vista and nero

G

Guest

is there anyway to get nero 6 to work on vista yet, like an update or
whatever? thanks for any help in this matter.
 
X

XS11E

lalala305 said:
is there anyway to get nero 6 to work on vista yet, like an update
or whatever? thanks for any help in this matter.
Click to expand...

This has been discussed here before, search this group for posts on the
subject.

My apologies if the following is something you already know but just in
case:

Google archives most Usenet groups, here's how to search a group:
Go to http://groups.google.com and enter the name of the group in the
"Find a Group" search box about 1/3 of the way down the page (in this
case you'll enter microsoft.public.windows.vista.general). Select the
group you want from the list that comes up.

Enter your search term (in this case enter Nero 6) in the search box at
the top of the page and click the "Search this group" button.

I found a bunch of posts about Nero 6, maybe one of them will help you?

Most seem to think you need to upgrade to the later version but some
say it works so good luck and let us know if you get it working!
 
C

Chad Harris

Whatup laX3/305--

My experience is this. Nero 6.0 will work just fine on Vista--did for me.
Nero 6+the latest will work fine on Vista--did for me. Nero 7+ the latest
to this minute works great on Vista--if I click on an iso to be burned, it
sets up seamlessly and eliminates me even searching an exploreresque
dialogue box to find my target to burn. My only criticism is that I wish
for the money that Nero would have included some of the storage formats that
it won't burn that Magic ISO will burn.

What particular problem are you having--what specifrically happens when you
try to burn because I can use Nero perfectly on Vista any build including
RTM using Nero 6 and I did before Nero 7+ was available and I was simply
puzzled at the people who said they couldn't when I was doing it.

CH

Bush, Congress, and most of all Apathetic Americans getting the hypocritical
democracy they deserve running the gas guzzlers and filling Dover Coffins
with dead soldiers like it's goin' outta style:

Apathetic America shopping and running gas guzzlers, their Congress and
their moron leader are making lots more of these in the next few years:

Photos of Military Coffins
(Battlefield and Astronaut Fatalities)
at Dover Air Force Base

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/

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.

May 28, 2007
Editorial Observer
What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead
By ADAM COHEN
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and
abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave
their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with
the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states
quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to
the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after
the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a
forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But something
important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral
battle to free black Americans from slavery.

In “Race and Reunion,†his masterful book about historical memory, David
Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s
transformation — and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations, he
makes clear, do not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a
nation’s understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for political
reasons. Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of
selective forgetting — a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves
uneasily into the history books.

Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes, were
like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to
the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery orator
declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of
this fair land by martyr blood.â€

Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South —
at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk of
union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared that
“all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,†and
noted approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to look
forward.â€

There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist
leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle
between “slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.†But the drive to
make the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.

The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come
together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders wanted
it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks,
whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War
was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal†could “long endure,†as Lincoln declared in
the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to
continue fighting for equal rights.

And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at Gettysburg
on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony, he
avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared “the
quarrel†between North and South “forgotten.†The ceremony was segregated,
and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white and black
bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50 years before
the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.

Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after
World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars —
while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the
start of summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much would
be gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.

When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The
holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity:
leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in which
great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have died
from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of returning
caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.

Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war
dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they
fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush
administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and its
devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create myths
about it is hardly new.

But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only
honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commemorate
them out in the open, and to insist on a true account.




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.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Trust and Betrayal
“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always
gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.†That’s what
President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any
president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with
reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s
architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to
hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go
so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled
into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue
administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for
those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush
began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will
not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped
and defeated,†people should have realized that he was going to use the
terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis
of evil†consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with
9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted
to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time
before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly
their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really
surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost
always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the
leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the
immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they
did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr.
Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman
back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin
Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had
lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command
structure,†he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about
him.â€

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public
mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single
speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we
went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will
end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave
Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly
disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not
clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the
nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are
convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering.
And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had
nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement†that “has already displayed
more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,†he should be
treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda†wants to “bring down the
West,†he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us
home†if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed
posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know
nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to
graves at Arlington.

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."





http://johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20060622/


Jun 22, 2006
Senator John Edwards
Washington, DC
 
C

Chad Harris

Mike--

I have not needed to install 7+. I have been able to run Nero 6, Nero 6
fully updated per Nero's site this second, and Nero 7 fully updated per
Nero's site this second on Vista without a hitch/glitch/problem.

