I will not forget!

Where were you when the twin towers fell?

I has just heard my alarm go off when I heard them announce on the radio that a plain had crashed into the World Trade Center, I got up in time to watch the second plane hit. The rest of the day I spent in front of the TV in awe.

I was in Phoenix and had been up for a few days and finally fell asleep-and I was OUT!!My friends woke me up and showed me the TV and I saw the 2nd plane hit,I was groggy and thought I was still sleeping and dreaming or whatever-I couldn't believe it.

We lived in Russell at the time. I was on the way to take my kids to school at Wilson. We heard a news report as we were in line to go through the circle saying that a "small plane" had crashed into the upper floors of the WTC. By the time I made it home, the second plane had struck. I had a doctor's appointmnet at KU Med Center that day, and Oz was getting ready to leave as soon as I got back. We watched for a while, then headed to KC. We listened to the radio coverage all day. The doctor was running a couple of hours behind, which is nothing unusual there, but on this day it was understandable because the staff was watching the TV in the lobby as much as they could. Right after we got gas for the trip home, my son called me and told me about the gas lines and the price gauging that was going on in Hays.

I had just gotten my uniform on when i worked for Ellis Co. EMS and was feeding my 5 month old and getting ready to go to work when I turned the TV on a few min before the second plane hit. Once at work everybody was glued to the TV screen, in between calls of course. Was a somber day that day in the staton. It was a somber day that day everywhere. I will never forget!!!!!!!!

I was sitting on the couch waiting for my then teenage son so i could take him to school. I was watching the TODAY show and saw the second plane hit. My son and I just sat on the couch absolutely in shock, holding hands and crying. I will never forget.

I had just woken up and turned the TV on and seen the first plane hit the tower. I had no kids that day so I watched that the rest of the day.

Same, here FMW, I had just woke up when the 1st plane hit. I spent the rest of the day in shock with the world and glued to the TV.

Was at work. We heard it on the radio and wondered at first if it was a bizarre joke in the manner of the old War Of The Worlds radio broadcast.

I was at work and one of my co-workers (not too bright) had came in and said that a plane had hit the tower. I was doing my usual immediate denial (with any bad news) thoughts and said something like, wow, they couldn't see that standing there? Then we spent the rest of the day at work watching it on various TVs throughout the building.

Had the day off was sleeping in. Mother called me and told me a plane had crashed into the WTC. Woke up and had the Tv on in time too see the second plane hit the other tower.

I was working at a small airport. It was the strangest thing not to see contrails in the sky and not to hear chatter on the radios. We checked the flight loads on the planes that went down and after awhile they were blocked and we could no longer view them. We also watched TV for the rest of the day.

Caught a blurb on the news rushing out of the house to get to work. Got to work and saw the second plane hit. Had a service call scheduled to install a $10,000 radio system in Lucas that day. I never called them that day, they never called me. It was surreal watching all day with strangers. When I picked up Josh after work, I hugged him extra.

I was completely numb while watching the news and then listening to the radio en route to KC...and then for the days after.

Alan Jackson's song, "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" still makes me cry.



One of my friends posted the following video on her Facebook page. "Daddy I miss you" really got me. Esp when the little girls says, "I sleep with the light on in case you come home to kiss me good night."



Some time after 9/11, Richard Picciotto, the highest-ranking firefighter to survive the terrorist attack, spoke at Fort Hays State University, promoting his book, "Last Man Down". Hearing his first-hand account was amazing...and there was hardly a dry eye in the auditorium. Did anyone else catch him?

I can remember being off work that day and waking and turning on the tv to see the first tower on fire. I was just in shock of that and the news people were saying that a small plane had it the tower and then I seen the 2nd plane strike the other tower I knew then the U.S was under attack. Later on that morning I drove home just to be with the family that day. This is the event that we will be telling our kids and grandkids about just like our parents told us about Kennedy gettting assassinated and our grandparents telling us about the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I just want to thank all the firemen, police and our service men who put their lives at risk everyday to make sure we stay safe.

I was working at Village Inn! We had a small tv in the office and we had it on. Customers were coming in asking what was going on. All I wanted to do was leave work and get my kids from school!! I was in shock! I will NEVER forget!!!

