Here's a great example for the Iraqis on how democracy works - The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill yesterday repealing most of the District's gun laws, in a vote that handed an election-season victory to gun rights groups and was denounced by the city's leaders as a historic violation of home rule. Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), the bill's sponsor, called the vote a bipartisan victory for District residents' constitutional right to bear arms. But what about the right to representation in Congress? Or making your own damn laws? Congressman Davis from Virginia, a Republican by the way, had this to say: "No one should question the importance of keeping fully loaded assault weapons off the streets of the District," "There is an important place for debate on D.C. gun laws -- that is in the chambers of the D.C. Council, not the Congress."
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Cheney on Iraq
Here's what he said more than a decade ago defending the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn't be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting "bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
Flip-flop? Change of opinion? Seems you were right the 1st time, Dick.
Flip-flop? Change of opinion? Seems you were right the 1st time, Dick.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Read this
The following is from the Toronto Star.
LANDSTUHL, Germany—At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives.
They're the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq.
They're the maimed and the scarred that hospital staff believe are largely invisible to an American public ignorant of their suffering.
"They have no idea what's going on here, none whatsoever," says Col. Earl Hecker, a critical care doctor who trained at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.
The broken bodies move some of the hospital's military staff to question a war producing the most American casualties since Vietnam.
And they reduce the chief surgeon to tears.
"It breaks your heart," says Lt.-Col. Ronald Place.
"There's nothing more rewarding than to take care of these guys. Not money, not anything," he adds, crying.
From their hospital beds, solidarity with the men and women in the platoons they've left behind has wounded soldiers expressing an amazing desire to return to Iraq.
But few feel they need to hurry. They're convinced U.S. soldiers will be fighting, dying and getting maimed in Iraq for many years to come.
Says Col. Rhonda Cornum, the hospital's commander: "Peace doesn't seem to be breaking out any time soon."
The 50-year-old medical centre is where the U.S. military's sick and seriously wounded from Iraq are treated after being patched up on the battlefield.
Prior to the Iraq war, the hospital received no more than 10 injured U.S. soldiers a year from conflicts. Now, it usually handles between 30 and 55 a day from Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, almost 16,000 wounded, injured or sick soldiers from the conflict have been evacuated to Landstuhl.
As of Friday, 1,042 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq — more than 900 of them since May 1, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over — and 7,400 were wounded in combat, according to the Pentagon. About 3,400 of the wounded returned to duty after 72 hours. Almost all the rest came to Landstuhl, in southwestern Germany, for treatment.
On Thursday, a medical flight from Iraq brought 27 injured soldiers, two of them fighting for their lives.
"He might not make it," says a member of the medical team as a 27-year-old soldier is lowered from an ambulance and rushed to the intensive care unit.
Plugged to a respirator, the soldier lies naked on a bed, his pelvic area covered by a towel.
A roadside bomb 12 hours earlier left deep burns on 20 per cent of his body, a punctured lung and a broken leg. His chances of survival, a doctor says, are roughly 50-50.
His seared hands are sliced opened to prevent the need for amputation due to swelling. His dead skin is scraped off, a gel is spread thick to prevent infections, and his arms are wrapped in thick, white bandages.
"He's very unstable," says Hecker, 70.
Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.
"I'm here for him — nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."
He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."
Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.
He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.
"It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."
"If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally."
What the hospital's chief psychologist calls "compassion fatigue" is a widespread syndrome among the medical staff.
"There's a great deal of hurt going on in the hospital," says Maj. Stephen Franco.
But Maj. Cathy Martin, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, prefers to deal with her stress by calling on Americans to consider the plight of the war wounded when making a choice in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
"People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change," she says.
Most combat wounds treated at the hospital are caused by rocket-propelled grenades or shrapnel from bombs, Place says.
About 160 U.S. soldiers from Iraq have had limbs amputated, and 200 have lost all or part of their sight from bomb blasts. Body armour has saved lives, but Place believes wounds that significantly disfigure are a greater advantage to insurgents than the rising body count.
"From a psychological warfare aspect, to maim many is better than to kill a few," he says.
Wounds that can't be seen are also taking their toll. About 1,400 U.S. soldiers have been treated exclusively for mental health problems caused by the trauma of war.
Hospital officials keep access to the wounded strictly limited. But they allow three soldiers to be interviewed, all in the hospital's orthopaedic wing, where two nurses steady a soldier learning to use a walker and dragging a lifeless right leg.
In one room is Marine Lance Cpl. Corey Dailey from San Diego. Dailey says he enlisted shortly after the war started because, "I'm 18-years-old, I wanted to go and get some."
"Combat is the ultimate adrenalin rush. It's scary as hell but when your adrenalin gets pumping, it's really awesome," he says.
Last Wednesday, a month after he got to Iraq, Dailey was at an observation post in Ramadi, part of the so-called Sunni triangle of insurgency, when a sniper's bullet shattered a bone in his right arm.
Now, Dailey doesn't think much of Iraq.
"The whole place sucks," he says. "The heat — that sucks, and the streets smell like crap."
Still, he's itching to go back.
"We can't win this fight without the Iraqis. They need to help us. They need to stand up" to the insurgents, he says.
In another room, 23-year-old Mark Romero from the army's Third Brigade is also nursing a broken arm. A mechanic who served 11 months in Iraq, he snapped a bone trying to stop a 230 kilogram metal door from falling on a fellow soldier.
Lodged in his back is a piece of shrapnel from mortars that rained through the roof of the gym at the U.S. base in Mosul, northern Iraq, while Romero was working out.
He says the question constantly asked by soldiers is: "What are we doing there?"
"Realistically, I think it's going to turn into Korea where we have troops that will always be stationed there," he says of the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Sitting stiff with pain on his bed is Romero's roommate, Sgt. 1st Class Larry Daniels — "Big Daddy Daniels" to his men in Iraq. His arms are bandaged from just below the shoulders to the tip of his fingers and rods stick out of them like scaffolding. Shrapnel wounds cover the back of his body, from behind his right ear to his ankles.
"They got most of it out," he says about the shrapnel.
Doctors estimate it will take two years for Daniels to recover.
On Sept. 18 at 3:30 p.m., Daniels and his men were protecting Iraqi contractors repairing a chain-link fence on a bridge near the Baghdad airport.
"The traffic was going around us and this guy came out of nowhere," Daniels says, describing a car in the distinctive orange and white colours of local taxis.
"I took a step and I heard a pop, and in my head I thought I stepped on a land mine. At the same time my body went up in the air and I was upside down looking at the cars and the spot where I'd been. And then I hit the ground," he says.
Two of his soldiers in their early 20s lay dead. Daniels, 37, was patched up in a military hospital in Baghdad and arrived at Landstuhl last Monday.
A member of the 1st Cavalry, Bravo 4-5 ADA Company, Daniels traces his family's long military roots to a colonel in the American Civil War.
"I wish I was there instead of here," he says about Iraq. "That's where I'm suppose to be. That's what I was trained to do. I wasn't trained to get hurt."
Suddenly being away from the 23 men in his platoon, Daniels says, "feels like a part of me is gone." He says the soldiers in his platoon never balked at the daily patrols, often working shifts from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m.
"Every day that we did something, we were one day closer to going home," he says. "The more missions we did, the sooner we got out of there."
But no one in his platoon thinks U.S. soldiers will be pulling out of Iraq anytime soon.
"They say our kids might end up here," says Daniels, an Arkansas native.
"It's going to be a long one, because the enemy don't wear a uniform so you can't identify them. If you don't have a specific person to look for, you just have to wait for them to shoot at you."
If Americans understood what was really going on in Iraq, they'd pressure Bush to be clearer about "why we're really fighting," he says.
"The war on terror wasn't in Iraq till we went there," he says. "We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in."
As a soldier, he describes himself as "almost a political prisoner" in the sense that he can't express himself on whether he believes U.S. soldiers should stay in Iraq.
But his 33-year-old wife, Cheryl, has no qualms about speaking her mind.
"The army is not going to like what I have to say, but I think we have no business being there," she says about Iraq.
She too comes from a family with a long military tradition and works as a civilian at her husband's military base in Texas. She voted for Bush in 2000, but now says Democratic challenger John Kerry will get her support.
"I will definitely vote for Kerry, not because I prefer Kerry over Bush but because I don't want Bush back in office. I'm hoping that if Kerry takes office, we'll be pulling out" of Iraq, she says.
Cheryl believes Bush misled the country to war, arguing he diverted resources from far greater threats to U.S. interests, including the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Asked why Bush launched the war, she says: "I think he wanted to fill his dad's shoes. I think he felt he had something to prove."
If the point of the war was to remove Saddam from power, then Bush's father, former president George Bush, should have done so in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which Daniels also fought.
Increasing Cheryl's anger is the fact the army did little to help her contact her wounded husband.
