite paranoid and maybe even felt that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Clintons or the Dems to distract their attention from the attack they had talked about for some years, the war on Saddam. Consider that as a hypothesis and then review things like Bush saying the CIA had “covered their ass” by warning him about the imminent 9/11 attack. Consider his quick change of direction after going into Afghanistan first and then switching to Iraq. I think he felt the Clintons and Dems somehow supported Saddam or were benefiting from his presence and were trying to protect him from Bush. Maybe it’s far-fetched, but it is a theory which helps explain the weird Bush behaviors. Doesn’t it also help explain their constant attacks on Bill and their obvious concern about Hillary?

OTOH, with Hillary talking about a Vast-Right-Wing-Conspiracy you can easily imagine the Clintons (and perhaps some other Dems) having similar conspiratorial feelings about the Republicans. Did Bush have a hand in 9/11 as the PNAC report seems to indicate? Was it a set-up to give him carte blanche to attack Iraq?

There are plenty of explanations which ignore OTHER possibly real explanations of what happened.

It’s time to revisit 9/11 to create a more solid foundation of knowledge upon which to base our foreign policy AND AND to heal some domestic wounds.

Our faults lie not in the stars, but in ourselves.

All wars are about ideolgies, and it is far past time for our (progressives and all they stand for) ideolgy to preval.

Food for thought. Bb

However – There is a type of budget reconciliation bill – as referenced above by bmaz – that is not subject to filibuster (the same does not apply to regular appropriations bills, as far as I know, though):

First used in 1980 this process was used at the end of a fiscal year to enact legislation to fine tune revenue and spending levels through legislation that could not be filibustered in the Senate. The policy changes brought about by this part of the budget process have served as constraints on the levels of mandatory spending and federal tax revenues which also has served since 1981 as a vehicle for deficit reduction. The reconciliation process is an optional procedure and not a required action by Congress every fiscal year as is passage of the concurrent budget resolution. However, during the eighteen year period from 1980 to 1998 thirteen reconciliation measures have been enacted into law and numerous others have been considered by Congress.

[snip]

Furthermore, the Budget Act prevents reconciliation legislation from being filibustered on the Senate floor.

[snip]

In contrast to the concurrent budget resolution, a reconciliation bill is sent to the President for approval or disapproval.

http://www.rules.house.gov/arc…..c_proc.htm

A while back, I remember thinking that a budget reconciliation bill could be a way to mandate a drawdown of funding for Iraq to bypass a filibuster, if there was the Congressional will. I don’t know enough about the process to understand if that was (or is) a viable option this year with regard to Iraq, or not, though.

For the record: The House has already passed both its FY 2008 Defense Authorization and Defense Appropriations Bills (with no significant changes for Iraq included). It has yet to deal with the FY 2008 $197 billion Iraq “emergency” funding supplemental. The Senate will be bringing its Defense Authorization Bill (as referenced @ 124) back to the floor next week, and its Defense Appropriations Bill remains in committee. The Senate must wait for action from the House on the $197 billion supplemental before acting on that.

Background on one recent (science) authorization bill that was signed into law 8/9/07:

Differing versions of the legislation initially passed the U.S. House of Representatives in May and the U.S. Senate in July. House and Senate negotiators worked quietly for several weeks to resolve differences between the two bills. On August 2, the final compromise passed the House by a vote of 367-57 and passed the Senate by unanimous consent.

The President signed the bill into law despite reservations about parts of the package. A statement released by the White House says, “The President is concerned that the legislation includes excessive authorizations and new duplicative programs. The bill creates over 30 new programs that are mostly duplicative or counterproductive – including a new Department of Energy agency to fund late-stage technology development more appropriately left to the private sector – and also provides excessive authorization for existing programs. Accordingly, the President will request funding in his 2009 budget for those authorizations that support the focused priorities of the ACI [American Competitiveness Initiative], but will not propose excessive or duplicative funding based on authorizations in the bill.”

It is important to distinguish this multi-year authorization bill from the annual appropriations bills that determine the actual funding levels for the science agencies under consideration. An authorization bill is neither necessary nor sufficient to appropriate funds for federal agencies and programs. The White House has already indicated that President Bush will not ask Congress to appropriate all of the funding that is authorized in the American COMPETES Act. Nevertheless, enactment of the America COMPETES Act reflects strong, bipartisan support for increasing the nation’s investment in research and science education.

http://ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1842

–Even My Little Soldier Is A Pacifist
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Seen in mid-Missouri today: Bombing for peace is like fu**ing for virginity.