I was in Colorado, putting a new front axle in a backhoe- a Case 580D. The kid who worked in the rental yard stopped by and told me that a plane had hit the world trade center. Like most people, I initially assumed it was a small plane- some fluke occurance. I kinda chuckled and went back to work.

I won't say it was a life-changing moment for me like it was for some. In terms of lives and $$, this was a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things- this sort of thing would be little more than another Tuesday in other times and places. But it was interesting to watch what this brought out in people over the next several years. I was impressed in the short-term. Disappointed long-term.

Later that week I had to pick up the Supreme Commandress out in BFE Nebraska. I'd heard about gas prices out in the dustbowl of Kansas and Nebraska- including the $5/gal price in Hays. So I rounded up a bunch of buckets and gas cans and bought an extra 40 gallons or so of gas- enough to make the round trip, just in case. Ended up being unnecessary, so I just used the gas up over the course of the next few weeks.

I remember what shocked me most was that nobody seemed to realize those buildings were going to fail structurally. It seemed obvious to me. I know than many of the fire crews had to know that at least the top of those buildings were probably coming down just because of the intense heat on the concrete and steel. And I have no doubt that many of them knew that going inside could easily be the last thing they were going to do.

Thanks Oz for posting those videos, I had never seen the second one.

Bighead wrote:

I won't say it was a life-changing moment for me like it was for some. In terms of lives and $$, this was a fairly minor event in the grand scheme of things

You are right about the terms of lives and money but this wasn't a war where trained, paid military personal are fighting each other. This was an all out atack on innocent, unarmed men, women and children and to me that is a life changing moment. Either you just don't care about your fellow Americans or you have no heart.

I don't think that's what Bighead meant. I took it as saying when you look at all the tragedy both natural and man made it's not a major event. The tsunami death toll, the thousands who were hung and burned in witch hunts, the millions of deaths in WWII, etc., put this low on the list of tragic loss in history.

9/11 was a slap in the face in more ways than one and had a special shock to it. But 100 years from now it may just be a small lesson in history class.

lyric wrote:

Either you just don't care about your fellow Americans or you have no heart.

I'd guess that it's a combination of both.

The Other One wrote:

lyric wrote:

Either you just don't care about your fellow Americans or you have no heart.

I'd guess that it's a combination of both.

It doesn't make you uncaring and cold to see that in the long term this will just be another moment in centuries of history filled with violent death. It's a big event to us because it's our time. The Civil War was horrific for those who lived it. The sinking of the Titanic shocked the world. But to us it's just history.

9-11 wouldn't make a pimple on the Civil War's ass in terms of either lives lost or historical significance. Now the Titanic would be a damn good analogy except for the lack of some monolithic evil to pin it on.

The Other One wrote:

lyric wrote:

Either you just don't care about your fellow Americans or you have no heart.

I'd guess that it's a combination of both.

Sometimes you're more perceptive than I've given you credit for, EP.

It's not that I DON'T care for my fellow Americans... I do. It's just that I don't think they're all that special. I mean, shit happens several times a year in other parts of the world that makes 9-11 look pretty goddamn inconsequential to me.

So yeah- that shit's bad and all. And it prompted us as a nation do WORSE to our own people... not to mention the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people in assorted goat-nations (thankyou again, Ratzilla) that we've slaughtered in vengeance (the VAST majority of whom had NOTHING to do with the 9-11 event).

I always have a hard time figgering exactly what people mean when they talk about a heart... it can mean several things- most of which are hard to define or quantify. But in this case, I think I'm being accused of having no tribal loyalty- no special sympathy for those who are relatively near and like me (and for those reasons only). I reckon I plead guilty.

Bighead wrote:

9-11 wouldn't make a pimple on the Civil War's ass in terms of either lives lost or historical significance. Now the Titanic would be a damn good analogy except for the lack of some monolithic evil to pin it on.

The Other One wrote:

lyric wrote:

Either you just don't care about your fellow Americans or you have no heart.

I'd guess that it's a combination of both.

Sometimes you're more perceptive than I've given you credit for, EP.

