Vista - Colored Folders

I used to use an opensource add-on to XP that allowed a right click that you
could choose the color of the folder, it would automatically change the
folder icon. I was hoping vista had something like this built in without
having to go through the trouble of searching for an icon. Is there a
utility for vista or something that i can do this - it's great for
prioritizing project folders.

thanks.

Hi David--

Iconoid which is free will color most things but I believe it does not color
folders. I threw it in here because it might interest you. It colors text,
text background, icon background, hides icons.

http://www.sillysot.com/

Check out this which advertises 15 colors of folders on Vista:

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...howtopic=11815

Also ck out these:

Icolorfolder at http://icolorfolder.sourceforge.net/ colors folders.



http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/B...r-folders.html

www.foldermarker.com/

http://www.batchconverter.com/Rainbo...ad-13093.shtml

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...howtopic=11662

CH


Go girls---let's see a woman win @ Indy today. Sarah Fisher, Milka Duno,
and Danica Patrick are the 3 women drivers who will get a green flag at
Indy.

Bush, Congress and most of all *Apathetic Americans who shop and drive gas
hogs and get the democracy they deserve are going to fill more and more of
these as we move towards Memorial Day 2007 and then 2008.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/

Hey there's a new Congress in town who dug around when they said the rubber
stamp days are over and found the rubber stamp. Thousands more coffins @
Dover by Bushie while they ignore body armor, IED stoppers because the
lobbyists have paid them for methods that don't work, and a political
solution that would force the Arab kings and leaders to get off their oil
stuffed asses and work to stabilize their region and step up to bat against
the direct threat to their stability. They'll get it when the people storm
their palaces.

I'm thinking that now that Georgia Rules diva Lindsey Lohan has joined the
"Crash your mercedes drunk with coke inside club" when Scooter is sentenced
a week from this Wednesday, the Judge might consider a special enhancement
putting Scooter in a cell for his first so many weeks with Paris and Lindsay
and let the three of them cat fight with their Blahnik collection.

War Without End
NYT Editorial

Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been
swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly
coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on
his disastrous misadventure.

By week's end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary
strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also
the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of
victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans'
lives.

And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was the
only person who understood the true enemy.

Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that Al
Qaeda is "public enemy No. 1" in Iraq and that "the terrorists' goal in Iraq
is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here at
home." The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter who
had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush's declining credibility with the
public, declaring that Al Qaeda is "a threat to your children" and accusing
him of naïvely ignoring the danger.

It's upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian violence
in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that Americans'
support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown
accustomed to this president's disconnect from reality and his habit of
tilting at straw men, like Americans who don't care about terrorism because
they question his mismanagement of the war or don't worry about what will
happen after the United States withdraws, as it inevitably must.

The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush's comments is his painting of the
war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-but-the-wrongheaded fight between the
United States and a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al Qaeda on the
other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated government of
Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with many of its own people. And it
removes all pressure from the Iraqi leadership - and Mr. Bush - to halt the
sectarian fighting and create a real democracy.

There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism - call it Al Qaeda or by
any other name - is a dire threat. There is also no doubt that terrorists
entered Iraq - mostly after the war began.

We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as possible so the
United States can withdraw its troops without unleashing even more chaos and
destruction. But Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality only
makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the Iraqi leaders, who
have to stop their sectarian blood feud and make a real attempt to form a
united government. That is their best chance to stabilize the country, allow
the United States to withdraw and, yes, battle Al Qaeda.

The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for political progress on
the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal date for American soldiers, were
trying to start that process. It's a shame they could not summon the will
and discipline to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As
disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense
than Mr. Bush's denial of Iraq's civil war and his war-without-end against
terror.


FRANK RICH: Operation Freedom From Iraqis
WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the
Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty
and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization
has now become America's sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.



However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis
were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people
in the administration's reckless bet to "transform" the Middle East. From
"Stuff happens!" on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded
contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus
is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz
to kick around anymore, the war's dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the
Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou
Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming "aliens" from Mexico.



Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and
nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That's a
total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this
month that Iraq's child-survival rate is falling faster than any other
nation's. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of
5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in
Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what's happening in
the country he gave "God's gift of freedom."




It's easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to
concede that American policy is in ruins. A "secure" Iraq is a mirage, and,
worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might
have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq's
humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he
tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops' coffins
off-camera and staying away from military funerals.



