Stan187

Been watching the X-Men movie a few too many times have we?

__________________
In Iran people belive pepsi stands for pay each penny save israel. -urmomma158
The Russian Navy is still a threat, but only to those unlucky enough to be Russian sailors.-highsea

Martin

Never seen it! I was being 100% honest. People like that deserve to be treated the way they treat others.

Gio

I fell asleep during that at the cinema. Oh well, those seats aren't so bad!

gunnut

So you would advocate that we do to others as what they have done or propose to do?

Does that mean you believe we should torture some (not all) terrorists using extreme measures as they have done?

I find it disturbing that admins come in here and advocate personal attacks on political figures without being challenged.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Dwarven Pirate

Would be nice, but it seems as though the FDA has been little more than a rubber-stamp (of approval) since the eighties?

When the OP opened the thread?

Him who? Huckabee? He's a republican preacher running for office. You dont need to rape him

Martin

Does the bible not say.... and I quote, and I never quote the bible....

"If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

What more effective justice than punishment that EQUALS the crime? Do you agree that people with illnesses such as AIDs should be seperated from the general public? Do you not agree that morally you a bad person for suggesting something like that? Most are innocent people who have done nothing to merit something so awful.

It doesn't matter if I'm an admin or not - I'm making a statement about what I believe. You are challenging me so what's your point? In fact, don't even bother answering because no doubt I'll be accused of something else.

Julie

It was meant to limit vengeance as a first step towards mercy. This law was not normally taken literally but served as a guide for a judge in a law court for assessing punishment and penalty.

troung

Mike Huckabee apologises for Mormon 'smear'

By Toby Harnden in Johnston, Iowa
Last Updated: 8:31pm GMT 13/12/2007

Mike Huckabee has apologised to Mitt Romney, his Republican rival for the White House, for suggesting that the former Massachusetts governor and his fellow Mormons believe that "Jesus and the devil are brothers".

The apology came as the race for the Republican presidential nomination increasingly centred on personal religious faith.

Mr Huckabee, new front runner in the first-voting state of Iowa, is a Baptist minister while Mr Romney is a former Mormon bishop.

"I went to Mitt Romney and apologised to him, because I said, I would never try, ever, to try to somehow pick out some point of your faith and make it, you know, an issue," Mr Huckabee said after the last Republican debate before the January 3rd Iowa caucuses.

The comment was made to a New York Times magazine reporter who spent several days with Mr Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor who has shot to first place in Iowa largely because of strong backing from Christian conservatives.
advertisement

Mr Romney’s campaign, which has been relentlessly criticising Mr Huckabee on immigration and tax issues and this week hit him with the first attack advertisement against a named fellow-party candidate, turned on Mr Huckabee over the comment.

"It’s hard to read it as anything other than an attempt to stir up anti-Mormon prejudice," said Jim Talent, a former senator and key Romney backer.

Chip Saltsman, Mr Huckabee’s campaign manager, said it was an innocent, offhand remarks made in the form of a question and was in no way intended to be a smear.

Mr Huckabee recently overtook Mr Romney in Iowa polls even though his rival - who had been aggressively wooing Christian conservatives - had been leading there for months and had been pumping millions of dollars into the state in advertising and staff.

Although Rudy Giuliani, a distant third or fourth in Iowa, leads in national polls, the victor in Iowa would build up powerful momentum.

Given Mr Romney’s concentration on the state, defeat there could sink his campaign.

Mr Romney said he accepted the apology for what he described as a "traditional smear" on the Mormon faith.

"We really shouldn’t be attacking a person’s religion in this nation," Romney added. "I think Americans are going to ultimately shy away from any effort to define candidates based on their faith."

The incident threatened to undermine Mr Huckabee’s folksy Mr Nice Guy image and Romney aides questioned whether the holder of a Master’s degree in theology didn’t know the basic tenets of Mormonism.

Under Mormonism, all of God’s children are brothers and sisters, including Jesus and Satan.

