President Obama, is expected to hold his first Rose Garden press conference today at 12:30pm EST.
His administration claims he does not want the U.S. to become a "political football" or "foil" to the demonstrators who are protesting Iran's disputed election outcome.

























There is one thing you can bet on, is that the theocracy has lost its credibility in the eyes of the progressive population. The political climate has change and will never be as before.
What about North Korea war and rescue 2 American.
Anyway, Iran is not on the top of his list. He still has to figure out what he will tell all of us about North Korea so that he will appear to have a handle on that situation. Biden was right. Obama is being tested and if I were grading …….. what’s lower than failing?
Seriously though, you are so right. I believe the President has become quite good at political sleight of hand. He wants us to be distracted by one action so that we ignore another.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but I think it was a darn good call for the swine flu to come about just as the bloodshed in Mexico was coming to a head.
The President needs to show some fortitude and not just deliver a speech but show discernment with his addresses. Speak firmly for now but prepared to act should the situation call for it.
Lower than failing should be impeachment.
Out-f&#@*!g-standing. Wish I had thought of that. Sorry! Couldn't think of a better adjective. Shame on you self!
Out-f&#@*!g-standing: the blog!
I love it. I think i will take a screenshot and send it to whitehouse.gov
The US should stay out and see how it ends up.
The Irani are Persians, and will get offended quickly if you call them Arabs. So our State Dept needs to be on their toes.
it's not our problem. We have our own problem
in america.
Obama actually almost did the right thing. He didn't launch into a tirade that would have allowed that whack job Ahmadinejad to use the USA as a rallying point for the Iranians. It's time we learned not everyone in the world wants to be like us, and that a broken country with no manufacturing and only a few years of oil of our own can't be the world's policeman.
Our insertion into Iraq only advanced terrorism and hate of the USA. We managed to turn the world's sympathy for us and hate for terrorists into dislike for us. We don't need to further that backwards step by involving ourselves in Iran's internal affairs.
While I don't agree with everything Obama is doing, at least he hasn't made any major blunders. I agree with his apology to the rest of the world for our bad behavior. I also agree with his statement that the USA is not a Christian nation. This is a nation that was founded as a free country when people of all faiths or even no faith are allowed to live in harmony. This is what we fought for.
Some of the comments are simply bizarre, like the suggestion that the swine flu is an intentional distraction. One has to wonder how firmly rooted in reality some of us are.
Gary and many others, in their zeal to promote hate politics, seem to forget who created this mess. They can whine and complain about a six month president, but for the last 40 years Republicans and Democrats alike have been the root of our problems. The key rules that prevented the financial collapse were tossed out by Republicans and Democrats alike.
If we look honestly and openly at history it is pretty easy to see it has been a toss up when laying blame. Anyone thinking a Republican or Democrat is going to come riding in and save our country is deluding himself. All the ranting and raving and holier than you attitudes will do is slow down education and learning what we have done wrong, and how to fix it.
It's time to let hate politics and my-God-is better-than-your-God politics go, and start actually working on restoring our country. We haven't been at the top in education or anything else for 20 years now, and it is mostly because we have forgotten how to be objective and honest.
We can't fix the world until we fix the USA. We can't fix the USA until we fix Barnesville and Lamar County. And we sure as hell aren't going to fix anything until we are honest and own up to our mistakes, say we are sorry, and move on a better path.
T. B. Bechtel, a City Councillor from Newcastle, Australia, was asked on
a local live radio talk show, just what he thought about the allegations
of torture of suspected terrorists. His reply prompted his ejection from
the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience.
HIS STATEMENT:
'If hooking up one raghead terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car
battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel-shagger will save
just one Australian life, then I have only three things to say,'
'Red is positive. Black is negative. And make sure his nuts are wet.'
It can't be both ways Sheila. We certainly CAN tell the rest of the world we are one kind of people and then do something openly hypocritical, but we also have to understand by doing that we don't look any better or more appealing than those we point fingers at.