She paid for her flight to Germany, and is staying at the Fisher House, a privately funded agency that offers virtually free accommodation in Landstuhl to the families of injured soldiers.
Infuriated by what she sees as a misleading president, an unnecessary war and a heartless military, Cheryl vows to break the Daniels' family tradition of serving their country. Her 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are already talking of enlisting one day, but Cheryl won't hear of it.
"We've paid our dues," she says.
LANDSTUHL, Germany—At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives.
They're the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq.
They're the maimed and the scarred that hospital staff believe are largely invisible to an American public ignorant of their suffering.
"They have no idea what's going on here, none whatsoever," says Col. Earl Hecker, a critical care doctor who trained at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.
The broken bodies move some of the hospital's military staff to question a war producing the most American casualties since Vietnam.
And they reduce the chief surgeon to tears.
"It breaks your heart," says Lt.-Col. Ronald Place.
"There's nothing more rewarding than to take care of these guys. Not money, not anything," he adds, crying.
From their hospital beds, solidarity with the men and women in the platoons they've left behind has wounded soldiers expressing an amazing desire to return to Iraq.
But few feel they need to hurry. They're convinced U.S. soldiers will be fighting, dying and getting maimed in Iraq for many years to come.
Says Col. Rhonda Cornum, the hospital's commander: "Peace doesn't seem to be breaking out any time soon."
The 50-year-old medical centre is where the U.S. military's sick and seriously wounded from Iraq are treated after being patched up on the battlefield.
Prior to the Iraq war, the hospital received no more than 10 injured U.S. soldiers a year from conflicts. Now, it usually handles between 30 and 55 a day from Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, almost 16,000 wounded, injured or sick soldiers from the conflict have been evacuated to Landstuhl.
As of Friday, 1,042 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq — more than 900 of them since May 1, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over — and 7,400 were wounded in combat, according to the Pentagon. About 3,400 of the wounded returned to duty after 72 hours. Almost all the rest came to Landstuhl, in southwestern Germany, for treatment.
On Thursday, a medical flight from Iraq brought 27 injured soldiers, two of them fighting for their lives.
"He might not make it," says a member of the medical team as a 27-year-old soldier is lowered from an ambulance and rushed to the intensive care unit.
Plugged to a respirator, the soldier lies naked on a bed, his pelvic area covered by a towel.
A roadside bomb 12 hours earlier left deep burns on 20 per cent of his body, a punctured lung and a broken leg. His chances of survival, a doctor says, are roughly 50-50.
His seared hands are sliced opened to prevent the need for amputation due to swelling. His dead skin is scraped off, a gel is spread thick to prevent infections, and his arms are wrapped in thick, white bandages.
"He's very unstable," says Hecker, 70.
Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.
"I'm here for him — nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."
He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."
Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.
He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.
"It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."
"If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally."
What the hospital's chief psychologist calls "compassion fatigue" is a widespread syndrome among the medical staff.
"There's a great deal of hurt going on in the hospital," says Maj. Stephen Franco.
But Maj. Cathy Martin, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, prefers to deal with her stress by calling on Americans to consider the plight of the war wounded when making a choice in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
"People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change," she says.
Most combat wounds treated at the hospital are caused by rocket-propelled grenades or shrapnel from bombs, Place says.
About 160 U.S. soldiers from Iraq have had limbs amputated, and 200 have lost all or part of their sight from bomb blasts. Body armour has saved lives, but Place believes wounds that significantly disfigure are a greater advantage to insurgents than the rising body count.
"From a psychological warfare aspect, to maim many is better than to kill a few," he says.
Wounds that can't be seen are also taking their toll. About 1,400 U.S. soldiers have been treated exclusively for mental health problems caused by the trauma of war.
Hospital officials keep access to the wounded strictly limited. But they allow three soldiers to be interviewed, all in the hospital's orthopaedic wing, where two nurses steady a soldier learning to use a walker and dragging a lifeless right leg.
In one room is Marine Lance Cpl. Corey Dailey from San Diego. Dailey says he enlisted shortly after the war started because, "I'm 18-years-old, I wanted to go and get some."
"Combat is the ultimate adrenalin rush. It's scary as hell but when your adrenalin gets pumping, it's really awesome," he says.
Last Wednesday, a month after he got to Iraq, Dailey was at an observation post in Ramadi, part of the so-called Sunni triangle of insurgency, when a sniper's bullet shattered a bone in his right arm.
Now, Dailey doesn't think much of Iraq.
"The whole place sucks," he says. "The heat — that sucks, and the streets smell like crap."
Still, he's itching to go back.
"We can't win this fight without the Iraqis. They need to help us. They need to stand up" to the insurgents, he says.
In another room, 23-year-old Mark Romero from the army's Third Brigade is also nursing a broken arm. A mechanic who served 11 months in Iraq, he snapped a bone trying to stop a 230 kilogram metal door from falling on a fellow soldier.
Lodged in his back is a piece of shrapnel from mortars that rained through the roof of the gym at the U.S. base in Mosul, northern Iraq, while Romero was working out.
He says the question constantly asked by soldiers is: "What are we doing there?"
"Realistically, I think it's going to turn into Korea where we have troops that will always be stationed there," he says of the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Sitting stiff with pain on his bed is Romero's roommate, Sgt. 1st Class Larry Daniels — "Big Daddy Daniels" to his men in Iraq. His arms are bandaged from just below the shoulders to the tip of his fingers and rods stick out of them like scaffolding. Shrapnel wounds cover the back of his body, from behind his right ear to his ankles.
"They got most of it out," he says about the shrapnel.
Doctors estimate it will take two years for Daniels to recover.
On Sept. 18 at 3:30 p.m., Daniels and his men were protecting Iraqi contractors repairing a chain-link fence on a bridge near the Baghdad airport.
"The traffic was going around us and this guy came out of nowhere," Daniels says, describing a car in the distinctive orange and white colours of local taxis.
"I took a step and I heard a pop, and in my head I thought I stepped on a land mine. At the same time my body went up in the air and I was upside down looking at the cars and the spot where I'd been. And then I hit the ground," he says.
Two of his soldiers in their early 20s lay dead. Daniels, 37, was patched up in a military hospital in Baghdad and arrived at Landstuhl last Monday.
A member of the 1st Cavalry, Bravo 4-5 ADA Company, Daniels traces his family's long military roots to a colonel in the American Civil War.
"I wish I was there instead of here," he says about Iraq. "That's where I'm suppose to be. That's what I was trained to do. I wasn't trained to get hurt."
Suddenly being away from the 23 men in his platoon, Daniels says, "feels like a part of me is gone." He says the soldiers in his platoon never balked at the daily patrols, often working shifts from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m.
"Every day that we did something, we were one day closer to going home," he says. "The more missions we did, the sooner we got out of there."
But no one in his platoon thinks U.S. soldiers will be pulling out of Iraq anytime soon.
"They say our kids might end up here," says Daniels, an Arkansas native.
"It's going to be a long one, because the enemy don't wear a uniform so you can't identify them. If you don't have a specific person to look for, you just have to wait for them to shoot at you."
If Americans understood what was really going on in Iraq, they'd pressure Bush to be clearer about "why we're really fighting," he says.
"The war on terror wasn't in Iraq till we went there," he says. "We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in."
As a soldier, he describes himself as "almost a political prisoner" in the sense that he can't express himself on whether he believes U.S. soldiers should stay in Iraq.
But his 33-year-old wife, Cheryl, has no qualms about speaking her mind.
"The army is not going to like what I have to say, but I think we have no business being there," she says about Iraq.
She too comes from a family with a long military tradition and works as a civilian at her husband's military base in Texas. She voted for Bush in 2000, but now says Democratic challenger John Kerry will get her support.
"I will definitely vote for Kerry, not because I prefer Kerry over Bush but because I don't want Bush back in office. I'm hoping that if Kerry takes office, we'll be pulling out" of Iraq, she says.
Cheryl believes Bush misled the country to war, arguing he diverted resources from far greater threats to U.S. interests, including the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Asked why Bush launched the war, she says: "I think he wanted to fill his dad's shoes. I think he felt he had something to prove."
If the point of the war was to remove Saddam from power, then Bush's father, former president George Bush, should have done so in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which Daniels also fought.
Increasing Cheryl's anger is the fact the army did little to help her contact her wounded husband.
She paid for her flight to Germany, and is staying at the Fisher House, a privately funded agency that offers virtually free accommodation in Landstuhl to the families of injured soldiers.
Infuriated by what she sees as a misleading president, an unnecessary war and a heartless military, Cheryl vows to break the Daniels' family tradition of serving their country. Her 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are already talking of enlisting one day, but Cheryl won't hear of it.
"We've paid our dues," she says.
Calvin and Hobbes
Fascinating. Calvin and Hobbes knew about this year's election a long, long time ago!!