But Satan would be considered a disinherited member of God’s family who was cast out of God’s presence for eternity.

Mr Huckabee has run an advertisement describing himself as a "Christian leader" - an implicit contrast with Mr Romney, who aides cried foul.

When asked about this, Mr Huckabee smiled and said: "If there are inferences, there’s a saying we have in the South, 'If you throw a rock across the fence, it’s the hit dog that hollers’."

Mr Huckabee has said that his faith is "one of the more refreshing things I get to talk about".

Mr Romney has been very reluctant to get into the details of Mormonism but last week opened the door to discussions of his faith by giving a major speech saying he believed that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Saviour of Mankind".

Many Iowa voters, however, view Mormonism as bizarre and not truly Christian - a strange cult.

"Many people won’t vote for him because he’s a Mormon," said John Strong, 66. "I like Romney OK but a lot of people think Mormons are a little bit weird, that it’s a cult.

"There’s the issue of whether the Mormon church believes in gender and racial equality. And there’s something in the Mormon religion, I think, that says that a wife’s soul follows her husband’s to heaven or hell. Romney should have to answer all these things."

__________________
To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

gunnut

I don't care what the bible says.

Obviously are you have something against christians, or Huckabee, personally.

You also seem to believe that it's ok to "do unto others as others done to you."

By extrapolation, you must be OK with torturing terrorists.

Unless you have a double standard where you apply one set to those people that you don't like and another set to those who you like.

Martin

I take offense to that. I respect people's religious beliefs. There isn't a religion acount that doesn't advocate PEACE as one of its core values.

I have something against christian nutjobs just like I have something against jewish nutjobs and islamic nutjobs as well as communist nutjobs and nutjobs of every other variety...

If a terrorist has planted a bomb and he's been caught before it goes off, why shouldn't he/she be tortured? They intended to kill innocent people so why shouldn't he/she be tortured to extract the information to save innocent lives?

HistoricalDavid

How often does that situation occur, where we know a certain chap to have information relating to a specific attack?

__________________
HD Ready?

Martin

Who knows how much information our governments actually have... It isn't something we have enough information to speculate about but I'd imagine it does happen. Certainly it has been reported in the UK press on a number of occasions in the past year that police have prevented terrorist activities from happening.

HistoricalDavid

They did it without torture, it seems!

And what I'm getting at here is who this torture would apply to. What is the chance it would be used on a know-nothing versus the real deal?

Frankly I think physical harm should always be off the table, but sleep deprivation should be considered for suspects on firm intelligence, backed up by a warrant (i.e. from a judge) that they know about a specific terrorist attack. That would fit your definition of "They intended to kill innocent people so why shouldn't he/she be tortured to extract the information to save innocent lives."

It should be backed up by a warrant since if there's nothing wrong with it, what's the problem with 'officialising' it?

dalem

I didn't see Huck's "Jesus-devil-brothers" comment as a smear so much as I saw it as a really stupid thing to say.

-dale

citanon

This is not some "ridiculous biggot attitude". It's fact. HIV infection is making a resurgence in the United States because of rampant metaphetamine abuse amongst gay men. Now, many segments of American society are abusing metaphetamine, but the unfortunate side effect of metaphetamine abuse in gay men is that it causes them to engage in unprotected anal sex with strangers. This is not just the conservatives who are saying this. Gay activists are bringing this issue to the forefront because they are seeing so many of their friends drop like flies. There has been major investigative reporting in the New York Times and opinion articles by prominent gay activists pointing to this fact.

Well, what about heterosexual sex? The fact is that protected heterosexual sex with the proper use of a condom gives nil chance of HIV infection, even when you do it with total strangers (you might not want to hit the crackhoe in the park though). Protected heterosexual sex with a known HIV partner over the course of a year gives you less than 20% probability of contracting AIDS. Unprotected is a different story but homosexual sex is in a different class all together because of the greater "friction" and hence greater exchange of blood involved.