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Sunday, February 25, 2007

SHOULD SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON APOLOGISE?

Your say, not mine; even if it may cost her the US presidency.


[
Will voters accept Hillary Clinton's nonapology?
Her vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq might cost her the presidency.
By Daniel Schorr

WASHINGTON - Welcome to the politics of apologia – the 2007 version.

In the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts had to endure charges that he was flip-flopping on funding for the Iraq war. In 1964, only two senators – Wayne Morse (D) of Oregon and Ernest Gruening (D) of Alaska – voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing President Johnson to expand the Vietnam War. I don't recall any of the others offering apologies.

So now, Sen. Hillary Clinton is being warned by some of her supporters that she may endanger her front-runner status if she refuses to make some outright apology for having voted along with 76 other senators in 2002 to empower the president to use force in Iraq.

A simple "I was conned and I'm sorry it happened" might have done it.

But the evolution of her position is like a study in self-torture.

At first in 2002, she made a speech supporting the resolution.

In 2003 she said, "I stand by the vote."

In 2004: "I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction...."

In 2005: "[I]f Congress had been asked, based on what we know now, we never would have agreed...."

And Feb. 17 in New Hampshire: "Obviously, I would not vote that way again if we knew then what we know now."

Still, Senator Clinton has not apologized for her vote, and she apparently doesn't intend to. She reportedly ended the debate in her own camp by deciding that she would not make an apology that she didn't believe in. What she may do is support a resolution revoking the war-making authority contained in the now- controversial 2002 resolution.

Whether that will appease her supporters remains to be seen. What they apparently will not get from her are those three little words. "I am sorry." What her lack of contrition will cost her, that also remains to be seen.

She may take comfort from the "great compromiser," Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, who on the Senate floor in 1839 declared, "I had rather be right than president."

• Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio. ]


SOURCE: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0223/p09s02-cods.html

Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa at 3:11:00 PM

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Greenville, Rhode Island bakery owned by the Cavanagh family, which uses the plant to produce church communion bread from just water and bread. That business is known to produce about 850 million sacramental wafers annually and to supply 80% of the Holy Communion bread used in American, Australian, Canadian, and British churches. The only middlemen in the supply chain are nuns living in convents! Now they want to expand to West Africa with their Christian sacramental ware for Pentecostal, Catholic, 'New Wave', and Orthodox church offerings. I make reference to the so-called New Wave churches - my term for those churches that broke away from the orthodoxy of the Protestant fold, just as the latter roke off from the Catholic church by virtue of the exploits of Martin Luther centuries ago. Many new-wave and other church goers in the generally undeveloped West African subregion of Africa pay more to religious organizations in monthly tithes and offerings than they do to their government in personal income and value added taxes. Now, that last fact is quite interesting because it is an admission that a bakery in Rhode Island has seen a huge market in the center of Black Africa for small white perfectly laminated and non-crumbly holy wheat bread, reportedly costing "less than a penny" apiece, for the use of both the bible-reading and the bible-believing religious organizations. However, the picture from the Cavanagh's factory floor speaks volumes, in my own opinion, about the need for the company to watch its business ethics and to treat all customers equally irrespective of location, creed, or other discriminatory demographic information or criteria. So, I just hope and pray that the wafers falling off the conveyor belt and by the way side are not destined for West Africa and that the actual wafers delivered will be wheat bread and water, and not just glutamate-free bread and 'pure' water, if you get my point, even if so requested by some shady, greedy, and unethical businessmen over in West Africa. Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa on Sunday, December 28, 2008.

In the summer of 2007, Pope Benedict XVI (BXVI) encouraged The Church to reach out to young people using new technologies, as he himself learned to send out cellphone text messages to the faithful. So in obedience, a tech savvy evangelizing Catholic priest got some help from a Web designer in order to write all the daily books of prayers into a low-cost computer software application downloadable onto the iPhone. Rev. Paolo Padrini's iTunes prayer book was officially approved by The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications in December 2008. Of course, all proceeds from the electronic prayer book venture will go to charity. Speaking of charitable behavior, The Holy See has seen it fit after 400 years to honor Galileo Galilei in 2009 as the "patron" of the non-mutual exclusivity of the faith versus reason dichotomy. That is very appropriate in this age of new technology, even though The Church still smarts from its error of judgment in calling the famous astronomer a heretic after he publicly embarrassed The Church by reporting that his scientific observations in Astronomy with his unique telescope had led him inexorably to believe that the Earth actually revolved around the sun, in direct opposition to the teaching of The Church at the time that Planet Earth was the center of the universe. In seeking to paint the Church in a new light of worldly knowledge by distancing itself from a past of imbibing pure dogma, The Vatican may have ventured to cross the final frontier and boundary between Science and Christianity by acknowledging recently that there could be life on planets other than the Earth! Posted by O. O. Awa on Wednesday, December 24, 2008.
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