Suckling at the teat
Fascinating stuff from TaxProf Blog. The Tax Foundation has released a fascinating report showing which states benefit from federal tax and spending policies, and which states foot the bill. The report shows that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States. Here are the Top 10 states that feed at the federal trough (with Red States highlighted in bold):
States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)
In contrast, of the 16 states that are "losers" -- receiving less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 69% are Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000. Indeed, 11 of the 14 (79%) of the states receiving the least federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Blue States. Here are the Top 10 states that supply feed for the federal trough (with Blue States highlighted in bold):
States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)
Two states -- Florida and Oregon (coincidentally, the two closest states in the 2000 Presidential election) -- received $1.00 in federal spending for each $1.00 in federal taxes paid.
Yet I bet those in the red states complain a whole lot more about "welfare" and government spending than those in the blue states. Go figure.
States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)
In contrast, of the 16 states that are "losers" -- receiving less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 69% are Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000. Indeed, 11 of the 14 (79%) of the states receiving the least federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Blue States. Here are the Top 10 states that supply feed for the federal trough (with Blue States highlighted in bold):
States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)
Two states -- Florida and Oregon (coincidentally, the two closest states in the 2000 Presidential election) -- received $1.00 in federal spending for each $1.00 in federal taxes paid.
Yet I bet those in the red states complain a whole lot more about "welfare" and government spending than those in the blue states. Go figure.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Another great weekend!
Arsenal won again (47 game unbeaten streak), UVa pounded Syracuse on a beautiful day in C-ville (it's good to be a season ticket holder!), and I've got Brett Favre on my fantasy team. What a great weekend!!
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Kerry on Letterman last night
He was pretty funny, and Dave actually asked better questions than most "real" journalists. Here's a clip.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Friday, September 17, 2004
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Are we ready for the election?
From the American Progress Action Fund:
Four Years Later, Are We Ready?
After the debacle that was the 2000 election process, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to "help prevent a replay of the Florida punch card-counting embarrassment that left many Americans wondering about the reliability of our voting system." Underfunding and ongoing political machinations, however, have left election reform gridlocked. Ongoing problems: although HAVA authorized the government to spend up to $3.9 billion over three years on new voting equipment, states have thus far received less than half of that. The law requires every state to create a computerized database of all registered voters; today forty states have been able to bypass this requirement, having been granted waivers of their obligation until 2006. And although, as the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project reports, "punch cards have the highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots over the last four presidential elections," 32 million voters still live in jurisdictions that will use those very same punch card ballots.
ASHCROFT'S COUP: Watching over voter integrity is the job of Attorney General John Ashcroft and lawyers in the Justice Department. A new article in the New Yorker asks, "Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud—or to keep voters from voting?" One looming issue: under Ashcroft, the method of hiring lawyers has changed. In the past, Justice Department lawyers were supposed to be apolitical, hired to spend their careers in government. The hiring program, known as the Attorney General's Honors Program, was run by other mid-level career officials known for their political independence. No more. In 2002, Ashcroft changed the system, putting political appointees in charge. Now, "lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change in the Honors Program has already had an effect, especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section."
VALID VOTERS STRUCK FROM ROLLS: Florida is one of only seven states in the union which denies former felons the right to vote, even after they've completed their sentences. In 2000, the state hired an outside contractor to implement a "felon list." Riddled with errors, this list struck thousands of innocent voters from the rolls. Lessons have not been learned. This past May, the Florida Division of Elections quietly distributed a brand-new purge list for the upcoming election. The outgoing head of the division, Ed Kast, sent a memo to election supervisors on May 12, 2004, detailing how to keep the list out of the hands of advocacy groups that wanted to double check the names, "citing statutes about the privacy of voter registration information and the will of the legislature – even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns." Later that month, after CNN filed suit to gain access to the rolls, they found the new list wrongly included thousands of eligible voters and "heavily targeted African-Americans – who traditionally vote Democrat – while "virtually ignoring Hispanic voters" – who, in Florida, are often more likely to check the box next to GOP names.
ACCENTURE-ATE THE NEGATIVE: After the felon list fiasco in 2000, the Florida legislature mandated that no outside vendor perform that kind of work for the state again. The new Florida purge list, however, was put together with help from Accenture. Accenture, formerly the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, "has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials." (In 2001, the company, which was paid $1.6 million for its work on Florida elections, skipped town and relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes.)
THE RIGHT TO VOTE IS TOO PRICEY: Republican state Senator Anna Cowin, head of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, keeps shooting down proposals from black lawmakers to come up with legislation to restore voting rights to former felons. In the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, she explains why: "It makes elections very expensive...because you have all these thousands and thousands of people – I mean tens of thousands of people – to send literature to…The people don't come to vote, anyway."
PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE POLLS: The election system is still rife with political maneuverings. In Florida this week, the Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts steamrolled over an injunction preventing Ralph Nader from appearing on the Florida ballot, directing 67 county voting supervisors to put his name on overseas absentee ballots. (Her excuse? Hurricane Ivan.) A Florida judge ordered election officials to abide by the injunction until the case is heard by the Florida Supreme Court this Friday.
UNDER INVESTIGATION: According to The New York Times, the Pentagon has contracted the handling of overseas ballots to a firm, Omega Technologies Inc., which has had been in trouble in the past for shady business dealings. "In 2002, a resort in Nashville, Gaylord Opryland, accused Omega of failing to pay a bill for $136,187 that the company had incurred in running an Army symposium at the resort. In its lawsuit, Gaylord said the Omega president, Patricia A. Williams, falsely said the payment had been sent and on one occasion provided a fictitious Federal Express package tracking number. Gaylord also said Ms. Williams sent a $50,000 check that bounced."
Four Years Later, Are We Ready?
After the debacle that was the 2000 election process, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to "help prevent a replay of the Florida punch card-counting embarrassment that left many Americans wondering about the reliability of our voting system." Underfunding and ongoing political machinations, however, have left election reform gridlocked. Ongoing problems: although HAVA authorized the government to spend up to $3.9 billion over three years on new voting equipment, states have thus far received less than half of that. The law requires every state to create a computerized database of all registered voters; today forty states have been able to bypass this requirement, having been granted waivers of their obligation until 2006. And although, as the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project reports, "punch cards have the highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots over the last four presidential elections," 32 million voters still live in jurisdictions that will use those very same punch card ballots.
ASHCROFT'S COUP: Watching over voter integrity is the job of Attorney General John Ashcroft and lawyers in the Justice Department. A new article in the New Yorker asks, "Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud—or to keep voters from voting?" One looming issue: under Ashcroft, the method of hiring lawyers has changed. In the past, Justice Department lawyers were supposed to be apolitical, hired to spend their careers in government. The hiring program, known as the Attorney General's Honors Program, was run by other mid-level career officials known for their political independence. No more. In 2002, Ashcroft changed the system, putting political appointees in charge. Now, "lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change in the Honors Program has already had an effect, especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section."
VALID VOTERS STRUCK FROM ROLLS: Florida is one of only seven states in the union which denies former felons the right to vote, even after they've completed their sentences. In 2000, the state hired an outside contractor to implement a "felon list." Riddled with errors, this list struck thousands of innocent voters from the rolls. Lessons have not been learned. This past May, the Florida Division of Elections quietly distributed a brand-new purge list for the upcoming election. The outgoing head of the division, Ed Kast, sent a memo to election supervisors on May 12, 2004, detailing how to keep the list out of the hands of advocacy groups that wanted to double check the names, "citing statutes about the privacy of voter registration information and the will of the legislature – even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns." Later that month, after CNN filed suit to gain access to the rolls, they found the new list wrongly included thousands of eligible voters and "heavily targeted African-Americans – who traditionally vote Democrat – while "virtually ignoring Hispanic voters" – who, in Florida, are often more likely to check the box next to GOP names.
ACCENTURE-ATE THE NEGATIVE: After the felon list fiasco in 2000, the Florida legislature mandated that no outside vendor perform that kind of work for the state again. The new Florida purge list, however, was put together with help from Accenture. Accenture, formerly the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, "has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials." (In 2001, the company, which was paid $1.6 million for its work on Florida elections, skipped town and relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes.)
THE RIGHT TO VOTE IS TOO PRICEY: Republican state Senator Anna Cowin, head of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, keeps shooting down proposals from black lawmakers to come up with legislation to restore voting rights to former felons. In the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, she explains why: "It makes elections very expensive...because you have all these thousands and thousands of people – I mean tens of thousands of people – to send literature to…The people don't come to vote, anyway."
PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE POLLS: The election system is still rife with political maneuverings. In Florida this week, the Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts steamrolled over an injunction preventing Ralph Nader from appearing on the Florida ballot, directing 67 county voting supervisors to put his name on overseas absentee ballots. (Her excuse? Hurricane Ivan.) A Florida judge ordered election officials to abide by the injunction until the case is heard by the Florida Supreme Court this Friday.