If you read through this blog or other patriotic forums, your will find an abundance of patriotic Christians against harming or killing any human life, even in stages prior or unrelated to human life (like stem cells).
We can find rants about North Korea and how they hold unfair trials, keeping those who oppose them captive for years.
While we preach Christian love, life, freedom, liberty, and the rule of law to others...our own leaders break the very rules or treaties we have signed with other "civil" nations.
If we really want to be number one again we have to stop living a lie. We can't pretend we are one thing and then, when convenient to us, be what we claim we are against.
For example?
We trained and financed Bin Laden to help him fight against the Russians because the Russians were "invading" his people's homeland. Why would we not expect him to do the same to us?
We supported the Shaw of Iran while he had goon squads. The Shaw ruled by killing or jailing anyone who opposed him, and now we want Iran's ruling party to listen to us when we tell them to not use the very same tactics.
Why do we expect other people to behave differently than we do? We set examples, and then we expect others to be have differently.
I never thought it was humorous or funny when our troupes were tortured in Vietnam. Around twenty years ago a friend was tortured, shot, and left hooked to an IV in a dry river bed in South America by people trying to extract information from him. He was there supporting people trying to overthrow a ruling party. I didn't think that was funny or right regardless of the reason Fred was there.
I don't think it is any more funny or humorous when we do it, unless we expect others to laugh when they do it to us or our allies.
Where is the draft......how many have registered in the past 5 years? Where is God in the government? Don't hand me that crap about separation of church and state either...it says SEPARATE...Not ELIMINATE. Everyone owns America because we sent the jobs away. Thanks to Bill (I love that blue dress) Clinton. You can kiss the terrorists A$$ like obama.........NOT ME!!! You have ZERO respect for all the Veterans that died for this country. Your attitude is sorry, Doc!!!!!!
We have to look at the problem clearly and without bias.
When I worked for Zenith the Japanese were dumping consumer electronics below cost. Zenith, Magnavox, Motorola and others banded together and tried to get our Republican president to enforce trade laws equally. We sued and won, and not a single Democrat or Republican would help us collect the damages or even enforce the trade rules we had to live by.
We let this happen with steel and with every other major industry.
Clinton had a part in it with NAFTA, but then so did all the Republicans. Right now we have two Republicans in Georgia who won't do a thing about illegal aliens and our border. It is not just Obama and not just the Democrats.
Republicans are just as much to blame as Democrats in the financial collapse. Phil Gramm was the leader in the financial collapse, although Democrats had a hand in it also. Research the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and how it set the stage for the Wall Street collapse.
Ronald Regan himself is a major cause of the problems we have today. He is the leader who in speech after speech wanted us to have a new service based economy and move away from manufacturing.
If we are ever going to fix this, we have to face the truth. We have to stop this silly hate stuff and the childish "blame the other party" games.
Ad hominem attacks against others without supporting facts, be it me or the president, simply show when people have no good honest factual answers in a debate.
Number ONE:
Question: "What does the Bible say about war?"
Answer: Many people make the mistake of reading what the Bible says in Exodus 20:13, “You shall not kill,” and then seeking to apply this command to war. However, the Hebrew word literally means “the intentional, premeditated killing of another person with malice; murder.” God often ordered the Israelites to go to war with other nations (1 Samuel 15:3; Joshua 4:13). God ordered the death penalty for numerous crimes (Exodus 21:12, 15; 22:19; Leviticus 20:11). So, God is not against killing in all circumstances, but only murder. War is never a good thing, but sometimes it is a necessary thing. In a world filled with sinful people (Romans 3:10-18), war is inevitable. Sometimes the only way to keep sinful people from doing great harm to the innocent is by going to war.
