So maybe he’s attacking legal immigrants who have residency?

Thompson the headless mansion owner!

I must quibble, however, with your definition of the Iran Contra scandal, which corresponds to how most people define it. Profits from the sale of weapons to Iran constituted a tiny fraction of the overall flow of illegal, privately solicited funds flowing to the Contras.

After learning about Joe Wilson’s War much later I began to wonder if some of the Contra money was going to Afghanistan. Since you mention Saudi money it would even make more sense.

Does anyone know?

OK, Caption Contest.

Tell your daddy and mommy to vote for John Edwards!

Okay okay, so it’s not so funny. But, it is important.

Sorry I’m late — got back from the rellies later than I thought I would!

this is the link to the Soledad O’Brien religion/politics fest

There was quite a little dustup that Republicans had in their debate over the question of evolution. So I’ll put the same question to you. Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in creationism?

JOHN EDWARDS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe in evolution.

O’BRIEN: What do you say to all the people — and there are millions of people who go to church every Sunday and who are told very clearly by their pastors that, in fact, the Earth was created in six days, that it’s about creationism? Are those people wrong? Are their pastors wrong?

EDWARDS: No. First of all, I grew up in the church and I grew up as a Southern Baptist, was baptized in the Baptist Church when I was very young, a teenager at the time. And I was taught many of the same things. And I think it’s perfectly possible to make our faith, my faith belief system consistent with a recognition that there is real science out there and scientific evidence of evolution. I don’t think those things are inconsistent. I think a belief in God and a belief in Christ, in my case, is not in any way inconsistent with that.

O’BRIEN: There are some people who say, well, it’s actually — isn’t it mutually exclusive? I mean, either man was created by, you know, from Adam’s rib or, in fact, that man came evolution-wise from apes? Aren’t the two mutually exclusive?

EDWARDS: No, I don’t think they are. Because the hand of God was in every step of what’s happened with man. The hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet.

O’BRIEN: Do you think this is a Christian nation?

EDWARDS: No, I think this is a nation — I mean I’m a Christian; there are lots of Christians in United States of America. I mean, I have a deep and abiding love for my Lord, Jesus Christ, but that doesn’t mean that those who come from the Jewish faith, those who come from the Muslim faith, those who come from — those who don’t believe in the existence of God at all, that they don’t — that they’re not entitled to have their beliefs respected. They’re absolutely entitled to have their beliefs respected. It is one of the basis for which our democracy was founded.

For more of this discourse, including with Obama and Clinton:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRA…..se.01.html

I must quibble, however, with your definition of the Iran Contra scandal, which corresponds to how most people define it. Profits from the sale of weapons to Iran constituted a tiny fraction of the overall flow of illegal, privately solicited funds flowing to the Contras. People focus on the weapons profits because they constitute the improbable nexus between what were, at the time, two essentially separate scandals — the Contra war and the arms-for-hostages deal.

The Contra war was always the greater outrage Constitutionally — by creating an extragovernmental web of financing for proxy wars of choice, which North and Secord termed “the Enterprise,” agents of the Reagan administration circumvented both Congress’s war-declaration power and its power of the purse.

In fact, when the secrets of the Enterprise began unraveling, North, Edwin Meese, and others deliberately decided to highlight the minor link between Iran arms-sales profits and Contra funding as an attempt to contain the true contours of the scandal. Unfortunately, the very name the scandal has taken on has helped them succeed.

(The role of drug money as an established component of the North-Secord network remains dubious, in my view, although drug money did undoubtedly find its way back to the Contras, as Parry’s pioneering journalism documented. But laundered contributions from the Saudis and donors such as the Sultan of Brunei were the real goldmines.)