UNDER INVESTIGATION: According to The New York Times, the Pentagon has contracted the handling of overseas ballots to a firm, Omega Technologies Inc., which has had been in trouble in the past for shady business dealings. "In 2002, a resort in Nashville, Gaylord Opryland, accused Omega of failing to pay a bill for $136,187 that the company had incurred in running an Army symposium at the resort. In its lawsuit, Gaylord said the Omega president, Patricia A. Williams, falsely said the payment had been sent and on one occasion provided a fictitious Federal Express package tracking number. Gaylord also said Ms. Williams sent a $50,000 check that bounced."
Here we go again
The Bush administration is debating military strikes on Iran. Can you believe this? Iraq is falling apart, and they're already looking at the next place to invade.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
What about the poor?
Have you noticed that neither candidate has really said anything about the poor and hungry in America? Every speech W or Kerry gives is all about the middle class. But it isn't government's main function to help those who are powerless? The mark of any society is how it treats it's vulnerable. Yet, by and large, we ignore them. I'm guilty of it. We're all guilty of it. How many times have we ignored a homeless person on the street. Yet, we don't hesitate to buy beer after beer following a softball game. I don't have answer to it. I just no that we all need to take the time to think about our priorities. I don't consider myself a religious person - well that's not entirely true. I'm not a church-goer. The two don't go hand in hand. Anyway, there's a popular saying "What would Jesus do?". He didn't hang out with the folks who were doing okay. He was with the outcasts - the lepers, the poor, the prostitutes - the people we ignore. He'd help a brother out.
Now I know a lot of folks will say, "that's right, Jesus would help a brother out, not the government". And I agree, churches do a great job of helping the destitute. But it's not enough. We need to take a serious look at the root causes of poverty and how best to combat it. When I say we, I mean everyone - Democrats, Republicans, Greens, you name it. Because each child in America that goes to bed hungry, without hope, is a future Einstein, a future MLK that we'll never know about.
Now I know a lot of folks will say, "that's right, Jesus would help a brother out, not the government". And I agree, churches do a great job of helping the destitute. But it's not enough. We need to take a serious look at the root causes of poverty and how best to combat it. When I say we, I mean everyone - Democrats, Republicans, Greens, you name it. Because each child in America that goes to bed hungry, without hope, is a future Einstein, a future MLK that we'll never know about.
Woman fired from factory for having Kerry sticker on her car
Freedom of speech? Overrated. Political expression? Who needs it? After all, since W is God's Chosen, opposing him is opposing Him.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Powell Sees No 'Direct' Link Between Hussein, Sept. 11
He also says that if we were attacked by terrorists, Kerry would "respond in a robust way". Hey Dub, Dick and Rummy, you payin' attention?
Friday, September 10, 2004
Documents may be forgeries
From factcheck.org:
Update: Documents May Be Forgeries09.10.2004
Serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of four documents that CBS News said it had obtained from the personal files of Bush's former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard. We are removing reference to them in our Feb. 8 article on the "Texans for Truth" ad until these questions are settled to our satisfaction.
The four memos were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, dated May 2, 1972, May 19 , 1972, August 1, 1972 and August 18, 1973. Killian died in 1984. CBS News didn't say how it had obtained the documents, but said it had was satisfied they were authentic after consulting experts. The White House did not question the documents when it released copies to reporters after obtaining them from CBS.
Subsequently, members of Killian's family said they suspected the documents weren't authentic, and experts quoted by conservative websites and mainstream news organizations said the documents could not have been produced by the typewriters in common use in the early 1970's. The memos contain proportional spacing, in which the letter "i" occupies less space than the letter "m," for example. And they contain the "superscript" character "th" (in “Report to111th F.I.S. administrative officer” in the May 2 memo, for example.) A feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes “th” to superscript characters when following numerals, but such characters were impossible to produce on ordinary typewriters in use in 1972.
The Associated Press quoted Killian's son Gary as saying he doubted his father would have written the 1973 memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review. "It just wouldn't happen," he said. "No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."
The Washington Post quoted Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell calling the documents "a farce" and saying he didn't keep files: "I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person." She said CBS had not asked her to authenticate the records.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Killian's daughter, Nancy Killian Rodriguez, as saying her family knew nothing about the source of the documents. "You can imagine all this from our perspective . . . Why is a man who passed away 20 years ago being brought up on something that happened 30 years ago and what does that have to do with what's going on in the world right now?"
The AP also quoted the personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time, Rufus Martin, as saying he believes the documents are fake: "They looked to me like forgeries. . . I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
The AP quoted independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines saying the documents looked as though they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
The Washington Post story quoted another document expert, William Flynn, a forensic specialist with 35 years of experience, as saying the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. "Although IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government," the Post said.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Farrell C. Shiver, a Georgia-based analyst who edits a journal for document examiners, as saying that the superscript "th" would have been very unusual for that time: "You would not be able to do that with a typewriter at that time unless you had a specialty key made." The New York Times also quoted Shiver questioning the curves in the apostrophes, but adding: "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
The New York Times also quoted Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio, as saying he could find nothing like the characters in the documents in a database he created of 3,000 old type fonts: "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens." He said they were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," a commonly used Microsoft Word font.
Update: Documents May Be Forgeries09.10.2004
Serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of four documents that CBS News said it had obtained from the personal files of Bush's former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard. We are removing reference to them in our Feb. 8 article on the "Texans for Truth" ad until these questions are settled to our satisfaction.
The four memos were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, dated May 2, 1972, May 19 , 1972, August 1, 1972 and August 18, 1973. Killian died in 1984. CBS News didn't say how it had obtained the documents, but said it had was satisfied they were authentic after consulting experts. The White House did not question the documents when it released copies to reporters after obtaining them from CBS.
Subsequently, members of Killian's family said they suspected the documents weren't authentic, and experts quoted by conservative websites and mainstream news organizations said the documents could not have been produced by the typewriters in common use in the early 1970's. The memos contain proportional spacing, in which the letter "i" occupies less space than the letter "m," for example. And they contain the "superscript" character "th" (in “Report to111th F.I.S. administrative officer” in the May 2 memo, for example.) A feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes “th” to superscript characters when following numerals, but such characters were impossible to produce on ordinary typewriters in use in 1972.
The Associated Press quoted Killian's son Gary as saying he doubted his father would have written the 1973 memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review. "It just wouldn't happen," he said. "No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."
The Washington Post quoted Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell calling the documents "a farce" and saying he didn't keep files: "I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person." She said CBS had not asked her to authenticate the records.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Killian's daughter, Nancy Killian Rodriguez, as saying her family knew nothing about the source of the documents. "You can imagine all this from our perspective . . . Why is a man who passed away 20 years ago being brought up on something that happened 30 years ago and what does that have to do with what's going on in the world right now?"
The AP also quoted the personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time, Rufus Martin, as saying he believes the documents are fake: "They looked to me like forgeries. . . I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
The AP quoted independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines saying the documents looked as though they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
The Washington Post story quoted another document expert, William Flynn, a forensic specialist with 35 years of experience, as saying the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. "Although IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government," the Post said.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Farrell C. Shiver, a Georgia-based analyst who edits a journal for document examiners, as saying that the superscript "th" would have been very unusual for that time: "You would not be able to do that with a typewriter at that time unless you had a specialty key made." The New York Times also quoted Shiver questioning the curves in the apostrophes, but adding: "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
The New York Times also quoted Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio, as saying he could find nothing like the characters in the documents in a database he created of 3,000 old type fonts: "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens." He said they were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," a commonly used Microsoft Word font.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
W in the Guard
Lot's of talk to today about the last night's 60 minutes interview and Bush's service in the Air National Guard. I'll just post some links for now.
Two-Sided Story
Officer told to give Bush good review
Records: Bush Failed to Meet Guard Standards
Two-Sided Story
Officer told to give Bush good review
Records: Bush Failed to Meet Guard Standards
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Quote of the day
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goerring, Hitler's Reichmarshall, during the Nuremberg Trials
Hermann Goerring, Hitler's Reichmarshall, during the Nuremberg Trials
Yep, Keyes is still crazy
What would Jesus do? Apparently, vote for Alan Keyes. Read all about it here.
Cheney and P Diddy, Joining Forces
Trying to appeal to young, urban voters, VP Dick Cheney confused Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' get out the vote slogan "Vote or Die", instead urging voters to "Vote for Us or Die".
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Cornell West Speaks on Democracy, Authoritarianism and Iraq
On this morning's Democracy Now, professor, culture critic, and social justice advocate Cornel West talked about the presidential race, the war in Iraq, the religious right, social change and much more. Author of numerous books on philosophy, race and sociology, West's latest book is Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. Click here to hear the interview
Bush: OB-GYNs Kept from 'Practicing Their Love'
I know he didn't mean it. I have no idea what he meant. But admit it, it's pretty damn funny!
