MINNEAPOLIS – Republicans on Tuesday debated election principles influenced by their conservative base as well as by presidential candidate John McCain, taking a hard line on abortion while edging toward a more moderate position on global warming.

Conservatives succeeded in removing a line from a platform draft urging a reduction in abortions — underscoring their point that abortion should be eliminated. At the same time, the party weighed an energy policy acknowledging the human imprint on climate change. END

Being a Registered Republican, I can tell you that it should be considered a world event that the conservative base--mentally challenged animals that in the four-legged world would be killed by the pack—has learned at this early date that humans have had an negative impact on the environment.

Really, if one has never listened to a group of these creatures from the dry end of the gene pool discuss greenhouse gases, they cannot begin to comprehend that this acknowledgment equals the acknowledgment of their ancestors in 1906 that Earth was round and not flat as John Jack Reagan, the world's first Alzheimer's patient, had lead them to believe.

Putting strong language against abortion in a convention platform document, after you have needlessly murdered over a million people in Iraq, 4,500 of them your own people, is slightly hypocritical. Furthermore, when you consider they have allowed Robert Mugabe, a CIA/MI6 puppet to murder 300,000 souls just because he wanted to, you zip right on past hypocrites and end up with a group of people whose deaths would make the world a better and safer place to live.

And all of that is not even the bad news. A five minute investigation into the sub-prime mortgage scandal will reveal that it was well planned and had been in the works for years. Bill Clinton vetoed this gangster plan twice, but the bought-and-paid-for mortgage industry puppets in Congress, one of them being Senator Joe Biden from Delaware, just kept hammering away until they got their bill in front of George W. Bush, who already had pen in hand (Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005). At that moment in time, the die was cast and the U.S. economy started a slow unseen death spiral.

In Denver, Biden is being touted as a friend to middle class Americans, while he and his children are in a half dozen deals at this very moment that are making it harder for these Americans to make ends meet. Right after that comes St. Paul where John McCain, a man being touted as a fixer and hero, cannot balance a checkbook, operate a computer, or even knows how many homes he owns. His only war experience was getting lost, then shot down and spending five years in a POW camp; not in a box, but in the best surroundings in the prison because he was making propaganda tapes for the NVA and snitching on his fellow POWs. I was shot down twice and fought my way to freedom, so I consider McCain one of the biggest phonies I've ever met, and I told him so to his face in the VA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. And he didn't grab me by the shirt or get hot under the collar and pop off. He chooses his victims wisely, and most are women.

Bob Miller