But his silence about Iraq's mass exodus is not merely another instance of
deceptive White House P.R.; it's part of a policy with a huge human cost.
The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to
prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray
Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or
to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.



Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden,
which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis
this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted
by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a
figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill
passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all
interpreters.




In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did
tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator
Kennedy's phrase, have "an assassin's bull's-eye on their backs" because
they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past
four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the
administration's most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador
John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the
Iraqi refugee problem had "absolutely nothing to do" with Saddam's
overthrow: "Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide
security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don't think we have an
obligation to compensate for the hardships of war."



Actually, we haven't fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning
institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn't was that L.
Paul Bremer's provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified
but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after
they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is
nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant
secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen
Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland
with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in
anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to
Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.




Ms. Sauerbrey's official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley
of "60 Minutes" in March, is that most of them "really want to go home." The
administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national
security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties. But
many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were vetted
already, when the American government and its various Halliburton
subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first
place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is the
contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of
refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000
Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of
Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven
months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.



The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War,
told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process
carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond
Vietnam's borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the
current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American treatment
of Iraqi refugees isn't that war in any case, but World War II. That's when
an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly
obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in
America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many
as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit
visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard Sachar's "History of the
Jews in America."



Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer declared
that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to cleanse Iraq of
Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who "broadened the decree's
impact far beyond our original design." The Republican leader in the Senate,
Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis for being unable "to do anything
they promised."



The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is "blame and
run." It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last fall,
when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his
defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might "have to pull up their
socks, step up and take responsibility for their country." By January, Mr.
Bush was saying that "the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt
of gratitude" and wondering aloud "whether or not there is a gratitude level
that's significant enough in Iraq." In February, one of the war's leading
neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the boom. "Iraq
is their country," Charles Krauthammer wrote. "We midwifed their freedom.
They chose civil war." Bill O'Reilly and others now echo this cry.




The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that's
coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for timelines and
benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting its own timeline for American
withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq's nominal
government is saying it's fed up. The American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of
convenience, midwifed by disastrous Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated
into the marriage from hell.



While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the
separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in
the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush's May 10 claim that
"the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially" since the surge
began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of such
murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear. Casualty
figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest yet for our
troops.



While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did greet
the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis - not
the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama bin Laden's
Qaeda in Pakistan - who do want to follow us home. That we are slamming the
door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality
beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though
the war's godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler,
their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own
Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.



MAUREEN DOWD: Bush's Fleurs du Mal
WASHINGTON

For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black
granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a war
that their leaders already knew could not be won.

So many died because of ego and deceit - because L.B.J. and Robert McNamara
wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect Nixon's
re-election chances.

Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It
knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome
bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the
American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90
killed thus far in May. The democracy's not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers get
ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be blown
up.

The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after long
years of pretending that we'd "turned the corner" doesn't believe there's a
military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an open letter to
the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism and violence,
even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from four months in
Iran, rallying his fans by crying: "No, no, no to Satan! No, no, no to
America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!"

W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of
surrender - just as Nixon did - and dumps the Frankenstate he's created on
his successor.

"The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike
our homeland," he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. "The enemy in Iraq
does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must
fight the terrorists where they live so that we don't have to fight them
where we live."

The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two years
old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to
attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking: Order the
killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American civilians
here. There AND here. Get it, W.?

The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in
Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we
pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops
have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn't know we're
leaving. Osama hasn't been found because he's hiding.

The terrorists moved into George Bush's Iraq, not Saddam Hussein's. W.'s
ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then
complaining your garden is toxic.

The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC
reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be "a
credible messenger on the war" given all the mistakes and all the
disillusioned Republicans.

"I'm credible because I read the intelligence, David," he replied sharply.

But he isn't and he doesn't. Otherwise he might have read "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S." in August 2001, and might have read the prewar
intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently forecast the
horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because they want to
be seen as hard, not soft.

Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they accurately
predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an "alien" idea that
could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook up with
Saddam loyalists and "angry young recruits" to militant Islam to "wage
guerrilla warfare" on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda would be
the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.

W. repeated last week that he would never retreat, but his advisers are
working on ways to retreat. After the surge, in lieu of strategy, come the
"concepts."