Crystal Ball
Thought I'd share the following from Larry Sabato's site. He was my government professor at UVa a million years ago (1986).
The Labor Day Assessment
Larry J. SabatoDirector, U.Va. Center for Politics
Labor Day ain't what it used to be. For generations the official start of the campaign, now it is merely a milestone indicating the beginning of the end. The presidential contest has been going full-tilt for a year and a half already!
Yet with the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, we can look at the final two months and plot out the path to Nov. 2.
Our readers tend to be busy people, so we like to keep it short and to the point. Here goes:
Campaigns are living organisms and they have phases of growth and decline, strength and weakness, good luck and ill fortune--sometimes with pain that is self-inflicted. There is an eerie, anthropomorphic resemblance between candidate campaigns and Mother Nature's hurricanes, as we sit and watch Frances tear through the ultimate swing-state of Florida. Each storm is named, it has its own unique pattern of life and death, and it wanders, strengthens, and weakens over time, defying many of the flawed predictions of forecasters. After a seven-month period of difficulty for the Bush campaign, it is now the Kerry campaign's turn.
The Swift Boat Vets story damaged Kerry, and his not-so-swift response throughout August hurt even more.
The Republican convention gave Bush a sizeable bounce, putting Kerry behind the eight-ball for the first time since he won the Iowa caucus in January.
The only constant in presidential politics is change, especially in the final two months, and there will be plenty of change to come, in the polls and on the campaign trail.
The sizeable Bush bounce is a triumph for the president's campaign, contradicting almost all published predictions that, like Kerry, Bush would secure little or no gain in the polls. Pardon our boast, but the Crystal Ball predicted the Bush bounce last Monday in this space. Why did we go out on that particular limb? Because the consensus Beltway wisdom is often wrong, because Bush was due some good luck, and because historically the Republicans usually put on the better, more organized show--something we have personally seen after attending part or all of 16 national conventions, eight on each side.
Both Time and Newsweek, covering slightly different time periods, have a Bush lead of about 11 percent, with Bush over 50 percent in both surveys, and Kerry in the low 40s. This is noteworthy, and cannot be easily dismissed. Future polls will refine the size of the bounce, of course, and the first measurements may have been exaggerated because of their timing. And, sure enough, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, taken post-convention Sept. 3-5, showed Bush picking up just two points among likely voters, with Kerry dropping 2 percent (or 50 percent to 47 percent for Bush pre-convention, 52 percent to 45 percent for Bush post-convention).
From a political perspective, it is not so much that Bush got the bounce, but that Kerry did not. This reinforces the view that the Democratic convention was poorly planned and executed, with too narrow a focus on Kerry's Vietnam service to the exclusion of nearly everything else--such as a defense of his Senate record.
More disturbing for the Democrats is the possibility that Kerry himself is simply not likeable in the eyes of swing voters. If that slant on the dueling bounces is accurate, then the repair job for Kerry will be much more difficult.
The Bush bounce notwithstanding, we'll bet that by debate time, the Bush-Kerry horserace is again a near-statistical tie, or much more like the CNN/USA Today/Gallup margin than that of the Time or Newsweek poll. The real question is not whether the Bush bounce will fade, but whether it all will disappear--or whether Bush will retain a crucial few points that could easily be the difference between victory and defeat.
It is now clear that Bush's nadir was reached in early August, while Democrats were pumped up after their convention, when the Swift Boat Vets had not yet emerged, and at the moment the bad jobs numbers were released, taking all the wind out of the president's sails. At that moment, we believed that Bush needed a miracle--or a series of small miracles--to win, and lo and behold, his miracles appeared in the form of the Swift Boat Vets; Democrats loathe them but they had a considerable effect, then the GOP Convention, then reasonably good--or at least not demonstrably bad--jobs numbers in early September.
The long and short at Labor Day: President Bush has at least a temporary lead thanks to his convention bounce, but this contest is still very much winnable by John Kerry. The debates--which do have an influence on the remaining undecideds and swing voters, the October jobs numbers (the last such measure before the election), developments in Iraq (including the tragic passing of the 1,000 mark in the deaths of American), the overall war on terrorism, and surprise issues (such as yet another chapter on President Bush's National Guard service--a media-driven penance for the "sins" of the Swift Boat Vets, courtesy of "60 Minutes") all have the potential to affect this highly competitive contest. By the way, prepare yourself for the usual "debate on debates," as President Bush may try what President Clinton accomplished in his reelection race against Senator Dole in 1996: the reduction of the number of presidential debates from three to two. Stay tuned: Not much is certain about this critical part of the campaign yet. The campaigns have agreed to nothing. But there will be at least two debates, plus one vice-presidential debate.
Get ready for the wild, sixty-day ride to Nov. 2
It is one we are all likely to remember for the rest of our political lives. Half of our readers want Kerry to win, the other half Bush. You have about a 50 percent chance of being right with your pick, but please have a little humility about it. Nobody knows the identity of the winner with any degree of certainty as yet, because there are too many unknowns on the road to Election Day. This is one campaign book with a guaranteed surprise ending!
The Labor Day Assessment
Larry J. SabatoDirector, U.Va. Center for Politics
Labor Day ain't what it used to be. For generations the official start of the campaign, now it is merely a milestone indicating the beginning of the end. The presidential contest has been going full-tilt for a year and a half already!
Yet with the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, we can look at the final two months and plot out the path to Nov. 2.
Our readers tend to be busy people, so we like to keep it short and to the point. Here goes:
Campaigns are living organisms and they have phases of growth and decline, strength and weakness, good luck and ill fortune--sometimes with pain that is self-inflicted. There is an eerie, anthropomorphic resemblance between candidate campaigns and Mother Nature's hurricanes, as we sit and watch Frances tear through the ultimate swing-state of Florida. Each storm is named, it has its own unique pattern of life and death, and it wanders, strengthens, and weakens over time, defying many of the flawed predictions of forecasters. After a seven-month period of difficulty for the Bush campaign, it is now the Kerry campaign's turn.
The Swift Boat Vets story damaged Kerry, and his not-so-swift response throughout August hurt even more.
The Republican convention gave Bush a sizeable bounce, putting Kerry behind the eight-ball for the first time since he won the Iowa caucus in January.
The only constant in presidential politics is change, especially in the final two months, and there will be plenty of change to come, in the polls and on the campaign trail.
The sizeable Bush bounce is a triumph for the president's campaign, contradicting almost all published predictions that, like Kerry, Bush would secure little or no gain in the polls. Pardon our boast, but the Crystal Ball predicted the Bush bounce last Monday in this space. Why did we go out on that particular limb? Because the consensus Beltway wisdom is often wrong, because Bush was due some good luck, and because historically the Republicans usually put on the better, more organized show--something we have personally seen after attending part or all of 16 national conventions, eight on each side.
Both Time and Newsweek, covering slightly different time periods, have a Bush lead of about 11 percent, with Bush over 50 percent in both surveys, and Kerry in the low 40s. This is noteworthy, and cannot be easily dismissed. Future polls will refine the size of the bounce, of course, and the first measurements may have been exaggerated because of their timing. And, sure enough, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, taken post-convention Sept. 3-5, showed Bush picking up just two points among likely voters, with Kerry dropping 2 percent (or 50 percent to 47 percent for Bush pre-convention, 52 percent to 45 percent for Bush post-convention).
From a political perspective, it is not so much that Bush got the bounce, but that Kerry did not. This reinforces the view that the Democratic convention was poorly planned and executed, with too narrow a focus on Kerry's Vietnam service to the exclusion of nearly everything else--such as a defense of his Senate record.
More disturbing for the Democrats is the possibility that Kerry himself is simply not likeable in the eyes of swing voters. If that slant on the dueling bounces is accurate, then the repair job for Kerry will be much more difficult.
The Bush bounce notwithstanding, we'll bet that by debate time, the Bush-Kerry horserace is again a near-statistical tie, or much more like the CNN/USA Today/Gallup margin than that of the Time or Newsweek poll. The real question is not whether the Bush bounce will fade, but whether it all will disappear--or whether Bush will retain a crucial few points that could easily be the difference between victory and defeat.
It is now clear that Bush's nadir was reached in early August, while Democrats were pumped up after their convention, when the Swift Boat Vets had not yet emerged, and at the moment the bad jobs numbers were released, taking all the wind out of the president's sails. At that moment, we believed that Bush needed a miracle--or a series of small miracles--to win, and lo and behold, his miracles appeared in the form of the Swift Boat Vets; Democrats loathe them but they had a considerable effect, then the GOP Convention, then reasonably good--or at least not demonstrably bad--jobs numbers in early September.