The only minor annoyance that has not been fixed to date for me is that Nero
any version disables Aero Glass but all you have to do to get it back is to
go to the appearances tab and select Aero on the pull down when you are
finished using Nero. The conflict has been widely reported and AFIK there
has been no plug or update to prevent Nero from stopping Aero Glass, at
least in my experiences.

However Nero 6 through the latest 7 build has worked just fine on my
machines on Vista RTM and prior Vista builds.

CH
___________

Bush, Congress, and most of all Apathetic Americans getting the hypocritical
democracy they deserve running the gas guzzlers and filling Dover Coffins
with dead soldiers like it's goin' outta style:

Apathetic America shopping and running gas guzzlers, their Congress and
their moron leader are making lots more of these in the next few years:

Photos of Military Coffins
(Battlefield and Astronaut Fatalities)
at Dover Air Force Base

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/

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.

May 28, 2007
Editorial Observer
What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead
By ADAM COHEN
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and
abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who gave
their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with
the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states
quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute to
the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after
the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a
forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But something
important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral
battle to free black Americans from slavery.

In “Race and Reunion,†his masterful book about historical memory, David
Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s
transformation — and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations, he
makes clear, do not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a
nation’s understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for political
reasons. Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of
selective forgetting — a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves
uneasily into the history books.

Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes, were
like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to
the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery orator
declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of
this fair land by martyr blood.â€

Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South —
at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk of
union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared that
“all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,†and
noted approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to look
forward.â€

There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist
leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle
between “slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.†But the drive to
make the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.

The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come
together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders wanted
it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks,
whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War
was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal†could “long endure,†as Lincoln declared in
the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to
continue fighting for equal rights.

And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at Gettysburg
on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony, he
avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared “the
quarrel†between North and South “forgotten.†The ceremony was segregated,
and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white and black
bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50 years before
the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.

Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after
World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars —
while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the
start of summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much would
be gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.

When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The
holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity:
leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in which
great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have died
from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of returning
caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.

Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war
dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they
fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush
administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and its
devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create myths
about it is hardly new.

But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only
honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commemorate
them out in the open, and to insist on a true account.




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.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Trust and Betrayal
“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always
gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.†That’s what
President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any
president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with
reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s
architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to
hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go
so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled
into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue
administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for
those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush
began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will
not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped
and defeated,†people should have realized that he was going to use the
terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis
of evil†consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with
9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted
to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time
before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly
their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really
surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost
always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the
leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the
immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they
did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr.
Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman
back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin
Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had
lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command
structure,†he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about
him.â€

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public
mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single
speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we
went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will
end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave
Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly
disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not
clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the
nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are
convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering.
And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had
nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement†that “has already displayed
more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,†he should be
treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda†wants to “bring down the
West,†he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us
home†if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed
posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know
nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to
graves at Arlington.

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."





http://johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20060622/


Jun 22, 2006
Senator John Edwards
Washington, DC
 
M

Mike Hall MVP

Chad

I could not get version 6 to work at all, relented and bought version 7.
Some of the elements of Nero 7 premium appear to interfere with other stuff,
do I just have the burning part installed..

Chad Harris said:
Mike--

I have not needed to install 7+. I have been able to run Nero 6, Nero 6
fully updated per Nero's site this second, and Nero 7 fully updated per
Nero's site this second on Vista without a hitch/glitch/problem.

The only minor annoyance that has not been fixed to date for me is that
Nero any version disables Aero Glass but all you have to do to get it back
is to go to the appearances tab and select Aero on the pull down when you
are finished using Nero. The conflict has been widely reported and AFIK
there has been no plug or update to prevent Nero from stopping Aero Glass,
at least in my experiences.

However Nero 6 through the latest 7 build has worked just fine on my
machines on Vista RTM and prior Vista builds.

CH
___________

Bush, Congress, and most of all Apathetic Americans getting the
hypocritical
democracy they deserve running the gas guzzlers and filling Dover Coffins
with dead soldiers like it's goin' outta style:

Apathetic America shopping and running gas guzzlers, their Congress and
their moron leader are making lots more of these in the next few years:

Photos of Military Coffins
(Battlefield and Astronaut Fatalities)
at Dover Air Force Base

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/

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.

