Our NEXT flag: will be even MORE impressive.

Especially when you see it festooning the armored vehicles rolling through YOUR TOWN.

Kneel and pray... or be shot.

Frist is more insane than Bush, and he is running for pRESIDENT
in 2008. First of all, we have to stop their side from rigging the election. Bush now is too greedy to be a real fundamental Christian, but imagine a Falwell or Pat Robertson type hiijacking this nations power..While the remainder of the greedy republicans raid the cash drawer...the Religious right steps in, they figure, just in time to "bring Jesus home"... War with Iran, Korea, China, war with the Ungodly...war, bloody soaked war. I could see Frist as the beginging of the end...this we Must stop.

...actually, as an Republican-Democrat Independent, I believe the inundation of 'In Your Face' attacks by same-sex advocates is only one of the many issues today destroying America... let alone marriage.

Whan my parents (I'm now 70yr old male) were Democrats, we didn't have a lot of foolishness condoned and pushed by our leaders like abortion and homosexuality. What the minority of troubled people did in their own home was their business, as long as it did not infringe on the common citizens rights and privacy.

What the emotionally mixed up do under these parameters, is between themselves and their own god.

When the issue of amendment to the Constitution to ban desecration of the flag arose in the past, I did a blog posting at

http://gadflying.blog.com/search/?q=vexillology

My feelings have not changed -- are, in fact, stronger than ever. I do not applaud flag-burning. But there are things I abhor far more.

Snippet:

We don't have to love our country's faults to remain steadfast in our love of it. We don't have to preserve the symbol at the expense of what it symbolizes.

History has provided us the lessons. The nation permits us the options. The flag is a symbol of as many things as there are people to conceive them. But it is made nothing and of no value at all if we fail to recognize the breadth of tolerance it symbolizes. Offenses against the fabric of the flag outrage me in ways I cannot fully explain; offenses against its meaning outrage me more.

As for marriage, I have yet to read or hear anything that enables me to understand how same-sex unions affect male-female unions in any way at all. To quote myself from my own blog at http://gadflying.blog.com/774665, a rant about the religious right:

Those who believe gay marriage (or homosexuality itself) and abortion (and/or birth control) are sins need never commit them. I think there are no instances in which anyone has obliged a heterosexual man or woman to participate in a shotgun wedding with a person of the same sex. Of course, I don't spend any time in the South any more, and I do recall they had some odd ideas of amusement by my standards. Still, I doubt it could be a common occurrence. Nor are pregnant women dragged screaming off the streets for abortions they don't want. (We may privately wish that some early progenitor of the Bush family had considered either complete abstinence or abortion, extirpating from the "git-go" a family many of us find…well, dispensable.)

Since the objections to gay marriages (and homosexuality) and abortion (and birth control) have their seeds in the Bible, and not everyone subscribes to its contents or agrees on its authorship or the disinterestedness of its early editors, it seems to me the anti-abortion, anti-gay crowd should suck it up and acknowledge they are not being obliged to do something they don’t want to do -- except to the extent they are being asked not to interfere with anyone else's having a say in directing his own life and making his own lawful moral decisions. I know they'd hate to give that up. But the rest of us will reciprocate -- by allowing them to steer their own lives. They need never invite a homosexual home to dinner, never consider aborting the child of incest between a 42-year-old uncle and his 12-year-old niece or the child of rape, never do business with a store or other business operated by Jews or Muslims, and never listen to reason. They just need to leave the rest of us alone.

The following is an email that I sent out yesterday (Memorial Day). I think it is a very apropos response to Bill Frist's Comments when on Fox News last Sunday:

Asked on "Fox News Sunday" if flag burning and gay marriage were the most important issues the Senate can address in June, Frist said the agenda will focus on securing the country and its values.

"I'm going to Arlington Cemetery tomorrow, and I'm going to see that American flag waving on every single grave over there," Frist said the day before Memorial Day ceremonies at the military cemetery.

"And when you look at that flag and then you tell me that right now people in this country are saying it's OK to desecrate that flag and to burn it and to not pay respect to it is that important to our values as a people when we've got 130,000 people fighting for our freedom and liberty today? That is important."

My email and post that points out the hypocrisy of chickenhawks like Frist:

On this Memorial Day we need to give some special and well deserved recognition to those ChickenHawk neo-cons that are responsible for helping to fill the many graves, that you will be visiting today, of our dedicated youth that have given their lives for George Bush’s “Noble Cause” by fighting and dieing in his misbegotten war in Iraq. Let’s not forget to also remember the thousands of our young men and women that have been wounded and maimed for this same Noble Cause. And please do not forget the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, including women and children, which have been sacrificed as collateral damage in this hellish neo-con push for domination in the Middle East.