The long and short at Labor Day: President Bush has at least a temporary lead thanks to his convention bounce, but this contest is still very much winnable by John Kerry. The debates--which do have an influence on the remaining undecideds and swing voters, the October jobs numbers (the last such measure before the election), developments in Iraq (including the tragic passing of the 1,000 mark in the deaths of American), the overall war on terrorism, and surprise issues (such as yet another chapter on President Bush's National Guard service--a media-driven penance for the "sins" of the Swift Boat Vets, courtesy of "60 Minutes") all have the potential to affect this highly competitive contest. By the way, prepare yourself for the usual "debate on debates," as President Bush may try what President Clinton accomplished in his reelection race against Senator Dole in 1996: the reduction of the number of presidential debates from three to two. Stay tuned: Not much is certain about this critical part of the campaign yet. The campaigns have agreed to nothing. But there will be at least two debates, plus one vice-presidential debate.
Get ready for the wild, sixty-day ride to Nov. 2
It is one we are all likely to remember for the rest of our political lives. Half of our readers want Kerry to win, the other half Bush. You have about a 50 percent chance of being right with your pick, but please have a little humility about it. Nobody knows the identity of the winner with any degree of certainty as yet, because there are too many unknowns on the road to Election Day. This is one campaign book with a guaranteed surprise ending!
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Great Weekend!
What a great weekend I've been having, tv-wise. 1st, the 90210 marathon on FX, and now, Footloose is on VH-1. I'm totally reliving my teens/20's. Now, if I can find the original season of The Real World in NY (with SF thrown in for good measure), I'd be set!
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Inherited recession?
From salon.com:
So did the recession really precede Bush, as they claim? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the private, nonpartisan research group responsible for tracking the official peaks and troughs of the U.S. economy, the economy began to contract in March of 2001, two months after Bush was inaugurated; the recession marked the end of the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history. Under Clinton, in 1999 alone more than 3 million new jobs were added to the economy. In 2000, the year in which Rob Portman says the country was "spiraling into recession," almost two million new jobs were created in America. Most would consider those numbers a fairly robust inheritance.
And contrast those numbers with employment data during Bush's presidency: About 1.8 million jobs were lost in 2001. Five hundred thousand jobs were lost in 2002. And 61,000 jobs were lost in 2003. It's true that since then, about a million people have found new jobs -- but during the Clinton years, there were a million new jobs added every couple months.
The Republicans may be selling some economic hocus-pocus, but so far "Bush prosperity" isn't buying a whole lot of jobs for the unemployed multitudes in places like Ohio and Michigan.
So did the recession really precede Bush, as they claim? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the private, nonpartisan research group responsible for tracking the official peaks and troughs of the U.S. economy, the economy began to contract in March of 2001, two months after Bush was inaugurated; the recession marked the end of the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history. Under Clinton, in 1999 alone more than 3 million new jobs were added to the economy. In 2000, the year in which Rob Portman says the country was "spiraling into recession," almost two million new jobs were created in America. Most would consider those numbers a fairly robust inheritance.
And contrast those numbers with employment data during Bush's presidency: About 1.8 million jobs were lost in 2001. Five hundred thousand jobs were lost in 2002. And 61,000 jobs were lost in 2003. It's true that since then, about a million people have found new jobs -- but during the Clinton years, there were a million new jobs added every couple months.
The Republicans may be selling some economic hocus-pocus, but so far "Bush prosperity" isn't buying a whole lot of jobs for the unemployed multitudes in places like Ohio and Michigan.
Bumper Stickers
On my car I have this bumper sticker: "I don't have to like Bush to love my country". Well, it looks like the GOP doesn't agree with me. That's the message I've been getting all week from watching this convention. The GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.
In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.
Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled against Bush's critics.
In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.
Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled against Bush's critics.
Yep, more flip-flops
As convention goers last night chanted "flip-flop" during the VP's speech, I decided to check up on W some more. You know, the President who Giuliani said was "a leader who is willing to stick with difficult decisions even as public opinion shifts." The one Schwarzenegger called a "leader who doesn't flinch, doesn't waver, does not back down."
Yesterday, I mentioned his switch on abortion nearly 30 years ago. I'll be a bit more topical today. Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, then changed his mind when it was clear the votes were against him. He opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, then supported it. He opposed a congressional investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq, then supported it. The president who was praised so often this week for his "unflinching" war on terror once said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", then said that he didn't really care about finding him. The president who never wavers used to say that America will win the war on terror; over the weekend, he said "I don't think we can ever win it"; over the last week, he's been explaining that he didn't really mean what he said when he said it.
And it's not just W. On Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried to make Bush look like a strong leader on domestic issues, saying that he would stand up to the trial lawyers who are driving up the costs of healthcare. Repeating a line used by Bush himself, Frist declared: "Let's be clear. You can no longer be both pro-patient and pro-trial lawyer." He said that Kerry has "made his choice" by choosing Edwards as his running mate. But Frist has made his choice, too: in the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Frist endorsed Mel Martinez, a millionaire trial lawyer.
I just posted a quote from a Republica icon, Teddy Roosevelt. Well, here's one from their #1 icon, which I guess they've taken to heart - "Facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan 1988
Yesterday, I mentioned his switch on abortion nearly 30 years ago. I'll be a bit more topical today. Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, then changed his mind when it was clear the votes were against him. He opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, then supported it. He opposed a congressional investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq, then supported it. The president who was praised so often this week for his "unflinching" war on terror once said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", then said that he didn't really care about finding him. The president who never wavers used to say that America will win the war on terror; over the weekend, he said "I don't think we can ever win it"; over the last week, he's been explaining that he didn't really mean what he said when he said it.
And it's not just W. On Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried to make Bush look like a strong leader on domestic issues, saying that he would stand up to the trial lawyers who are driving up the costs of healthcare. Repeating a line used by Bush himself, Frist declared: "Let's be clear. You can no longer be both pro-patient and pro-trial lawyer." He said that Kerry has "made his choice" by choosing Edwards as his running mate. But Frist has made his choice, too: in the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Frist endorsed Mel Martinez, a millionaire trial lawyer.
I just posted a quote from a Republica icon, Teddy Roosevelt. Well, here's one from their #1 icon, which I guess they've taken to heart - "Facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan 1988
A little fact checking
"America needs to know the facts," Zell Miller said last night, but he failed to mention a few of them. Miller told the delegates that Kerry voted against production of the F-14 and F-15 fighters and the Apache helicopter, but he didn't say that Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, proposed eliminating both of them, too. Miller criticized Kerry for voting against the B-2 bomber, but he didn't say that President George H.W. Bush also proposed an end to the B-2 bomber program. In his 1992 State of the Union Address, Bush said he supported such cuts "with confidence" based on the recommendations of his Secretary of Defense: Dick Cheney. With the Cold War over, Bush said, failing to cut defense spending would be "insensible to progress."
That's not how Miller described the cuts last night. He said Kerry's record on defense spending suggests that he wants to arm U.S. troops with "spitballs." Miller, who was introduced as the "conscience of the Democratic Party," didn't see fit to mention that he and Kerry both voted in 2002 for the largest military spending increase in two decades -- a defense bill that Republican Senator John Warner said would "help to ensure that our military has the tools it needs to defend our nation."
That's not how Miller described the cuts last night. He said Kerry's record on defense spending suggests that he wants to arm U.S. troops with "spitballs." Miller, who was introduced as the "conscience of the Democratic Party," didn't see fit to mention that he and Kerry both voted in 2002 for the largest military spending increase in two decades -- a defense bill that Republican Senator John Warner said would "help to ensure that our military has the tools it needs to defend our nation."
A quote
Given the harsh tone of last night's speeches, maybe the folks at the RNC should listen to one of their heroes:
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."- President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."- President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Iraq's gonna be like Northern Ireland says Rove
I swear to God, I'm not making this up.
President Bush's chief strategist said Wednesday that Democratic Sen. John Kerry tarnished "the records and service" of fellow Vietnam veterans with his anti-war protests, and compared the U.S. war on terrorism to the decades-old conflict in Northern Ireland.
They've been fighting each other in Northern Ireland for a few centuries, right?
President Bush's chief strategist said Wednesday that Democratic Sen. John Kerry tarnished "the records and service" of fellow Vietnam veterans with his anti-war protests, and compared the U.S. war on terrorism to the decades-old conflict in Northern Ireland.
They've been fighting each other in Northern Ireland for a few centuries, right?
Another flip-flop
In a 1978 interview with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, congressional candidate George W. Bush "said he opposes the pro-life amendment favored by (his opponent) and favors leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question."
Hmm. This is the same guy who is "pro-life" and as president supports a consitutional amendment to ban abortion. What gives?
Hmm. This is the same guy who is "pro-life" and as president supports a consitutional amendment to ban abortion. What gives?