It's not that I DON'T care for my fellow Americans... I do. It's just that I don't think they're all that special. I mean, shit happens several times a year in other parts of the world that makes 9-11 look pretty goddamn inconsequential to me.

So yeah- that shit's bad and all. And it prompted us as a nation do WORSE to our own people... not to mention the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people in assorted goat-nations (thankyou again, Ratzilla) that we've slaughtered in vengeance (the VAST majority of whom had NOTHING to do with the 9-11 event).

I always have a hard time figgering exactly what people mean when they talk about a heart... it can mean several things- most of which are hard to define or quantify. But in this case, I think I'm being accused of having no tribal loyalty- no special sympathy for those who are relatively near and like me (and for those reasons only). I reckon I plead guilty.

Whatever.

Wash your hands.

I'll just wipe them. I have a nice star-spangled towel handy.

Bighead may be heartless, but bobby is clueless.

Stony has a breadth and depth of understanding that you could never hope for, EP. That's part of his downfall- and something that you've had the good sense (or dumb luck) not to pursue.

A wise man once wrote that "Ignorance is strength". I doubt you can understand that on any but the most superficial level... but you LIVE it every day.

Bighead wrote:

Stony has a breadth and depth of understanding that you could never hope for, EP. That's part of his downfall- and something that you've had the good sense (or dumb luck) not to pursue.

A wise man once wrote that "Ignorance is strength". I doubt you can understand that on any but the most superficial level... but you LIVE it every day.

You been dipping into his stash?

slider has more depth of understanding than he does.

hardliners and moderates fighting to wrest control of the government....talk about cognitive dissonance... ep you're a tool...

You don’t have to adopt the party line. It’s not, ‘Israel, right or wrong.’ ”

There appears to be an appetite for J Street’s approach. Over the last year, J Street’s budget has doubled, to $3 million; its lobbying staff is doubling as well, to six. That still makes it tiny compared with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, whose lobbying prowess is a matter of Washington legend. J Street is still as much an Internet presence, launching volleys of e-mail messages from the netroots, as it is a shoe-leather operation. But it has arrived at a propitious moment, for President Obama, unlike his predecessors, decided to push hard for a Mideast peace settlement from the very outset of his tenure. He appointed George Mitchell as his negotiator, and Mitchell has tried to wring painful concessions from Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states. In the case of Israel, this means freezing settlements and accepting a two-state solution. Obama needs the political space at home to make that case; he needs Congress to resist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeals for it to blunt presidential demands. On these issues, which pose a difficult quandary for the mainstream groups, J Street knows exactly where it stands. “Our No. 1 agenda item,” Ben-Ami said to me, “is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

The idea that there is an “Israel lobby,” with its undertones of dual loyalty, is a controversial notion. It has been around since the early 1970s at least, but it became a topic of wide discussion only after the publication of a notorious article in The London Review of Books in 2006 by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The article, which was expanded into a book, infuriated many readers by its air of conspiratorial hugger-mugger; by its insistence that Jewish neoconservatives had persuaded President Bush to go to war in Iraq in order to protect Israel; and by the authors’ apparent ignorance of the deep sense of identification many Americans — Jewish and gentile — feel toward Israel. But the authors made one claim that struck many knowledgeable people as very close to the mark: The Israel lobby had succeeded in ruling almost any criticism of Israel out of bounds, especially in Congress.

“The bottom line,” Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, “is that Aipac, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that U.S. policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.” Mearsheimer and Walt also wrote that Aipac and other groups succeeded in installing officials who were deemed “pro-Israel” into senior positions. This is, of course, what effective lobbies do. The Cuba lobby, for example, long operated in the same way. But Israel is a much more important American national-security interest than Cuba. No country, whether Israel or Cuba, has identical interests to those of the United States. And yet mainstream American Jewish groups had implicitly agreed to subordinate their own views to those of the government in Jerusalem. The watchword, says J. J. Goldberg, editorial director of The Forward, the Jewish weekly, was, “We stick with Israel regardless of our own judgment.”

American Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, but as Jewish groups moved to the right along with Israel in the 1980s, the groups increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party, which from the time of Ronald Reagan was seen as more staunchly pro-Israel than were the Democrats. Jewish groups also began to work with the evangelicals who formed the Republican base and tended to be fervidly pro-Israel. Indeed, when I met with Malcolm Hoenlein in July, he had just come from a huge Washington rally sponsored by Christians United for Israel, whose founder, the Rev. John Hagee, has denounced Catholicism, Islam and homosexuality in such violent terms that John McCain felt compelled eventually to reject his endorsement during the 2008 presidential campaign.

George W. Bush shared the views of the mainstream groups on Israel and Palestine, on Iran and on the threat of Islamic extremism. Doug Bloomfield, who served as legislative director for Aipac in the 1980s — and who was pushed out, he says, for being “too pro-peace” — describes Aipac and other groups as “very sycophantic toward the Bush administration.” Aipac and other groups found little to criticize in a president who, unlike Bill Clinton, did not believe in pushing Jerusalem to make serious compromises to achieve peace. President Bush, in this view, was the best president either Israel’s Likud leadership or the mainstream Jewish groups could have wished for.

And it was precisely this success that began to loosen the “stranglehold” described by Mearsheimer and Walt. As Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and now the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, puts it, “In the Bush years, when Israel enjoyed a blank check, increasing numbers of people in the Jewish and pro-Israel community began to wonder, If this was the best president Israel ever had, how come Israel’s circumstances seemed to be deteriorating so rapidly?” Why was Israel more diplomatically isolated than ever? Why had Israel fought a savage and apparently unavailing war with Hezbollah in Lebanon? Why were the Islamists of Hamas gaining the upper hand over the more moderate Fatah in Palestine? “There was kind of a cognitive dissonance,” Indyk says, “about whether a blank check for Israel is necessarily the best way to secure the longevity of the Jewish state.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13JStreet-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

i won't forget this either...

Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel's story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.

Moorer, who as top legal council to the official investigation is in a position to know, agrees that Israel intended to sink the USS Liberty and blame Egypt for it, thus dragging the United States into a war on Israel's behalf. This seems to be a common trick of Israel. Starting with the Lavon affair, through the USS Liberty, to the fake radio transmitter that tricked Reagan into attacking Libya, to potentially 9-11 itself, Israel's game is to frame Arabs and set them up as targets for the United States.

The official US investigation is discredited. And with it, every claim of innocence for Israel that relied on the official investigation as a source.

The real question facing the American people is why the US Government seems more concerned with protecting Israel after they are caught playing these dirty tricks, rather than doing something to convince Israel not to kill any more Americans

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ussliberty.html

im a little upset that you publicly try to mock me ep by calling me bobby and then go crying to admin when i poke fun of your own name using an anonimity excuse... seems so israeli of you... thank you for the chiding tho... coward.

I won't forget that either... and the similarities are astounding

robert wrote:

im a little upset that you publicly try to mock me ep by calling me bobby and then go crying to admin when i poke fun of your own name using an anonimity excuse... seems so israeli of you... thank you for the chiding tho... coward.

Now that ain't fair. If EP were acting like an Israeli you'd have a tank crashing through your home and he'd be claiming dat dere town uff Wictoria as his ancestral homeland.

Glass. Let there be glass.

I wonder what would happen if you told the Arabs and Israelis that you had a dozen nukes aimed at them that were each carrying a couple tons of pig innards assholes and snouts and that when they detonate the pig molecules would intermingle with everyones molecules who would be vaporized on the ground.

The Other One wrote:

Bighead may be heartless, but bobby is clueless.

Ok, so I don't have a heart.





Robert doesn't have a brain.

robert wrote:

im a little upset that you publicly try to mock me ep by calling me bobby and then go crying to admin when i poke fun of your own name using an anonimity excuse... seems so israeli of you... thank you for the chiding tho... coward.

What do you lack, EP?

robert wrote:

im a little upset that you publicly try to mock me ep by calling me bobby and then go crying to admin when i poke fun of your own name using an anonimity excuse... seems so israeli of you... thank you for the chiding tho... coward.

Really? Show me where I ever talked to the admin about anything, dipshirt. You're an idiot. Or maybe just high again.

Big LOL!!!