Politics & Government - 1 August 2007

can i get my divers license at age of 18 without the six month permit

2007-08-01 13:21:30 · 5 answers · asked by abc.xyz 3 in Law Enforcement & Police

2007-08-01 13:20:17 · 14 answers · asked by Brian_Galang 4 in Government

2007-08-01 13:19:59 · 16 answers · asked by Anonymous in Politics

2007-08-01 13:19:47 · 31 answers · asked by kamelia 2 in Law & Ethics

2007-08-01 13:18:46 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous in Politics

we deport all illegal alliens and build a wall then what , are we going to live like in a giant bubble , just like in the movie the Simpsons? no one goes in or out. ............... yeah I know "we welcome Legal Visitors" and " they must speak English " cause we are so lonely and we need someone to talk to.

2007-08-01 13:18:38 · 13 answers · asked by santos laguna 3 in Immigration

Like every civilization all come to an end. How long will it take the US and what will be its demise?

2007-08-01 13:17:57 · 26 answers · asked by danny 1 in Immigration

Currently we ride on the back of a mining export boom mostly to China, this has given Australia vast economic strength, at the risk of what ? Is it to risky to export minerals or iron ore to foreign places like China ? Certainly banned with North Korea, but shouldn't trade sanctions exist so that our exports can't be returned in the form of Artillery, bullrts or bombs ?

2007-08-01 13:16:41 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Military

I personally think current US politicos could learn so much from him, he sought to understand the people he was dealing with, doesn't seem to be much evidence of that now.

2007-08-01 13:16:17 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous in Military

Are they?

2007-08-01 13:15:32 · 8 answers · asked by ihatewinnipegx 1 in Law & Ethics

Does he not know thats an act of war?

2007-08-01 13:14:10 · 20 answers · asked by Anonymous in Politics

do you agree with her or think she is mean spirited ?

2007-08-01 13:12:00 · 15 answers · asked by Anonymous in Other - Politics & Government

The term has been used alot, but never clearly defined.

2007-08-01 13:11:48 · 18 answers · asked by Anonymous in Military

my mom is in the national guard and had surgery were they had to put in an acute port into her chest and this was done at the v.a. hospital they told her they would be putting her asleep for the operation so they put the iv in her and then take her to surgery well they started to cut and my mom told them to stop cuz she could feel it and remember she was supposed to be asleep during this well they continue on and she is still telling them to stop and crying and screaming but they don't stop she tells them that she can feel everything and that the meds aren't working but still they don't stop to see why she is awake and talking to them. finally they get done with the surgery and she goes into recovery and the nurse there said she wasn't expecting her to be awake but asleep my mom tells her she never was asleep and then they realized the reason her meds weren't workin was because they didn't get into her blood stream they stayed in her arm. we filled a complaint to the medical advacate

2007-08-01 13:09:30 · 3 answers · asked by partyprincess8186 2 in Law & Ethics

The new Congress takes an old approach to homeland security.


Members of Congress head home this week with precious little to show for their months of grandstanding on the Hill. However, as the clock counted down to August recess, lawmakers were able to get one “signature” bill off to the president, an act purporting to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Those hoping the bill would provide a clear strategic direction for homeland-security policy will find this “signature” as inscrutable as that of a drunken doctor writing in haste. But the bill does clearly show, however, that the way Congress “does” homeland security has changed significantly under it new Democratic leadership.

That’s not to say that everything about the bill is wrong-headed. The so-called 9/11 bill includes several positives, embracing measures that homeland security experts have long advocated. Among these are provisions:

Lowering the minimum amount of security grants that Washington must give each state. Unlike most of the bill’s provisions, this one actually was recommended by the 9/11 Commission, which was rightfully concerned that homeland security grants were becoming little more than vehicles for pork-barrel spending projects. This reform will allow the Department of Homeland Security to focus more money on the highest homeland security priorities.

Requiring periodic strategic assessments similar to the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Reviews. It makes sense to take time occasionally to review whether what’s being done is actually accomplishing anything useful.

Promoting reform and encouraging a modest expansion in the Visa Waiver Program. Efforts to increase opportunities for America’s friends and allies to visit the U.S. while making terrorist travel more difficult are long overdue.