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
We can't win the war on terror. I mean we can win. But I'm not flip-floppin!
1st, Dubya tells Matt Lauer that we can't win the war on terror. And now, he's saying we misunderstood him, we can win the war on terror, in fact we are winning. Um, isn't this considered a flip-flop? A waffle, to coin a phrase from the Clinton days? What gives? You know they'd be all over Kerry's ass if he said this. C'mon, gimme a friggin' break!
Monday, August 30, 2004
973
973, that's how many Americans have died since our invasion of Iraq. My graduating class from high school was 635. So, if my entire class died on graduation day, and half of us came back from the dead and died again, that's how many of our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters have died for this war.
Think about it. Is it worth it?
Think about it. Is it worth it?
In Case you Forgot
Kerry got shot, Bush did shots.
(by the way, if given a choice, I'd do shots too)
(by the way, if given a choice, I'd do shots too)
What the hell are they afraid of?
As the GOP open their convention with an invocation by a woman who thinks that those who support gay marriage are just like those who supported the man who implemented the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, gypsies, gays, etc..., I have a few questions. Why do they hate gays so much? Now, I'm not gay (not there's anything wrong with that), but I know plenty of people who are. And you know what? They're just as boring and normal as anyone else. And don't give me that old excuse about the the Bible says it's wrong. The Bible also says eating a bacon cheeseburger is wrong, and what would the folks of W's family compound in Maine do if we stopped eating lobster? You know what? You can use the Bible to promote any view you want. Why? Because it was written by people! Now, they may have been inspired by God, but I don't think the big fella actually sat at his PC one day and typed the whole thing up. Not to mention the fact that the Bible, like all books, has been edited . There's stuff that used to be in the Bible that most of us have never imagined. And compare a Catholic Bible to the King James version. Not the same, folks. If we used the Bible as our only guide, then it's okay to sleep with your daughters if your entire city has been destroyed (right, Lot?). Or own slaves, and sleep with one of them when your wife can't have kids (right Abraham?). C'mon, we're living in the 21st century. While it's okay to use a document written in the Israeli desert over 2000 years as a guide to your life, it's just that, a guide.
Man, I can ramble, can't I? I guess what I'm trying to say is this: Just love each other and be nice. That's pretty simple, isn't it? It's an idea a Jewish guy named Joshua went around saying awhile back.
Man, I can ramble, can't I? I guess what I'm trying to say is this: Just love each other and be nice. That's pretty simple, isn't it? It's an idea a Jewish guy named Joshua went around saying awhile back.
What would Cheney do?
Okay, so last week VP Cheney comes out in favor of gay marriage, kinda. But my question is, what would he do if he became President? His main duty as VP is to take over if something were to happen to the President, right? Would he continue the administration's backing of an amendment banning gay marriage? If not, shouldn't W get a VP who backs him on his policies? You can't have it both ways, can you? And for the repeated GOP statements about "activist" courts forcing this issue on America, um, wasn't it "activist" courts who forced integration on America? If you took a poll 40 years ago, I'm sure most Americans would have been either against or indifferent towards civil rights. Just because the majority wants something doesn't make it right. Remember, Hitler came into power by the ballot box.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Arsenal Set New Landmark!!
You knew I was going to mention it. I mean, I have a blog and haven't written anything about mighty, mighty Arsenal yet. But that's because I was waiting for this. Arsenal beat Blackburn 3-0 at Highbury to extend their unbeaten streak to 43 games, breaking Nottingham Forest's record of 42 games unbeaten from 1977-78. They haven't lost a game since May of 2003!
Go you Gunners!!
Go you Gunners!!
Here's to you, little bro!
Just wanted to give a shout out to my little brother, Ken10, and his band Los Able Minded Poets. They were just nominated for a SDMusic (San Diego Music) award for best hip hop album. You can buy it at www.anotherphatrecord.com
Bush's Response to Swiftvets
There's a big difference between coming out against all 527 ads, some of which are essentially harmless, and refuting one in particular which is arguably maliciously untrue. Here's how Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) put it: "If someone asks me to denounce Joseph Stalin and I say, 'Well, yes, I'm against all politicians who support the death penalty' then I haven't denounced Joseph Stalin, right? This is the same thing."
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
A brief rant
The latest Swiftvet ads are running now, accusing Kerry of saying the US committed atrocities in Vietnam. Um, we did - heard of My Lai? Son Thang? Tiger Force? Of course, the Civil War wasn't about slavery either. Funny how only white folks say that.
What all of this is doing is making us forget about what's important TODAY!! The Vietnam War is in history books for a reason - it's history! It happened. Nothing we say or do today will change that. I was born in 1968, the height of the war. But you know what? I'm a lot more concerned about what's going to happen in the future. What kind of world will my children be born into? My grandchildren? That's what this election is about. Not what W or Kerry did 35 years ago. And you know what? I would have done the same thing W did - there's no way in hell my butt would have volunteered to go to a war zone, especially if we weren't under any direct threat. It's great that Kerry volunteered, but so what? It's also great that W didn't run away to Canada, but did what he needed to do not get killed in a jungle halfway around the world. So stop it, dammit! Talk about how you're going to fix the economy, how the hell we're going to get out of the mess in Iraq, how we're going to feed the poor, help the sick, get America respect by the world again. That's what I want to hear!
What all of this is doing is making us forget about what's important TODAY!! The Vietnam War is in history books for a reason - it's history! It happened. Nothing we say or do today will change that. I was born in 1968, the height of the war. But you know what? I'm a lot more concerned about what's going to happen in the future. What kind of world will my children be born into? My grandchildren? That's what this election is about. Not what W or Kerry did 35 years ago. And you know what? I would have done the same thing W did - there's no way in hell my butt would have volunteered to go to a war zone, especially if we weren't under any direct threat. It's great that Kerry volunteered, but so what? It's also great that W didn't run away to Canada, but did what he needed to do not get killed in a jungle halfway around the world. So stop it, dammit! Talk about how you're going to fix the economy, how the hell we're going to get out of the mess in Iraq, how we're going to feed the poor, help the sick, get America respect by the world again. That's what I want to hear!
AAAARGH!!!
I don't know what makes me angrier - the fact that W and company say this stuff, or that some people believe it.
What Kerry said - "Every performer tonight in their own way, either verbally or through their music, through their lyrics, have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country." -- Kerry, July 8
What Bush said - "The other day, my opponent said he thought you could find the heart and soul of America in Hollywood." -- Bush, Aug. 18
Kerry - "My goal, my diplomacy, my statesmanship is to get our troops reduced in number and I believe if you do the statesmanship properly, I believe if you do the kind of alliance building that is available to us, that it's appropriate to have a goal of reducing the troops over that period of time [the first six months of a Kerry administration]. Obviously, we'd have to see how events unfold. . . . It is an appropriate goal to have and I'm going to try to achieve it." -- Kerry, Aug. 9
Bush - "I took exception when my opponent said if he's elected, we'll substantially reduce the troops in six months. He shouldn't have said that. See, it sends a mixed signal to the enemy for starters. So the enemy hangs around for six months and one day. . . . It says, maybe America isn't going to keep its word." -- Bush, Aug. 18
Kerry - "I will fight this war on terror with the lessons I learned in war. I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president of the United States. I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history. I lay out a strategy to strengthen our military, to build and lead strong alliances and reform our intelligence system. I set out a path to win the peace in Iraq and to get the terrorists wherever they may be before they get us." -- Kerry, Aug. 5
Cheney - "Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a 'more sensitive' war on terror. America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. . . . Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed." -- Cheney, Aug. 12
Kerry - "Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, has said this administration is not moving with the urgency necessary to respond to our needs. I believe this administration and its policies is actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists. We haven't done the work necessary to reach out to other countries. We haven't done the work necessary with the Muslim world. We haven't done the work necessary to protect our own ports, our chemical facilities, our nuclear facilities. There is a long, long list in the 9/11 recommendations that are undone." - Kerry, Aug. 2
Bush - "My opponent says . . . that going to war with the terrorists is actually improving their recruiting efforts. I think the logic -- I know the logic is upside down. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature of these people. See, during the 1990s, these killers and terrorists were recruiting and training for war with us, long before we went to war with them. They don't need an excuse for their hatred. It's wrong to blame America for anger and the evil of these killers. We don't create terrorists by fighting back. You defeat the terrorists by fighting back." -- Bush, Aug. 18
What Kerry said - "Every performer tonight in their own way, either verbally or through their music, through their lyrics, have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country." -- Kerry, July 8
What Bush said - "The other day, my opponent said he thought you could find the heart and soul of America in Hollywood." -- Bush, Aug. 18
Kerry - "My goal, my diplomacy, my statesmanship is to get our troops reduced in number and I believe if you do the statesmanship properly, I believe if you do the kind of alliance building that is available to us, that it's appropriate to have a goal of reducing the troops over that period of time [the first six months of a Kerry administration]. Obviously, we'd have to see how events unfold. . . . It is an appropriate goal to have and I'm going to try to achieve it." -- Kerry, Aug. 9
Bush - "I took exception when my opponent said if he's elected, we'll substantially reduce the troops in six months. He shouldn't have said that. See, it sends a mixed signal to the enemy for starters. So the enemy hangs around for six months and one day. . . . It says, maybe America isn't going to keep its word." -- Bush, Aug. 18
Kerry - "I will fight this war on terror with the lessons I learned in war. I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president of the United States. I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history. I lay out a strategy to strengthen our military, to build and lead strong alliances and reform our intelligence system. I set out a path to win the peace in Iraq and to get the terrorists wherever they may be before they get us." -- Kerry, Aug. 5
Cheney - "Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge he would fight a 'more sensitive' war on terror. America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. . . . Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed." -- Cheney, Aug. 12
Kerry - "Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, has said this administration is not moving with the urgency necessary to respond to our needs. I believe this administration and its policies is actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists. We haven't done the work necessary to reach out to other countries. We haven't done the work necessary with the Muslim world. We haven't done the work necessary to protect our own ports, our chemical facilities, our nuclear facilities. There is a long, long list in the 9/11 recommendations that are undone." - Kerry, Aug. 2
Bush - "My opponent says . . . that going to war with the terrorists is actually improving their recruiting efforts. I think the logic -- I know the logic is upside down. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature of these people. See, during the 1990s, these killers and terrorists were recruiting and training for war with us, long before we went to war with them. They don't need an excuse for their hatred. It's wrong to blame America for anger and the evil of these killers. We don't create terrorists by fighting back. You defeat the terrorists by fighting back." -- Bush, Aug. 18
Death of a Senator - A Fable
A powerful senator dies after a prolonged illness. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.