Condi Rice, Bob Gates and generals at the Pentagon are talking about
long-range "concepts" for reducing forces in Iraq, The Times reported
yesterday, as a way to tamp down criticism, including from Republicans; it
is also an acknowledgment that they can't sustain the current force level
there much longer. The article said that officials were starting to think
about how to halve the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, sometime in the
second half of 2008.

As the Hollywood screenwriter said in "Annie Hall": "Right now it's only a
notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later turn
it into an idea."


THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: The Quiet Americans
Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot
about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I'm not sure
what they call this generation. Is it generation "X" or "Y" or "Zero" or
"Me"? Having taken part in two other commencements this season, though, and
knowing enough about what my own daughter's friends are doing, I can say
there is something quietly impressive about this cohort. In fact, if I were
giving them a label I'd call them the "Quiet Americans" - not in the cynical
way Graham Greene meant it, but in a very positive sense.

They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of
terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America
they are about to inherit. They don't take to the streets much - in part, I
suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it
seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for
military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.

Four years ago, when my wife and I dropped our daughter off at college, I
wrote that I was troubled that I was dropping her off into a world that was
so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into - and I worried
that she would not be able to travel in the carefree way that I had when I
was her age. Her two summers teaching and researching in India have cured me
of that misapprehension. Now I know how my mother felt.

"I don't know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they read
to them," said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, the departing president of George
Washington University.

"I've been a college president for 30 years, and these kids are more
optimistic about the future than any I have seen - maybe more than they have
reason to be," he said. "They still believe that the world is their oyster
and go abroad with abandon. Notwithstanding everything, they remain
optimistic."

In my previous column, I wrote about the number of foreign-born students who
are dominating graduate science programs at our best schools, which I
witnessed firsthand at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's commencement. But
something else struck me at Rensselaer - the number of R.O.T.C. grads,
including women, who came up and collected their degrees in full dress
uniforms.

It was not only the pride with which they wore those uniforms that was
palpable, but also the respect they were accorded by their classmates. I
spoke to one young man who was going from graduation at Rensselaer right out
to sea with the United States Navy. As bad as Iraq is, they just keep
signing up. I have been equally impressed by the number of my daughter's
friends who have opted to join Teach for America.

And that can-do-will-do spirit is a good thing, because we will need it to
preserve our democracy from those who want to steal the openness and
optimism that make democracy work.

When I graduated in 1975, the world was dominated by interstate rivalries
and conclusive wars. The class of 2007 is graduating into a world of
state-versus-gang wars and gang-versus-gang wars that are often
inconclusive. Look at the Middle East today. You have gangs fighting states
and armies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Gaza.

If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and capitalism,
the dominant clash of this generation is between "nihilism" - represented by
suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to Baghdad - and
"optimism" that a better social and political order can be created, and
therefore service matters. That's why this generation's willingness to
continue venturing into the world, whether to repair it or do business with
it, is so important. It is exactly the opposite of what the nihilists want.

"Triumphing over fear is the victory of the democratic citizen against the
paralyzing effects of terror," the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi
observed. "It has to be done, though, at the level of each citizen. Just as
the violence has been fragmented, so must the victory over this violence be
done one by one. Leaders can help, but ultimately victory is about not
letting the fear engendered by this new era paralyze you."

We have to hope, though, that the determination that characterizes these
Quiet Americans extends into their adulthood, and is also shared by those
who choose to be doctors, consultants, lawyers and bankers. So many big
problems are going to come due on their watch - from underfunded Social
Security to health care to climate change - that the effort needed to fix
them will require them to stay involved, redouble their resolve and raise
their voices.


"DavidH" <email@dfhaskell.com> wrote in message
news:el68WLHoHHA.2596@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
>I used to use an opensource add-on to XP that allowed a right click that
>you could choose the color of the folder, it would automatically change the
>folder icon. I was hoping vista had something like this built in without
>having to go through the trouble of searching for an icon. Is there a
>utility for vista or something that i can do this - it's great for
>prioritizing project folders.
>
> thanks.

Thanks.