If, on this Memorial Day, you are sick and tired of the lies and half-truths that are flying out of the mouths of these neo-con artists and if you are feed up with this idiotic sacrifice by the “best of us”, write, call or email your Congressional Reps and tell them to “Get Our People Out of Iraq NOW!!!!” You can pick a no better day than this to launch that protest.

Shayne Munger
Riverside, CA

P.S. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that any of the children or grandchildren of these chickenhawks are or have been fighting in Iraq for George Bush's "Noble Cause".

Definition:

Chickenhawk (also chicken hawk and chicken-hawk) is a political epithet used in United States to criticize a politician, bureaucrat, or commentator who strongly supports a war or other military action, but who actively avoided serving in a war when s/he was of draft age. The term is a deliberate insult, meant to indicate that the person in question is cowardly or hypocritical for personally avoiding combat in the past while advocating that others go to war in the present. Often, the implication is that the person in question lacks the experience, judgment, or moral standing to make decisions about going to war.

CHICKENHAWKS

The Big Cheese Chickenhawks

Name: George W. Bush (R-TX)
Born: 1946
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: You know when a guy walks away from a National Guard obligation during wartime and gets away with it, he must come from "a good family." Not that his daddy had anything to do with his getting a Guard slot in the first place - oh, no ...

Name: Richard "Dick" Cheney (R-WY)
Born: 1942
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Says he had "other priorities." You bet he had other priorities. Imagine how early in life you must begin scheming to get away with what this guy has. He was too busy thinking about Halliburton to go fight Charlie.

Name: Karl Rove
Born: 1950
Employer: Baal
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: This little cherub was born on Christmas Day, 1950. Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove ran George W.’s campaign, right down to the tiny detail of deciding Bush was going to run. The hardest part was convincing a horde of Republican skeptics that it could be done.

He is said to have said of his boss, he’s "the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with."

Now Karl is Senior White House advisor. If he really is “Bush’s Brain,” and if the fondest wishes of former US Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV come true, one fine day Karl will be “frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs.”

Will history record that event as “Bush’s Lobotomy?”

Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Born: 1943
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer (Now it's the World Bank.)
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Deputy Secretary for Defense - yet another Bush administration man in the Pentagon who has no idea what it's like to wear a uniform. He got a BA at Cornell in 1965. Maybe if we'd had a guy as bright as he thinks he is in Vietnam, it would have turned out differently.

Name: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Born: 1950±
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer (my note: No More!!!)
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He’s had a string of no-doubt well-paying government jobs in State and Defense. He’s also practiced law. In fact, he was Marc Rich’s lawyer for years. Yes — the Marc Rich whose pardon from President Clinton was excoriated by so many high and mighty Republicans. Maybe if Scooter had been a better lawyer, his client wouldn’t have needed that pardon. Speaking of legal questions, “Scooter” is alleged by some to have traded energy stocks while helping his buddy Dick Cheney cook up a new energy policy in secret. He’s also suspected of having inserted the bogus “Niger yellowcake” reference into the President’s State of the Union address. As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also a top suspect in the outing of CIA operative Valeria Plame. Clearly “Scooter” is a ballsy kind of guy, so it’s a complete mystery to us why, when he graduated from Phillips Andover in 1968, he didn’t enlist in the Marines or go Airborne instead of going to Yale.

Name: Donald "The Don" Rumsfeld
Born: 1932
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: When the shooting started in Korea Rummy here was either 18, or about to turn 18. Not to worry for him, though — he spent the war at Princeton, wearing a ROTC uniform. Once the war was over he flew jets for the Navy for a few years. Defenders of Rumsfeld will say he’s no chickenhawk — he served, and it’s not his fault the war ended before he got his commission. To which others answer, “plenty of farmers and mechanics and kids just out of high school served. Anyone as full of whatever that stuffing in him is, could have tried out for a battlefield commission.”

The Talking Head Chickenhawks

Name: Ann Coulter
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: Critics will howl that a woman can’t be a chickenhawk. In Ann Coulter’s case, that doesn’t matter; anyone with her level of bellicosity deserves to be held to a higher standard.