In the Old Testament, God ordered the Israelites to: “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites” (Numbers 31:2). Deuteronomy 20:16-17 declares, “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the LORD your God has commanded you.” Also, 1 Samuel 15:18 says, “Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites; make war on them until you have wiped them out.” Obviously God is not against all war. Jesus is always in perfect agreement with the Father (John 10:30), so we cannot argue that war was only God’s will in the Old Testament. God does not change (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17).
Jesus’ second coming will be exceedingly violent. Revelation 19:11-21 describes the ultimate war with Christ, the conquering commander who judges and makes war “with justice” (v. 11). It’s going to be bloody (v. 13) and gory. The birds will eat the flesh of all those who oppose Him (v. 17-18). He has no compassion upon His enemies, whom He will conquer completely and consign to a “fiery lake of burning sulfur” (v. 20).
It is an error to say that God never supports a war. Jesus is not a pacifist. In a world filled with evil people, sometimes war is necessary to prevent even greater evil. If Hitler had not been defeated by World War II, how many more millions would have been killed? If the American Civil War had not been fought, how much longer would African-Americans have had to suffer as slaves?
War is a terrible thing. Some wars are more “just” than others, but war is always the result of sin (Romans 3:10-18). At the same time, Ecclesiastes 3:8 declares, “There is…a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” In a world filled with sin, hatred, and evil (Romans 3:10-18), war is inevitable. The most important thing we can be doing in a time of war is to be praying for godly wisdom for our leaders, praying for the safety of our military, praying for quick resolution to conflicts, and praying for a minimum of casualties among civilians on both sides (Philippians 4:6-7).
NUMBER TWO:
They all sat on the plane, delayed by the airport's heavy morning traffic, as American Airlines Flight 11 and
United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston. They sat there as American Airlines flight 77 left Washington.
At 8:42 a.m., Flight 93 took off, light with passengers, heavy with 11,000 gallons of jet fuel for its
cross-country flight. Nicole Miller's boyfriend watched it leave from his own plane, as it sat on the tarmac.
Six minutes later, the north tower of the World Trade Center erupted in flames.
For the next 30 minutes, it appears, Flight 93 soared west across Pennsylvania as havoc erupted behind it.
Flight attendants, passenger accounts suggest, poured coffee and served breakfast.
One of the attendants, CeeCee Ross Lyles, was at the beginning of her career. She had dreamed of being a
flight attendant since she took her first plane trip at age 6 but had just realized her dream a year ago, leaving
after six years of work as a police officer. Another, Sandra Bradshaw, was thinking about leaving her job so
she could stay home with her children.
At some point, before the plane reached Cleveland, the hijackers took over the plane, armed with knives and
the threat of a bomb.
Around 9:30 a.m., air traffic controllers in Cleveland heard someone in the cockpit say, "Hey, get out of here!"
a source said. Then a voice, in what was described as a thick Arabic accent, was heard that appeared to be
addressing passengers, even though it was radioed to air traffic control.
"This is your captain," the man said. "There is a bomb on board. Remain in your seats. We are returning to the
airport."
How the hijackers overpowered the pilots remains unclear. One passenger would report in a telephone call
that two people lay on the floor in the first-class cabin, either injured or dead. They appeared to be the pilot
and co-pilot, he said, relating information from a flight attendant. Another told a friend that two people's
throats were slit but didn't identify them. A third saw only one injured.
At least five passengers and flight attendants described the hijackers in their calls in similar terms: three
men, wearing red bandannas, one with some sort of box strapped around his waist that he claimed was a
bomb. One passenger reported that two of the hijackers were in the cockpit and a third guarded passengers
in first class from behind a curtain.
None of the callers mentioned a fourth hijacker, although the FBI has identified four men in connection with
the hijacking.
Those men are Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi, Ahmed Alnami and Ziad Jarrah.
It may be that the people who made calls were unable to see the fourth hijacker. Some news reports have
suggested one may have already gained access to the cockpit, as an uniformed guest pilot sitting in the spare
jump-seat. Or, some terrorism experts suggest, he may have played a role as a backup, perhaps remaining
unidentified among the other passengers or hiding in the bathroom until he was needed.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said Friday that their "best information" shows that four were involved.
