I have a craving for oranges lately. Oh, you do too? Don

Most of my career as a writer was spent spinning what other people wanted to communicate into more clear and engaging prose. My biggest challenge always was to get those people to define what they really meant by terms that they used that I was expected to incorporate into whatever I spun. Lots of people use the word

No, that’s not an affirmation. That’s an accusation. America is continually proving just what a bully we are.
….. thousands of Iraqis protested that they did not need American help now Saddam Hussein had gone. “No to America, No to Saddam,” chanted Iraqis from the Shia Muslim majority long oppressed by Saddam, who is from the rival Sunni sect. Arabic television networks said up to 20,000 people marched.
At talks that began after a delay, skepticism ran deep among groups united by little more than joy at Saddam’s fall and unease at getting too close to Washington.
But are our leaders listening? Of course not.
Speaking of listening to people that should (or shouldn’t) be listened to, myrln reminds us:
If Paula Zahn is a journalist (a wholly unsubstantiated assumption, I know) rather than an informal Israeli cheerleader, then why doesn’t she insist that an Israeli minister (preferably Sharon himself) be booked on the show to answer the same questions she put to the Syrian minister today? Her bias is always evident, and it diminishes CNN’s already questionable credibility.
Perhaps she could also ask if it’s true Israel is looking for an oil pipeline from Iraq which must route through Syria, and how much that influenced the US invasion of Iraq and the current accusations against Syria. Oh, wait, you can’t do that because the invasion wasn’t about oil. Dubya said so, and you guys believed him.
Oh yes, bully, bully for us:
At least 10 people were shot dead and scores wounded in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a hospital doctor said, with witnesses claiming US troops had opened fire on a crowd after it turned against an American-installed local governor.

By the time a post has more than 10 Comments, the only people reading them are the ones who are adding theirs to the others. Yet, I find that some of my writing that states my positions most clearly are the ones I put in my Comments. I think it has to do with the fact that Comments become real conversations. Not real-time conversations, but thoughtful exchanges nonetheless. So, I’m repeating here some of what I wrote as Comments here:
Using [Jessica] Lynch as some kind of catalyst for a discussion of violence toward women on the home front was a bit of a stretch. I see her more as a victim of our military system, which promises a better life for those who serve. Except first, they have to survive the service itself, and that’s the part that’s not empahsized enough.
The older I get, the more I realize that everything in life is a trade-off. You have to be careful to make sure that you understand what you’re trading off for what you think you’re going to get.
….we make our choices and we take our chances when it comes to women joining the military. (I wonder, though, how many women in the military really thought through the choice they were making.) There’s a lot of cultural conditioning that gets in the way of letting us do our jobs no matter what our jobs are. We’re often damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And the men who work with us (on and off the battlefield) often make it harder on themselves as well as us because they don’t know how to get past that cultural conditioning. (And, as I’ve said before — much to the annoyance of both males and females I know — they don’t know how to control their testosterone surges.)
So, my choice is just about always to go where I’m not expected to play by the rules that have been set up by men primarily. I just don’t expect them to really understand how I think, make decisions, get things done. If, by chance, they do, terrific. That means we’ll work well together because I’ll go out of my way to try to meet them half-way. Now, none of that would hold true in the military. It’s a man’s game all the way.
I operate from the perspective that males and females are equal but different. We are of equal value as humans and have the same potential to succeed as far as brain-power is concerned. We might work out problems using different thought and interpersonal processes, but our solutions to those problems will be just as exquisitely forumulated as those of men. Different, maybe, but just as valid, just as deliberate, just as well-constructed.
In general, we don’t have the level of brute physical strength that men have, and if we choose to give birth, we have the constraints of our biology. But those are — or at least they should be — minor obstacles to success in just about any area of intelligent human activity. Except, I think, the military. It’s really beyond me why any female would honestly want to be a part of all that phoney baloney machismo. It’s not that I don’t think we need a military, but it has to evolve into a horse of different color before I would consider it worth riding on into the sunset.