Name: David Limbaugh
Born: December 11, 1952
Employer: newspapers with low standards
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: David's no fool - he stayed in school! Straight from high school to college in '71, where he stayed 'till '75, when the war was safely over. Poly sci major, wouldn't you know? The least annoying of the Limbaugh brothers, but only because he's more obscure.

Name: Rush Limbaugh
Born: 1951
Employer: Yack Radio
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Where to begin ... a joke about the Hindenburg? No, let's go right to the reason he had to stay home from the war - the world's most famous anal cyst. He's denied it, but www.snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages, has got the goods on him.
Name: Michael Reagan
Born: March 18, 1946
Employer: Yack Radio
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: What are the odds anyone would know who he is if everybody didn't know who his daddy was? What are the odds he would have escaped the draft if his name had been Manual Rodriguez?

Name: William "Bill" Bennett
Born: 1943
Employer: Empower America
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Bill's occupation used to be "public scold," but since his gambling habit was exposed, he's a little less noisy on that front. Bill's a triple-crown winner as a former bureaucrat, a propagandist, and a barking head. (All barking heads are propagandists, but not all propagandists are barking heads.)

Name: Frank Gaffney
Born: 1953
Employer: Indeterminate
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Frank here is a very clever boy. Built a thing called the Center for Security Policy, which apparently keeps him in nice suits so he will look good in front of the TV cameras, which can't seem to get enough of him. As far as we can tell, Frank is a freelance salesman for the defense industry who is paid by an elaborately circuitous process. For all his obsession with the military, it's funny he never served.

Name: Rep. Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich (R-GA)
Born: June 17, 1943
Employer: Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: A virtuoso in the art of hypocrisy, the former Speaker of the House now claims the Vietnam War was a splendid idea, but at the time he opposed going himself. Newtie also speaks highly of morality, but as a serial adulterer he doesn’t want to get too close to it himself.

Name: Sean Hannity
Born: December, 1961
Employer: Rupert Murdoch
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: Plenty of guys his age were in Desert Storm - what's his excuse?

Name: William "Bill" O'Reilly
Born: 1949
Employer: Rupert Murdoch
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Bill O’Reilly loves to come off as a straight-talking, blue-collar kind of guy. Funny, a lot of guys who fit that description and graduated high school the same year he did - 1967 - went straight to Vietnam. Not our Bill - he went to college. And he didn’t just go to college, he spent his junior year, 1969-1970, in London. He graduated in 1971, briefly exposing him to the draft again, but Bill was miraculously spared.

Name: Michael Savage
Born: Unk.
Employer: UNK.
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: We're not sure if this frothing lunatic is still on the air. Didn't he get canned for saying all gays should contract AIDS and die? If only he could have channeled all that animosity against Ho Chi Minh - we'd be selling Big Macs in Vietnam today!
Name: Rep. Joseph "Joe" Scarborough (R-FL)
Born: April 9, 1963
Employer: MSNBC
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: A former Republican congressman (1995-2002) turned MSNBC motor mouth, Joe qualifies as a politician and a talking head. Where were you during Desert Storm, pal?

The Christian Right Chickenhawks – Praying For Armageddon and the Rapture

Name: Rev. Jerry Falwell
Born: 1933
Employer: Thomas Road Baptist Church
Conflict Avoided: Korea, Peacetime Draft
Notes: Jerry could probably have served in Korea - other kids his age did. He certainly could have been drafted into the peacetime Army. He called the members of his '70's cult the Moral Majority "soldiers of morality." For all his loathing of communism, it's a pity he didn't get to kill a few when he was young.

Name: Dr. Marion "Pat" Robertson
Born: 1930
Employer: Christian Broadcasting Network
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: Dr. Pat claimed in his biography to have "seen combat in Korea. He was in Korea in uniform briefly, but his daddy the Congressman got his reassigned to Japan. His picture belongs in the dictionary next to "pious fraud." Just recently declared that the State Department ought to get nuked, but has yet to be indicted for uttering a terrorist statement.

Other Notable Chickenhawks

• Secretary of State and former NSA Condoleezza Rice - did not serve
• Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist - did not serve
• Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - did not serve.
• Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay - did not serve
• House Majority Whip Roy Blunt - did not serve
• Majority Whip Mitch McConnell - did not serve
• Rick Santorum, third ranking Republican in the Senate - did not serve.
• Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott - did not serve
• Bill Kristol - did not serve

Sources:
The New Hampshire Gazette
http://www.nhgazette.com/news/chickenhawks/chickenhawk_headquarters/

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://wikipedia.org/

The DailyKos
Requiem For a Nightmare
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/28/966/14833