By 9:36 a.m., United Flight 93 had suddenly changed course, according to flight-path information provided by
Flight Explorer, a firm that supplies real-time radar tracking data. The plane had made a U-turn and headed
back toward Washington.
In the cabin, passengers frantically began making calls, 23 from the seat-back phones alone from 9:31 to
9:53 a.m. Others passed cell phones to people who had been strangers just minutes before.
Why so many people were able to make calls while apparently under guard by hijackers could be that, as
one passenger reported, there was no hijacker among the passengers in coach.
Some of the telephone calls were short — no more than a few rushed words of fear or love.
Lauren Grandcolas, flying home to San Rafael, Calif., from her grandmother's funeral, left a message for her
husband saying her flight had been hijacked but she was "comfortable, for now."
Linda Gronlund and Joe Deluca, on their way to San Francisco for a vacation together, took turns. She called
her sister to say she would miss her. He called his father.
"The plane's been hijacked," he said. "I love you."
Andrew Garcia, an Air National Guard air traffic controller and plane buff, only managed to get out his wife's
name, "Dorothy," before his phone went dead.
Other passengers, though, managed to conduct fairly lengthy, even repeated conversations during the plane's
final minutes, constructing a jumbled puzzle of what was happening inside the Boeing 757.
Deena Burnett was feeding her three daughters breakfast and watching the news in horror when the
telephone rang in her home in San Ramon, Calif.
"Are you OK?" she asked her husband, Tom, 38.
"No," he said. "I'm on the airplane and it's been hijacked."
He told his wife the hijackers had stabbed someone. He told her to call the authorities, and he hung up.
When he called back, she was on the line to the FBI. She told him about the World Trade Center, the first
he knew of the attack. He paused. "Were they commercial airplanes?" he asked.
Deena Burnett didn't think so. Cargo or private planes, she said.
"Do you know anything else about the planes?" No, she said.
"Do you know who was involved?" Again, she said no.
He told her the man who was stabbed had died.
The hijackers are talking about running the plane into the ground, he said. Then he said he had to go.
His third call came about 9:41 a.m., shortly after a plane had hit the Pentagon. "OK," he said. "We're going
to do something."
In his fourth and final call, just before 10 a.m., Burnett said he was sure the hijackers didn't have a bomb,
that he thought they had only knives.
"There's a group of us who are going to do something," he repeated.
Deena Burnett thought about her years of training as a flight attendant. She was taught to appease hijackers,
to meet their demands, to stay in the background. She told her husband to sit down. "Don't draw attention to
yourself," she said.
She told him she loved him. She felt he thought he was coming home that night. This was simply a problem
that he was going to solve, as he had solved many others.
As Burnett talked with his wife, three other men who may have joined him in whatever plans were being
hatched made calls of their own.
Across the aisle in Seat 4D, Mark Bingham, 31, called his mother. He was so rattled that when Alice Hoglan
got on the line, her son told her, "This is Mark Bingham."
His message was brief: The plane had been hijacked by three men and he loved her.
In the rear of the plane, Jeremy Glick, also 31, a sales manager for a Web site firm and former judo
champion, called his wife from a seat-back phone. He described three Middle Eastern men brandishing knives
and a red box.
His wife told him about the attacks at the World Trade Center. He tried to grasp the hijackers' plans — to blow
up the plane or fly it into a target?
The passengers had taken a vote among themselves, he said. They had decided to try to take back the plane.
"I told him to go ahead and do it," Lyzbeth Glick said on "Good Morning America. "I trusted his instincts, and I
said, 'Do what you have to do.' I knew that I thought he could do it."
Beamer, 32, an account manager for Oracle, called a stranger. He picked up a seat-back phone and hit "0,"
and at 9:45 a.m., he was connected first to a dispatcher for GTE Airfone, and then to Lisa Jefferson, the
operator's supervisor.