Nor did the final bill include every bad idea incorporated in the original bills offered in the House and Senate. For example, bill conferees dropped a measure that would have expanded union rights over the Transportation Safety Administration. The erstwhile “union protection” provisions would have made it virtually impossible for TSA make timely changes in its passenger screening procedure in response to ever-evolving security threats.

Unfortunately, the bill does contain a good deal of junk. Some requirements will actually make America less safe, needlessly siphoning time, effort, and resources away from the kind of work that actually thwarts terrorists. Among the key strategic missteps are provisions that:

Increase spending based on criteria unrelated to actual security risks. Though they tightened up one state grant program, lawmakers wound up creating new grant programs, beefing up existing (and unfocused) grant programs, and injecting wasteful state minimums into more grant funding formulas. They also adopted a host of earmarks from congressional leadership. In the end, Congress could not resist buying a bigger barrel and stuffing it with even more pork.

Require ports and airlines to scan every container entering the United States. While this initiative “polls well,” most security experts find the idea preposterous. The scanning will produce so much data (and poor-quality data at that) that it will bog down rather than inform security operations. By the time anyone dockside will be able to review pictures of, say, a container of sneakers sent from China, odds are the shoes will have already been stocked, sold, and walking around the country for weeks.

One measure of how far the bill has missed its strategic mark is how found in how very few of its more than 700 pages of provisions pertains in any way to recommendations actually made by the 9/11 Commission. Inspecting every container of frozen fish, for example, was never suggested in the commission report.

How curious that the so-called 9/11 bill can come up with so many frothy original ideas, yet scrupulously avoid so many hard-nosed recommendations from the commission. For instance, whatever happened to the idea of further consolidating the jurisdiction of congressional committees over the Homeland Security Department. The new law studiously ignores this basic housekeeping reform so strenuously sought by the commission.

What Congress cobbled together shortly before recess was pretty much standard kitchen-sink legislation — a hodgepodge of measures styled mostly to please various stakeholders and deliver on campaign promises. Some are good, some bad, and some indifferent. This “new” way of doing homeland security looks an awful lot like the traditional way Congress legislates.

The contrast with how Congress approached homeland security shortly after 9/11 could not be more striking. In the wake of the attack, legislators purposefully created the Department of Homeland Security, passed the Patriot Act (which has actually helped stop terrorist attacks), and reformed the intelligence community. The post-9/11 congresses governed a nation at war.

Until this year.

This year, Congress slaps together a mediocre bill, bats it over to the president, and goes on vacation.

2007-08-01 13:08:31 · 9 answers · asked by mission_viejo_california 2 in Politics

Obamy does,

2007-08-01 13:08:12 · 20 answers · asked by Anonymous in Other - Politics & Government

I see this term all over the place
Is it a racial slur ?

2007-08-01 13:07:51 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Immigration

2007-08-01 13:07:41 · 15 answers · asked by WJ 7 in Politics

He should know the war on terror is a never ending battle.

2007-08-01 13:05:55 · 21 answers · asked by Steve 3 in Other - Politics & Government

2007-08-01 13:05:40 · 12 answers · asked by Anonymous in Other - Politics & Government

I need to find out in which (mainly european) countries same sex marriage is valid / legal? this is for my "Changing world and society" course at Uni. It is part of my paper... please help me and if u can give me websites..thats would help me lots...

thank u

2007-08-01 13:03:11 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous in Law & Ethics

2007-08-01 13:00:59 · 9 answers · asked by just me 34 1 in Law Enforcement & Police

The National Debt has climbed into the staggering billions. Some experts have said that he has "looted" our treasury. Bush is borrowing money from China and other countries to pay for his Iraq War. The U.S. has become a debtor nation. The burden for this debt will fall on the younger generation, because this huge debt has to be paid. Most young people believe that the liberal party will raise taxes, but the truth is, ANY political party will have to levy higher taxes for generations to come, in order to pay this debt. I want to know if the younger generation realizes what a burden is being placed upon their shoulders?

2007-08-01 13:00:10 · 17 answers · asked by Me, Too 6 in Politics

what do you all think about russia claiming to to own the oil in the north pole becos they got there first and put their flag there, just as the U.S. got on the moon first and put its flag on it too?

do you think the U.S. owns the moon and does russia own the north pole sea bed?

