For once I find myself essentially in agreement with Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman. USA citizens are indeed under terrorist attack.

And he is one of the two most recent terrorists. His insistence that health care reform contain no public option will documentedly kill more people in this country than any random shooting by a single gunman is ever likely to do.

The statistics suggest this. And the Senator should know a thing or two about statistics. It is how the insurance industry - the largest gambling concern in the world - makes its money; with taxpayer rescue.

He has made it clear that the public option must not be in any senate bill über alles. And he is willing to risk his career as a politician to prevent it.

If Connecticut citizens disagree at the polls, it could lead to Lieberman's political suicide.

Yet Joe Lieberman will likely 'live' to fight another day after his suicide attempt. And his nemisis the Fort Hood mass murderer apparently will as well. Hopefully we will all survive long enough to be enlightened.

A Syrian-Canadian sent to Syria to be tortured has been denied the right to sue in US 2nd district Appeals court in a 7-4 decision. Would Senator Lieberman's conscience extend so far as to support Maher Arar's claim? Would he support him if he were Jewish?

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad describes Israel as a "fake regime". Would major Malik Hadal Hasan agree? Does he promote the same solution as president Ahmadinejad?

Extremism and fundamentalism are not restricted by religion. Should we expect a higher standard from a senator than from an Army major?

Candidate Lieberman's support of the Bush administration was such an issue in his re-election that it forced him to leave the Democratic party.

At the same time those torture policies were not only harming innocent people, they were likely putting US troops in the field at greater risk of similar treatment. Torture can be a state-sponsored form of terror. Have we allowed torture?

When convicted Nidal Malik Hasan will face the death penalty.

Whether he will become a martyr for the Palestinian cause may be the more important question to ask.

The death penalty is not surprising given the fact that he was an active US soldier & he killed on a military base. Plus the fact it happened in TX.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect only federal law will be applied in this case.

So the state in which it took place would be irrelevant.

Should the Texas legal prosecutorial tradition apply he would probably have an attorney assigned who slept through the proceedings, mishandled data so badly that the Supreme Court would eventually have to approve his execution, and our justice system made such a mockery before the world that future terrorist attacks would be virtually assured.

But I'm only guessing, obviously.

It is stunning to recall that Brendan McClelland was dragged to his death in the state of Texas so recently. Note that the article is careful to point out that The Nation of Islam, which was one of many groups to protest the State's handling of the case, was itself considered a hate group.

That may be "fair and balanced" but will terrorists of any political stripe care?

And we now have a black president prosecuting a muslim soldier for a mass murder motivated by ideologies.

I was referring more to public sentiment & outrage in that state (& I'm in no way defending Hasan's actions).

...Hell, TX is willing to execute just about any criminal regardless of the offense & the public is in full support of it. & the faster they're executed the better.

I still think about a former next-door neighbor, who was from Texas, whose father visited from that state. While we were on our deck having dinner, and they on theirs doing the same, stood on a stool to peep over the bannister and engage us in conversation.

I don't know what he thought of an interracial gay couple living next to his daughter and son-in-law but he did mention during a brief and light-hearted conversation that he thought all prisoners, regardless of crime, who were there for more than a three year sentence should be put to death.

We waited for a chuckle. None came. We never spoke to him again.

Perhaps that's the problem in this country. Such people are not challenged, or even taken seriously, by normal folks.

We did not doubt he was armed, since we've even had a serviceperson from the Philadelphia suburbs insist on bringing a gun into our house. We insist they leave them outside or we find someone else.

How do you talk down a suicide bomber? This may be good practice for the nation.

The "protests" perpetrated by Westboro Baptist Church in the Philadelphia area recently are an indicator of what can happen when one forms an alliance with the devil.

These folks could not care less that Joe Lieberman supports the right of Israel to all of Judea and Samaria. They hate him, Israel, other Jews and Gays with equal fervor.

But Lieberman sees no philosophical connection between his orthodoxy and theirs. And he assumes it can only help and never hurt him or his causes.

But if he continues to thwart the will of the majority in his state, movements similar to WBC will eventually proliferate. And they will elect other politicians who "know what is best" for their constituents.

So now Senator Lieberman appears to be advising "preemptive" war in Yemen.

We have some good examples of preemptive wars based on principle. Ghengis Khan waged at least one. Alexander the Great waged several. The Holy Roman Empire had some temporary success. Russia had much the same in Afghanistan - but with much shorter success. More recently Adolf Hitler attempted to forcibly convert the world to his version of superior German rule.

And then there was the USA's war in Vietnam, striking at the shadow of the domino principle; a war which we seem to forget each time there is a new terrorist attack on, or threat to, this country.

How many muslim national governments will we have to destroy and inadequately replace - and at what expense - before people like Lieberman realize that the War on Terrorism is an international police action that we lead by default? Police do not destroy a house to arrest a few individuals, even if it is a crack house or harbors radical extremists.

Philadelphia learned that with the Move incident, and our federal government learned with the Waco Siege. If we continue to practice and advocate excessive responses to every terror attack, we risk promoting state terror.