May 28, 2007
Editorial Observer
What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead
By ADAM COHEN
Memorial Day got its start after the Civil War, when freed slaves and
abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to honor Union soldiers who
gave
their lives to battle slavery. The holiday was so closely associated with
the Union side, and with the fight for emancipation, that Southern states
quickly established their own rival Confederate Memorial Day.

Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute
to
the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South
after
the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a
forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But
something
important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been a moral
battle to free black Americans from slavery.

In “Race and Reunion,†his masterful book about historical memory, David
Blight, a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s
transformation — and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations,
he
makes clear, do not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a
nation’s understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for
political
reasons. Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of
selective forgetting — a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves
uneasily into the history books.

Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes,
were
like Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to
the emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery
orator
declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom
of
this fair land by martyr blood.â€

Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the
South —
at New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk
of
union, and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared
that
“all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,†and
noted approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to
look
forward.â€

There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist
leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle
between “slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.†But the drive
to
make the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.

The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to
come
together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders
wanted
it: on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks,
whose status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War
was not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the
proposition
that all men are created equal†could “long endure,†as Lincoln declared
in
the Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to
continue fighting for equal rights.

And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at
Gettysburg
on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like ceremony, he
avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and declared “the
quarrel†between North and South “forgotten.†The ceremony was segregated,
and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white and black
bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50 years before
the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.

Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after
World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars —
while at the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the
start of summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much
would
be gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.

When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The
holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main
activity:
leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in
which
great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have
died
from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of
returning
caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.

Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war
dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they
fought. Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush
administration stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and
its
devolution, demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create
myths
about it is hardly new.

But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only
honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to
commemorate
them out in the open, and to insist on a true account.




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.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Trust and Betrayal
“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always
gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.†That’s what
President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than
any
president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with
reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s
architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to
hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all
go
so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was
misled
into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue
administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there,
for
those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush
began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will
not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found,
stopped
and defeated,†people should have realized that he was going to use the
terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis
of evil†consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with
9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack,
wanted
to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time
before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly
their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really
surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations
almost
always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the
leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the
immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they
did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr.
Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman
back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin
Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had
lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any
command
structure,†he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about
him.â€

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public
mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a
single
speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when
we
went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will
end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave
Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public
utterly
disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not
clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the
nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are
convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering.
And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which
had
nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement†that “has already
displayed
more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,†he should be
treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah
and
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda†wants to “bring down the
West,†he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us
home†if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed
posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know
nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to
graves at Arlington.

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."





http://johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20060622/


Jun 22, 2006
Senator John Edwards
Washington, DC
Click to expand...

--


Mike Hall
MS MVP Windows Shell/User
http://msmvps.com/blogs/mikehall/
 
M

Milhouse Van Houten

The Vista compatibility wiki says about the last version of Nero 6.6.x:

"(installs if you ignore Vista warnings but also causes Explorer crashes
when viewing directories that have video files in them, as well as file
copy/move operations - the Explorer crashes (COM Surrogate failures) can be
corrected by making modifications to Nero specific merit values using
DirectShow Filter Manager 0.5 (freeware) but the file copy/move operations
cannot - surprisingly, a better solution is to install Nero inside a Windows
XP virtual machine (ie. using VMWare Server) and let Nero burn discs from
within the VM using the burner residing outside the VM in Vista -
suprisingly, this works perfectly)."

 
M

MICHAEL

* Milhouse Van Houten:
The Vista compatibility wiki says about the last version of Nero 6.6.x:

"(installs if you ignore Vista warnings but also causes Explorer crashes
when viewing directories that have video files in them, as well as file
copy/move operations - the Explorer crashes (COM Surrogate failures) can be
corrected by making modifications to Nero specific merit values using
DirectShow Filter Manager 0.5 (freeware) but the file copy/move operations
cannot -
Click to expand...
surprisingly, a better solution is to install Nero inside a Windows
XP virtual machine (ie. using VMWare Server) and let Nero burn discs from
within the VM using the burner residing outside the VM in Vista -
suprisingly, this works perfectly)."
Click to expand...

Speaking of XP in virtual machine, you can do several things faster using
XP virtualized than you can with Vista as an installed OS. This is true
whether you use VPC 2007 or a VMWare product. Although, VMWare is
a bit better with more options. I can transfer files across my home network
much faster using my XP Pro vm and Vista as the host. A virtual machine faster
than the host... that's almost funny.


-Michael
 

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