Hi David--
Iconoid which is free will color most things but I believe it does not
color folders. I threw it in here because it might interest you. It
colors text, text background, icon background, hides icons.
http://www.sillysot.com/
Check out this which advertises 15 colors of folders on Vista:
www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11815
Also ck out these:
Icolorfolder at
http://icolorfolder.sourceforge.net/ colors folders.
www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best/colour-folders.html
www.foldermarker.com/
www.batchconverter.com/RainbowFolders-download-13093.shtml
www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11662
CH
Go girls---let's see a woman win @ Indy today. Sarah Fisher, Milka Duno,
and Danica Patrick are the 3 women drivers who will get a green flag at
Indy.
Bush, Congress and most of all *Apathetic Americans who shop and drive gas
hogs and get the democracy they deserve are going to fill more and more of
these as we move towards Memorial Day 2007 and then 2008.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/
Hey there's a new Congress in town who dug around when they said the
rubber stamp days are over and found the rubber stamp. Thousands more
coffins @ Dover by Bushie while they ignore body armor, IED stoppers
because the lobbyists have paid them for methods that don't work, and a
political solution that would force the Arab kings and leaders to get off
their oil stuffed asses and work to stabilize their region and step up to
bat against the direct threat to their stability. They'll get it when the
people storm their palaces.
I'm thinking that now that Georgia Rules diva Lindsey Lohan has joined the
"Crash your mercedes drunk with coke inside club" when Scooter is
sentenced a week from this Wednesday, the Judge might consider a special
enhancement putting Scooter in a cell for his first so many weeks with
Paris and Lindsay and let the three of them cat fight with their Blahnik
collection.
War Without End
NYT Editorial
Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been
swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly
coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit
on his disastrous misadventure.
By week's end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary
strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also
the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of
victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans'
lives.
And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was
the only person who understood the true enemy.
Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that
Al Qaeda is "public enemy No. 1" in Iraq and that "the terrorists' goal in
Iraq is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here
at home." The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter
who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush's declining credibility with
the public, declaring that Al Qaeda is "a threat to your children" and
accusing him of naïvely ignoring the danger.
It's upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian
violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that
Americans' support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we
have grown accustomed to this president's disconnect from reality and his
habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don't care about
terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don't
worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it
inevitably must.
The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush's comments is his painting of
the war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-but-the-wrongheaded fight
between the United States and a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al
Qaeda on the other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated
government of Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with many of its own
people. And it removes all pressure from the Iraqi leadership - and Mr.
Bush - to halt the sectarian fighting and create a real democracy.
There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism - call it Al Qaeda or
by any other name - is a dire threat. There is also no doubt that
terrorists entered Iraq - mostly after the war began.
We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as possible so the
United States can withdraw its troops without unleashing even more chaos
and destruction. But Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality
only makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the Iraqi
leaders, who have to stop their sectarian blood feud and make a real
attempt to form a united government. That is their best chance to
stabilize the country, allow the United States to withdraw and, yes,
battle Al Qaeda.
The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for political progress on
the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal date for American soldiers, were
trying to start that process. It's a shame they could not summon the will
and discipline to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As
disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense
than Mr. Bush's denial of Iraq's civil war and his war-without-end against
terror.
FRANK RICH: Operation Freedom From Iraqis
WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the
Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought
liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch
rationalization has now become America's sorriest self-delusion in this
tragedy.
However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis
were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people
in the administration's reckless bet to "transform" the Middle East. From
"Stuff happens!" on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq
exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now
this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war's dead-enders are pinning
the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as
much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming "aliens" from
Mexico.
Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and
nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That's a
total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported
this month that Iraq's child-survival rate is falling faster than any
other nation's. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the
age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and
AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what's
happening in the country he gave "God's gift of freedom."
It's easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is
to concede that American policy is in ruins. A "secure" Iraq is a mirage,
and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who
might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq's
humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he
tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops'
coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
But his silence about Iraq's mass exodus is not merely another instance of
deceptive White House P.R.; it's part of a policy with a huge human cost.
The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to
prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray
Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time
or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden,
which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000
Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings
conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to
7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration
propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another
piddling 500, all interpreters.
In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did
tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator
Kennedy's phrase, have "an assassin's bull's-eye on their backs" because
they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past
four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of
the administration's most fervent hawks, the former United Nations
ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He
claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had "absolutely nothing to do" with
Saddam's overthrow: "Our obligation was to give them new institutions and
provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don't think we have
an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war."
Actually, we haven't fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning
institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn't was that L.
Paul Bremer's provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with
unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were
hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The
administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices.
The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now,
Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of
Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in
anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was
to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
Ms. Sauerbrey's official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley
of "60 Minutes" in March, is that most of them "really want to go home."
The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national
security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties.
But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were
vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton
subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first
place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is
the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of
refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000
Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of
Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven
months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.
The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War,
told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process
carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond
Vietnam's borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the
current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American
treatment of Iraqi refugees isn't that war in any case, but World War II.
That's when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge
Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from
obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under
existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before
the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard
Sachar's "History of the Jews in America."
Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer
declared that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to
cleanse Iraq of Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who
"broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design." The
Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis
for being unable "to do anything they promised."
The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is "blame
and run." It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last
fall, when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his
defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might "have to pull up their
socks, step up and take responsibility for their country." By January, Mr.
Bush was saying that "the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt
of gratitude" and wondering aloud "whether or not there is a gratitude
level that's significant enough in Iraq." In February, one of the war's
leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the
boom. "Iraq is their country," Charles Krauthammer wrote. "We midwifed
their freedom. They chose civil war." Bill O'Reilly and others now echo
this cry.