"Chad Harris" <vistaneedsmuchowork.net> wrote in message
news:%23hYrgjHoHHA.1244@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> Hi David--
>
> Iconoid which is free will color most things but I believe it does not
> color folders. I threw it in here because it might interest you. It
> colors text, text background, icon background, hides icons.
>
> http://www.sillysot.com/
>
> Check out this which advertises 15 colors of folders on Vista:
>
> http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...howtopic=11815
>
> Also ck out these:
>
> Icolorfolder at http://icolorfolder.sourceforge.net/ colors folders.
>
>
>
> http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/B...r-folders.html
>
> www.foldermarker.com/
>
> http://www.batchconverter.com/Rainbo...ad-13093.shtml
>
> http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...howtopic=11662
>
> CH
>
>
> Go girls---let's see a woman win @ Indy today. Sarah Fisher, Milka Duno,
> and Danica Patrick are the 3 women drivers who will get a green flag at
> Indy.
>
> Bush, Congress and most of all *Apathetic Americans who shop and drive gas
> hogs and get the democracy they deserve are going to fill more and more of
> these as we move towards Memorial Day 2007 and then 2008.
> http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/
>
> Hey there's a new Congress in town who dug around when they said the
> rubber stamp days are over and found the rubber stamp. Thousands more
> coffins @ Dover by Bushie while they ignore body armor, IED stoppers
> because the lobbyists have paid them for methods that don't work, and a
> political solution that would force the Arab kings and leaders to get off
> their oil stuffed asses and work to stabilize their region and step up to
> bat against the direct threat to their stability. They'll get it when the
> people storm their palaces.
>
> I'm thinking that now that Georgia Rules diva Lindsey Lohan has joined the
> "Crash your mercedes drunk with coke inside club" when Scooter is
> sentenced a week from this Wednesday, the Judge might consider a special
> enhancement putting Scooter in a cell for his first so many weeks with
> Paris and Lindsay and let the three of them cat fight with their Blahnik
> collection.
>
> War Without End
> NYT Editorial
>
> Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been
> swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly
> coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit
> on his disastrous misadventure.
>
> By week's end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary
> strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also
> the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of
> victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans'
> lives.
>
> And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was
> the only person who understood the true enemy.
>
> Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that
> Al Qaeda is "public enemy No. 1" in Iraq and that "the terrorists' goal in
> Iraq is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here
> at home." The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter
> who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush's declining credibility with
> the public, declaring that Al Qaeda is "a threat to your children" and
> accusing him of naïvely ignoring the danger.
>
> It's upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian
> violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that
> Americans' support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we
> have grown accustomed to this president's disconnect from reality and his
> habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don't care about
> terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don't
> worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it
> inevitably must.
>
> The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush's comments is his painting of
> the war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-but-the-wrongheaded fight
> between the United States and a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al
> Qaeda on the other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated
> government of Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with many of its own
> people. And it removes all pressure from the Iraqi leadership - and Mr.
> Bush - to halt the sectarian fighting and create a real democracy.
>
> There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism - call it Al Qaeda or
> by any other name - is a dire threat. There is also no doubt that
> terrorists entered Iraq - mostly after the war began.
>
> We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as possible so the
> United States can withdraw its troops without unleashing even more chaos
> and destruction. But Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality
> only makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the Iraqi
> leaders, who have to stop their sectarian blood feud and make a real
> attempt to form a united government. That is their best chance to
> stabilize the country, allow the United States to withdraw and, yes,
> battle Al Qaeda.
>
> The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for political progress on
> the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal date for American soldiers, were
> trying to start that process. It's a shame they could not summon the will
> and discipline to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As
> disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense
> than Mr. Bush's denial of Iraq's civil war and his war-without-end against
> terror.
>
>
> FRANK RICH: Operation Freedom From Iraqis
> WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the
> Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought
> liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch
> rationalization has now become America's sorriest self-delusion in this
> tragedy.
>
>
>
> However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis
> were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people
> in the administration's reckless bet to "transform" the Middle East. From
> "Stuff happens!" on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq
> exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now
> this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and
> Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war's dead-enders are pinning
> the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as
> much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming "aliens" from
> Mexico.
>
>
>
> Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and
> nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That's a
> total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported
> this month that Iraq's child-survival rate is falling faster than any
> other nation's. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the
> age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and
> AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what's
> happening in the country he gave "God's gift of freedom."
>
>
>
>
> It's easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is
> to concede that American policy is in ruins. A "secure" Iraq is a mirage,
> and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who
> might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq's
> humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he
> tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops'
> coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
>
>
>
> But his silence about Iraq's mass exodus is not merely another instance of
> deceptive White House P.R.; it's part of a policy with a huge human cost.
> The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to
> prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray
> Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time
> or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
>
>
>
> Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden,
> which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000
> Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings
> conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to
> 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration
> propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another
> piddling 500, all interpreters.
>
>
>
>
> In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did
> tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator
> Kennedy's phrase, have "an assassin's bull's-eye on their backs" because
> they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past
> four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of
> the administration's most fervent hawks, the former United Nations
> ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He
> claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had "absolutely nothing to do" with
> Saddam's overthrow: "Our obligation was to give them new institutions and
> provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don't think we have
> an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war."
>
>
>
> Actually, we haven't fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning
> institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn't was that L.
> Paul Bremer's provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with
> unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were
> hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The
> administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices.
> The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now,
> Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of
> Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in
> anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was
> to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
>
>
>
>
> Ms. Sauerbrey's official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley
> of "60 Minutes" in March, is that most of them "really want to go home."
> The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national
> security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties.
> But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were
> vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton
> subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first
> place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is
> the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of
> refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000
> Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of
> Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven
> months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.
>
>
>
> The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War,
> told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process
> carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond
> Vietnam's borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the
> current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American
> treatment of Iraqi refugees isn't that war in any case, but World War II.
> That's when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge
> Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from
> obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under
> existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before
> the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard
> Sachar's "History of the Jews in America."
>
>
>
> Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer
> declared that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to
> cleanse Iraq of Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who
> "broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design." The
> Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis
> for being unable "to do anything they promised."
>
>
>
> The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is "blame
> and run." It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last
> fall, when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his
> defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might "have to pull up their
> socks, step up and take responsibility for their country." By January, Mr.
> Bush was saying that "the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt
> of gratitude" and wondering aloud "whether or not there is a gratitude
> level that's significant enough in Iraq." In February, one of the war's
> leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the
> boom. "Iraq is their country," Charles Krauthammer wrote. "We midwifed
> their freedom. They chose civil war." Bill O'Reilly and others now echo
> this cry.
>
>
>
>
> The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything
> that's coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the
> compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American
> demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting
> its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation
> schedule, Iraq's nominal government is saying it's fed up. The
> American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous
> Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell.
>
>
>
> While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the
> separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in
> the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush's May 10 claim that
> "the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially" since the
> surge began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of
> such murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear.
> Casualty figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest
> yet for our troops.
>
>
>
> While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did
> greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such
> Iraqis - not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama
> bin Laden's Qaeda in Pakistan - who do want to follow us home. That we are
> slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the
> real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi
> Freedom. Though the war's godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world
> of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that
> will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to
> be saved.
>
>
>
> MAUREEN DOWD: Bush's Fleurs du Mal
> WASHINGTON
>
> For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black
> granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a
> war that their leaders already knew could not be won.
>
> So many died because of ego and deceit - because L.B.J. and Robert
> McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect
> Nixon's re-election chances.
>
> Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It
> knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome
> bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the
> American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90
> killed thus far in May. The democracy's not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers
> get ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be
> blown up.
>
> The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after
> long years of pretending that we'd "turned the corner" doesn't believe
> there's a military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an
> open letter to the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism
> and violence, even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from
> four months in Iran, rallying his fans by crying: "No, no, no to Satan!
> No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!"
>
> W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of
> surrender - just as Nixon did - and dumps the Frankenstate he's created on
> his successor.
>
> "The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike
> our homeland," he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. "The enemy in Iraq
> does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must
> fight the terrorists where they live so that we don't have to fight them
> where we live."