2007-08-01 12:59:35 · 16 answers · asked by Anonymous in International Organizations

If victory in Iraq was oversold at the outset, there are now signs that defeat is likewise being oversold today.
One of the earliest signs of this was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he could not wait for General David Petraeus’s September report on conditions in Iraq but tried to get an immediate congressional mandate to pull the troops out.

Having waited for years, why could he not wait until September for the report by the general who is actually on the ground in Iraq every day? Why was it necessary for politicians in Washington to declare the troop surge a failure from 8,000 miles away?

The most obvious answer is that Senator Reid feared that the surge would turn out not to be a failure — and the Democrats had bet everything, including their chances in the 2008 elections, on an American defeat in Iraq.

Senator Reid had to preempt defeat before General Petraeus could report progress. The Majority Leader’s failure to get the Senate to do that suggests that not enough others were convinced that declaring failure now was the right political strategy.

An optimist might even hope that some of the senators thought it was wrong for the country.

Another revealing sign is that the solid front of the mainstream media in filtering out any positive news from Iraq and focusing only on American casualties — in the name of “honoring the troops” — is now starting to show cracks.

One of the most revealing cracks has appeared in, of all places, the New York Times, which has throughout the war used its news columns as well as its editorial pages to undermine the war in Iraq and paint the situation as hopeless.

But an op-ed piece in the July 30 New York Times by two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution — Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack — now paints a very different picture, based on their actual investigation on the ground in Iraq after the American troop surge under General Petraeus.

It is not a rosy scenario by any means. There are few rosy scenarios in any war. But O’Hanlon and Pollack report some serious progress.

“Today,” they report, “morale is high” among American troops and “civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began.”

In two cities they visited in northern Iraq “American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate” in providing their own security.

“Today,” they say, “in only a few places did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.”

In the last six months, O’Hanlon and Pollack report, “Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists.”

In Ramadi, where American Marines “were fighting for every yard” of territory just a few months ago, “last week we strolled down the streets without body armor.”

Victory is not inevitable, any more than victory was inevitable when American and British troops landed at Normandy in 1945. General Eisenhower even kept in his pocket a written statement taking full responsibility in the event of failure.

But victory is not even defined the same way in Iraq as it was in World War II. American troops do not need to stay in Iraq until the last vestige of terrorism has been wiped out.

The point when it is safe to begin pulling out is the point when the Iraqi military and police forces are strong enough to continue the fight against the terrorists on their own.

That point depends on how much and how long the current progress continues, not on how much the Democrats or their media allies need an American defeat before the 2008 election.

O’Hanlon and Pollack warn that “the situation in Iraq remains grave” but conclude that “there is enough good happening in Iraq that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.”

But 2008 may have an entirely different significance for politicians than for these Brookings scholars.

2007-08-01 12:59:31 · 11 answers · asked by mission_viejo_california 2 in Politics

He believes there are terrorists in Pakistan...

2007-08-01 12:59:07 · 8 answers · asked by Forever Brooklyn 2 in Elections

There isn't a day that goes by that liberals and democrats don't insist that we're losing the war in Iraq. So what happens when we start making progress? What happens when things start to improve? Will democrats acknowledge it and congradulate our brave men and women in uniform for a job well done? Or will they continue to insist on withdrawl and failure? Kind of makes you wonder why anybody would support politicians that WANT the US to lose in Iraq just so they don't look like idiots!

2007-08-01 12:58:13 · 19 answers · asked by ? 3 in Politics

A. who hears the call of duty and sees it an honor to serve?

B. Or a socialist elitist who earnestly believes she is entitled to be president?

Discuss. Choose A or B - but back up your answers with evidence.

(See - fair and balanced. I want BOTH sides.)

2007-08-01 12:57:51 · 7 answers · asked by Cherie 6 in Politics

the sheriff wants the state to go to the supreme court

2007-08-01 12:57:47 · 6 answers · asked by mike d 2 in Law & Ethics

I seem to always be the one who drives when I am with my friends because all of them have dwi's and I don't. So I would like to know what do cops look for when people are driving, How can they tell by the cars movements (besides swerving of coarse) that the driver is intoxicted? ie brake patterns or something, anything will be helpful thanks

2007-08-01 12:56:27 · 12 answers · asked by LSU 2 in Law Enforcement & Police