The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything
that's coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the
compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American
demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting
its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation
schedule, Iraq's nominal government is saying it's fed up. The
American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous
Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell.
While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the
separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in
the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush's May 10 claim that
"the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially" since the
surge began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of
such murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear.
Casualty figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest
yet for our troops.
While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did
greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such
Iraqis - not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama
bin Laden's Qaeda in Pakistan - who do want to follow us home. That we are
slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the
real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi
Freedom. Though the war's godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world
of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that
will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to
be saved.
MAUREEN DOWD: Bush's Fleurs du Mal
WASHINGTON
For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black
granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a
war that their leaders already knew could not be won.
So many died because of ego and deceit - because L.B.J. and Robert
McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect
Nixon's re-election chances.
Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It
knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome
bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the
American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90
killed thus far in May. The democracy's not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers
get ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be
blown up.
The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after
long years of pretending that we'd "turned the corner" doesn't believe
there's a military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an
open letter to the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism
and violence, even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from
four months in Iran, rallying his fans by crying: "No, no, no to Satan!
No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!"
W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of
surrender - just as Nixon did - and dumps the Frankenstate he's created on
his successor.
"The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike
our homeland," he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. "The enemy in Iraq
does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must
fight the terrorists where they live so that we don't have to fight them
where we live."
The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two
years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in
Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking:
Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American
civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?
The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in
Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we
pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops
have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn't know we're
leaving. Osama hasn't been found because he's hiding.
The terrorists moved into George Bush's Iraq, not Saddam Hussein's. W.'s
ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then
complaining your garden is toxic.
The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC
reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be "a
credible messenger on the war" given all the mistakes and all the
disillusioned Republicans.
"I'm credible because I read the intelligence, David," he replied sharply.
But he isn't and he doesn't. Otherwise he might have read "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S." in August 2001, and might have read the
prewar intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently
forecast the horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because
they want to be seen as hard, not soft.
Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they
accurately predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an "alien"
idea that could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook
up with Saddam loyalists and "angry young recruits" to militant Islam to
"wage guerrilla warfare" on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda
would be the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.
W. repeated last week that he would never retreat, but his advisers are
working on ways to retreat. After the surge, in lieu of strategy, come the
"concepts."
Condi Rice, Bob Gates and generals at the Pentagon are talking about
long-range "concepts" for reducing forces in Iraq, The Times reported
yesterday, as a way to tamp down criticism, including from Republicans; it
is also an acknowledgment that they can't sustain the current force level
there much longer. The article said that officials were starting to think
about how to halve the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, sometime in
the second half of 2008.
As the Hollywood screenwriter said in "Annie Hall": "Right now it's only a
notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later
turn it into an idea."
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: The Quiet Americans
Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot
about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I'm not
sure what they call this generation. Is it generation "X" or "Y" or "Zero"
or "Me"? Having taken part in two other commencements this season, though,
and knowing enough about what my own daughter's friends are doing, I can
say there is something quietly impressive about this cohort. In fact, if I
were giving them a label I'd call them the "Quiet Americans" - not in the
cynical way Graham Greene meant it, but in a very positive sense.
They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of
terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America
they are about to inherit. They don't take to the streets much - in part,
I suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it
seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for
military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.
Four years ago, when my wife and I dropped our daughter off at college, I
wrote that I was troubled that I was dropping her off into a world that
was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into - and I
worried that she would not be able to travel in the carefree way that I
had when I was her age. Her two summers teaching and researching in India
have cured me of that misapprehension. Now I know how my mother felt.
"I don't know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they
read to them," said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, the departing president of
George Washington University.
"I've been a college president for 30 years, and these kids are more
optimistic about the future than any I have seen - maybe more than they
have reason to be," he said. "They still believe that the world is their
oyster and go abroad with abandon. Notwithstanding everything, they remain
optimistic."
In my previous column, I wrote about the number of foreign-born students
who are dominating graduate science programs at our best schools, which I
witnessed firsthand at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's commencement.
But something else struck me at Rensselaer - the number of R.O.T.C. grads,
including women, who came up and collected their degrees in full dress
uniforms.
It was not only the pride with which they wore those uniforms that was
palpable, but also the respect they were accorded by their classmates. I
spoke to one young man who was going from graduation at Rensselaer right
out to sea with the United States Navy. As bad as Iraq is, they just keep
signing up. I have been equally impressed by the number of my daughter's
friends who have opted to join Teach for America.
And that can-do-will-do spirit is a good thing, because we will need it to
preserve our democracy from those who want to steal the openness and
optimism that make democracy work.
When I graduated in 1975, the world was dominated by interstate rivalries
and conclusive wars. The class of 2007 is graduating into a world of
state-versus-gang wars and gang-versus-gang wars that are often
inconclusive. Look at the Middle East today. You have gangs fighting
states and armies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Gaza.
If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and
capitalism, the dominant clash of this generation is between "nihilism" -
represented by suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to
Baghdad - and "optimism" that a better social and political order can be
created, and therefore service matters. That's why this generation's
willingness to continue venturing into the world, whether to repair it or
do business with it, is so important. It is exactly the opposite of what
the nihilists want.
"Triumphing over fear is the victory of the democratic citizen against the
paralyzing effects of terror," the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi
observed. "It has to be done, though, at the level of each citizen. Just
as the violence has been fragmented, so must the victory over this
violence be done one by one. Leaders can help, but ultimately victory is
about not letting the fear engendered by this new era paralyze you."
We have to hope, though, that the determination that characterizes these
Quiet Americans extends into their adulthood, and is also shared by those
who choose to be doctors, consultants, lawyers and bankers. So many big
problems are going to come due on their watch - from underfunded Social
Security to health care to climate change - that the effort needed to fix
them will require them to stay involved, redouble their resolve and raise
their voices.