For 13 minutes, Beamer told Jefferson everything he could, passing along information he gleaned himself and
from a flight attendant. The passengers remained in their seats, she said he told her, and the flight attendants
were forced to sit in the back of the plane.
He told her how much he loved his pregnant wife and two sons, and he asked her to call them. He asked her
to recite the Lord's Prayer and 23rd Psalm with him.
Moments later, Beamer told Jefferson about the plan, that the passengers were going to run up the long,
narrow aisle to the first-class cabin and attack the hijacker there.
"I'm going to have to go out on faith," Beamer said.
He turned to someone else, and he said, "Are you ready?" Then, in the last words Jefferson would hear from
him, "OK. Let's roll."
Sandra Bradshaw, the flight attendant, also identified three hijackers when she called her husband in
Greensboro, N.C. She had been moved to the back of the plane, she said, but she and other passengers
had a plan. They were going to rush their captors; she was boiling water to throw on them.
Another passenger, Elizabeth Wainio, also apparently talked of a plan to rush the hijackers. In a call she made
to her stepmother in Baltimore, using the cell phone lent to her by Lauren Grandcolas, she said, "I've got to
go now, Mom, they're breaking into the cockpit," according to the mother of another passenger, who said she
spoke with family members about the call. Wainio's parents declined comment.
The accounts of these calls — if accurate — would indicate that at least four people were somehow plotting to
attack the hijackers. If Beamer's report is accurate, they were seated in different sections of the plane, with
Bingham and Burnett up front, while the others were in the back.
It may be there were separate plans to take the plane or that somehow, amid all the telephone calls, chaos
and fear, the passengers were able to communicate with each other.
If they did, they may have known they had another pilot among them, Donald Greene, chief executive officer
of Safe Flight Instrument in New York. Greene, according to his family, knew anything and everything about
airplanes.
At about 9:54 a.m., the plane started flying erratically. In Oak Brook, Ill., Jefferson heard screams in the
background.
Two minutes later, the plane's flight plan changed. The destination airport was changed from San Francisco
International to Ronald Reagan National Airport. Estimated time of arrival: 10:28 a.m.
At nearly the same moment, from the plane's bathroom, someone called 911, repeating that Flight 93 had
been hijacked, that this was not a hoax.
Then, Marion Britton called a longtime friend, Fred Fiumano, at his New York City auto shop.
Britton, crying, told him the plane was turning around. It was going to go down.
"Don't worry about it," Fiumano said, trying desperately to reassure her. "They're only taking you for a ride."
He heard yelling and screaming in the background, and then the phone went dead. He tried to call the
cellular-phone number back, but no one answered.
A few of the passengers expected they would win the battle. Before Lyzbeth Glick turned over the phone to
her father because she couldn't bear to listen anymore, her husband told her, "Hang on the line. I'll be back."
At 10:03 a.m., a black crater bloomed in the soft earth of a field 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The wife in California, the father-in-law in New York, the operator in suburban Chicago still held onto their
phones.
They held on, waiting and hoping in the silence.
NUMBER THREE:
Kiss my big AMERICAN Maximum Glutenous. America was number one at one time. Probably not again for many generations because of wimpy opinions like yours and obama and his gang!
NUMBER FOUR:
Red is positive, black is negative, keep your fruit-of-the-looms dry.
For the last time, if you're going to post an unoriginal thought (not likely...) at least cite your source.
The internet is full of unreliable information - something I tell my students all the time. Some are better than others and any crackpot can post what they please. See one source of above plagiarized, un-cited, quotation:
http://www.gotquestions.org/war-Bible.html
You can judge for yourself if you deem this website a source of redeeming information on thelogical questions.
If we are going to put a stop to terrorists, we have to stop emulating their tactics.
That is an emotional story. It should motivate us to win, NOT to lose. It would be wrong to let those people die in vain by doing exactly what the terrorists want. Please stop letting Osama Bin Laden pull your strings.