>
> The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two
> years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in
> Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking:
> Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American
> civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?
>
> The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in
> Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we
> pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops
> have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn't know we're
> leaving. Osama hasn't been found because he's hiding.
>
> The terrorists moved into George Bush's Iraq, not Saddam Hussein's. W.'s
> ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then
> complaining your garden is toxic.
>
> The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC
> reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be "a
> credible messenger on the war" given all the mistakes and all the
> disillusioned Republicans.
>
> "I'm credible because I read the intelligence, David," he replied sharply.
>
> But he isn't and he doesn't. Otherwise he might have read "Bin Laden
> Determined to Strike in U.S." in August 2001, and might have read the
> prewar intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently
> forecast the horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because
> they want to be seen as hard, not soft.
>
> Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they
> accurately predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an "alien"
> idea that could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook
> up with Saddam loyalists and "angry young recruits" to militant Islam to
> "wage guerrilla warfare" on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda
> would be the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.
>
> W. repeated last week that he would never retreat, but his advisers are
> working on ways to retreat. After the surge, in lieu of strategy, come the
> "concepts."
>
> Condi Rice, Bob Gates and generals at the Pentagon are talking about
> long-range "concepts" for reducing forces in Iraq, The Times reported
> yesterday, as a way to tamp down criticism, including from Republicans; it
> is also an acknowledgment that they can't sustain the current force level
> there much longer. The article said that officials were starting to think
> about how to halve the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, sometime in
> the second half of 2008.
>
> As the Hollywood screenwriter said in "Annie Hall": "Right now it's only a
> notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later
> turn it into an idea."
>
>
> THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: The Quiet Americans
> Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot
> about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I'm not
> sure what they call this generation. Is it generation "X" or "Y" or "Zero"
> or "Me"? Having taken part in two other commencements this season, though,
> and knowing enough about what my own daughter's friends are doing, I can
> say there is something quietly impressive about this cohort. In fact, if I
> were giving them a label I'd call them the "Quiet Americans" - not in the
> cynical way Graham Greene meant it, but in a very positive sense.
>
> They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of
> terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America
> they are about to inherit. They don't take to the streets much - in part,
> I suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it
> seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for
> military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.
>
> Four years ago, when my wife and I dropped our daughter off at college, I
> wrote that I was troubled that I was dropping her off into a world that
> was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into - and I
> worried that she would not be able to travel in the carefree way that I
> had when I was her age. Her two summers teaching and researching in India
> have cured me of that misapprehension. Now I know how my mother felt.
>
> "I don't know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they
> read to them," said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, the departing president of
> George Washington University.
>
> "I've been a college president for 30 years, and these kids are more
> optimistic about the future than any I have seen - maybe more than they
> have reason to be," he said. "They still believe that the world is their
> oyster and go abroad with abandon. Notwithstanding everything, they remain
> optimistic."
>
> In my previous column, I wrote about the number of foreign-born students
> who are dominating graduate science programs at our best schools, which I
> witnessed firsthand at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's commencement.
> But something else struck me at Rensselaer - the number of R.O.T.C. grads,
> including women, who came up and collected their degrees in full dress
> uniforms.
>
> It was not only the pride with which they wore those uniforms that was
> palpable, but also the respect they were accorded by their classmates. I
> spoke to one young man who was going from graduation at Rensselaer right
> out to sea with the United States Navy. As bad as Iraq is, they just keep
> signing up. I have been equally impressed by the number of my daughter's
> friends who have opted to join Teach for America.
>
> And that can-do-will-do spirit is a good thing, because we will need it to
> preserve our democracy from those who want to steal the openness and
> optimism that make democracy work.
>
> When I graduated in 1975, the world was dominated by interstate rivalries
> and conclusive wars. The class of 2007 is graduating into a world of
> state-versus-gang wars and gang-versus-gang wars that are often
> inconclusive. Look at the Middle East today. You have gangs fighting
> states and armies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Gaza.
>
> If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and
> capitalism, the dominant clash of this generation is between "nihilism" -
> represented by suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to
> Baghdad - and "optimism" that a better social and political order can be
> created, and therefore service matters. That's why this generation's
> willingness to continue venturing into the world, whether to repair it or
> do business with it, is so important. It is exactly the opposite of what
> the nihilists want.
>
> "Triumphing over fear is the victory of the democratic citizen against the
> paralyzing effects of terror," the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi
> observed. "It has to be done, though, at the level of each citizen. Just
> as the violence has been fragmented, so must the victory over this
> violence be done one by one. Leaders can help, but ultimately victory is
> about not letting the fear engendered by this new era paralyze you."
>
> We have to hope, though, that the determination that characterizes these
> Quiet Americans extends into their adulthood, and is also shared by those
> who choose to be doctors, consultants, lawyers and bankers. So many big
> problems are going to come due on their watch - from underfunded Social
> Security to health care to climate change - that the effort needed to fix
> them will require them to stay involved, redouble their resolve and raise
> their voices.
>
>
> "DavidH" <email@dfhaskell.com> wrote in message
> news:el68WLHoHHA.2596@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
>>I used to use an opensource add-on to XP that allowed a right click that
>>you could choose the color of the folder, it would automatically change
>>the folder icon. I was hoping vista had something like this built in
>>without having to go through the trouble of searching for an icon. Is
>>there a utility for vista or something that i can do this - it's great for
>>prioritizing project folders.
>>
>> thanks.
>