The very thing the terrorists want is for us to behave exactly as you are proposing. If we play into their hands by becoming like them and casting aside our laws, they will win.
The terrorists came from the Afghanistan and Pakistan border area. We invaded Iran instead of chasing down Bin Laden, a terrorist our own CIA financed and trained. The entire world realizes this. It is no secret. It is a fact. It was our mistake.
When we go into a nation that is none of our business under the mistaken assumption they have WMD or they want to be like us, and when we kill countless thousands of men, women, and children who had nothing to do with 9/11, it is exactly what terrorists want. It is like a Christmas gift to them. It gives them the hate tools they need to recruit more terrorists because it makes people who didn't hate us suddenly hate us with a passion. By falling into that trap we become our own worst enemy, and we become our enemies biggest recruitment tool.
There are many reasons American is not number one. We have a failing educational system, we have a deteriorating family structure, we are out of cheap oil, we don't secure our borders, we don't protect our domestic manufacturing or farming, we don't monitor our financial institutions, and now we have a tendency to think dishonoring our agreements with the rest of the world is "patriotic".
We beam Soap Operas all over the world that others think represents life in America, we have politicians and men of the cloth who have homosexual interactions with minor children and with adult women out of wedlock. Make no mistake about it, this is NOT just Bill Clinton. It is equally both parties and churches who have dishonored us.
We killed many thousands of people who had nothing to do with 9/11, and we somehow expect the friends and families of those people to like us and want to be just like us!
Take a deep breath and reflect on how we would feel if a thug street gang from Canada bombed China, and the Chinese came to the USA and started fighting people they thought might have something to do with the gang from Canada. Let's say the Chinese killed 50,000 people here who had nothing to do with the attack on China. Would we hold them in high esteem and want to help them?
This is a problem we created. Now we have to deal with it.
We signed and we demand others follow specific rules concerning prisoners. When we don't follow the same rules we expect others to follow, it makes us all look like liars. John McCain knows this. Anyone who served the USA with honor knows this. This was the difference between us and the Japanese and Germans in WWII. Because we had high standards, people wanted us to win.
Nobody with honor cheered for people who tortured or murdered prisoners. Only those with the blackest of hearts supported such activity.
We really need to stop all the hate theatrics (like Hitler used) and go after the terrorists without destabilizing other nations. If we go in like fools and kill ten's of thousands of innocent people, we will breed more terrorists than we manage to stop.
Girls don't (or they didn't) get a chance to learn some things. Boys learn when they get in enough fist fights. A fight starts and for some everything gets blurry and red and they start swinging. The really successful fighters learn to not get blind-mad, but to watch and plan what they are doing by staying in a successful routine. Successful fighters learn to take a hit without loosing their cool, and to go after the weakest points without wasting energy on the wrong target.
We forgot how to fight that way sometime after WWII.
Think about it. Use some common sense. Stop letting hate rule you. Unless we do that, we are destined to fail. It would be nice if we could stop doing what what the terrorists want and become Americans again.
Although I think that is tasteless and disgusting, you certainly have the right to your opinion.
You debate an issue or make a point by attacking people and calling childish names. Then you demand people who you call names or personally insult listen to you, take your advice, and read something you copied and pasted from the Internet.
Ronald Regan, a true American cowboy, is a good part of why our economy is in the shape it is in. He and his team pushed and pushed and he gave countless speeches about taking us into a service economy that is dependent on free trade. He let the steel industy collapse through unfair trade and he refused to help companies who won lawsuits against others for dumping collect money courts awarded them.
The problems we are in go through all political parties, even Reagan. We can't export our low level jobs without creating a welfare state.
Yours were the most intelligent comments I've read on this blog lately. Most Americans are begining to see that our problems are of our own making and only then can we fix them and restore our standing in the world. We will never be able to fix the world but an attitude that respects others and their beliefs is a giant step in the right dirrection. Please blog more often. I've almost quit pulling up this web site because it is dominated by blind hatred and ignorance not worth reading. Good day to you sir.