"Welcome to Heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we're not sure what to do with you."
"No problem, just let me in," says the guy.
"Well, I'd like to but I have orders from higher up. What we'll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity."
"Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven," says the senator.
"I'm sorry but we have our rules."
And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him, everyone is very happy and in evening attire. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.
Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator rises.
The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. "Now it's time to visit Heaven."
So 24 hours pass with the head of state joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.
"Well then, you've spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity."
He reflects for a minute, then the senator answers, "Well, I would never have said it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell."
So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell.
Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. The Devil comes over to him and lays his arm on his neck. "I don't understand," stammers the senator. "Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is, is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.
The Devil looks at him, smiles and says, "Yesterday we were campaigning...Today you voted for us!"
VOTE WISELY THIS COMING ELECTION!!
"Welcome to Heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we're not sure what to do with you."
"No problem, just let me in," says the guy.
"Well, I'd like to but I have orders from higher up. What we'll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity."
"Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven," says the senator.
"I'm sorry but we have our rules."
And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him, everyone is very happy and in evening attire. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.
Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator rises.
The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. "Now it's time to visit Heaven."
So 24 hours pass with the head of state joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.
"Well then, you've spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity."
He reflects for a minute, then the senator answers, "Well, I would never have said it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell."
So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell.
Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. The Devil comes over to him and lays his arm on his neck. "I don't understand," stammers the senator. "Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is, is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.
The Devil looks at him, smiles and says, "Yesterday we were campaigning...Today you voted for us!"
VOTE WISELY THIS COMING ELECTION!!
Kerry on The Daily Show
As if you needed a reason to watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central, tonight John Kerry will appear in an extended interview.
Monday, August 23, 2004
They're at it again!
Elderly black voters in Orlando have been frightened and intimidated in their homes by Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement officials, further frustrating efforts to get out the black vote in November. One woman asked, "Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?"
What was Cheney doing 35 years ago?
While attacking Kerry on his Vietnam record, what exactly where top Republicans doing during the war? Here's what John Nichols wrote in "The Nation" back in May:
Dick Cheney has positioned himself as the Bush Administration's point man in the ongoing work of questioning the national security credentials of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Cheney's latest attacks on Kerry come as part of a renewed push by the Bush/Cheney campaign, the Republican National Committee and their media allies to suggest that somewhere in the story of Kerry's evolution from decorated Vietnam War combatant to outspoken antiwar activist in the early 1970s can be found evidence that he is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief.
But what of Cheney's Vietnam-era story? Like Kerry, Cheney was "of age" for service. Faced with the chance to engage on the battlefield or the home front, however, he dodged out-not for moral reasons but selfish ones. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss, who interviewed Cheney for his book They Marched Into Sunlight, says the Vice President just couldn't be bothered. "I think he's emblematic of a certain type. He wasn't against the war, just didn't want anything to do with it," explains Maraniss. "He wanted to get on with his life and not let the world get in the way."
Unfortunately, the world had a tendency to get in the way of young men who, like Cheney, were of draft age when the US troop presence in Vietnam began to rise in the mid-1960s. As a result, there was one sense in which Cheney mirrored the actions, if not the politics, of his fellow students. Dick Cheney was definitely opposed to the draft, at least as far as it affected him. Indeed, unlike George W. Bush, who performed some sort of service-ill-defined and unrecorded as it may have been-in the Texas Air National Guard, Cheney reacted to the prospect of wearing his country's uniform like a man with a deadly allergy to olive drab. Between 1963 and '65, Cheney used his student status at Casper College and the University of Wyoming to apply for and receive four 2-S draft deferments. As the war in Vietnam heated up, Cheney fought to defend and expand his deferments. Twenty-two days after Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, raising the prospect of a rapid expansion of the draft, he "coincidentally"-in the words of a Washington Post profile-married Lynne. The advantage was that even if his student deferment was lifted, his married status might carry some weight with his draft board.
But the Vietnamese were not cooperating with Cheney's schemes. The war kept demanding more and more young American men, and the range of those who were eligible for the draft expanded rapidly. On May 19, 1965, Cheney was reclassified with the most dangerous draft status: 1-A, "available for military service." Soon afterward, Lyndon Johnson announced that draft call-ups would double, and on October 26, Selective Service constraints on the drafting of childless married men were lifted. Danang was calling. And it didn't look like Dick had any excuses left.
But there was one way for ambitious young men to avoid serving their country while maintaining their political viability. If Cheney had a child, he'd be reclassified 3-A, removing him from the pool of those likely to be drafted. Cheney needed a kid-quick. And he got one. Precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for childless married men, Cheney was no longer childless. His daughter Elizabeth was born on July 28, 1966. Convenient? Coincidence? That's not Cheney's style. Writer Timothy Noah did the math and suggested that the timing of Elizabeth's arrival "would seem to indicate that the Cheneys, though doubtless planning to have children sometime, were seized with an untamable passion the moment Dick Cheney became vulnerable to the Vietnam draft. And acted on it. Carpe diem! Who says government policy can't affect human behavior?" Cheney applied for 3-A status immediately, receiving it on January l9, 1966, when Lynne was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy.
Twenty-three years later, when Cheney appeared before the Senate to plead the case for his confirmation as George Herbert Walker Bush's Defense Secretary, he was questioned about his failure to serve. Cheney responded that he "would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called." In a more truthful moment that same year, Cheney admitted to a reporter, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." Cheney's lie to the Senate has never caused much concern, but that "other priorities" line has dogged him. After he selected himself to serve on the 2000 Republican ticket, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown, a Vietnam veteran disabled by a gunshot wound to his right arm, said, "As a former Marine who was wounded and nearly lost his life, I personally resent that comment. I resent that he had 'other priorities,' when 58,000 people died and over 300,000 returned wounded and disabled. In my mind there is no doubt that because he had 'other priorities' someone died or was injured in his place."
That may sound like a harsh assessment, but the fact is that at least a dozen men aged 19 to 47 from Cheney's adopted hometown of Casper, Wyoming, died in Vietnam during the period when Cheney might have served. Because local draft boards had to fill quotas when a man who was eligible got a deferment, someone else had to fill the slot. The vagaries of draft quotas, military service and the war itself make it impossible to say whether Leroy Robert Cardenas or Walter Elmer Handy or Douglas Tyrone Patrick or any of the other sons of Casper who perished in Southeast Asia might have survived the war years and gone on to explore their "other priorities" if Cheney had responded to his country's call. But that doesn't stop some of those who served from asking, "Who died in your place, Dick Cheney?" Vietnam veteran Dennis Mansker raises that question on his website, where he maintains a list of the dead from Casper. Maybe Cheney did have other priorities, Mansker argues, but "so did these guys."
Dick Cheney has positioned himself as the Bush Administration's point man in the ongoing work of questioning the national security credentials of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Cheney's latest attacks on Kerry come as part of a renewed push by the Bush/Cheney campaign, the Republican National Committee and their media allies to suggest that somewhere in the story of Kerry's evolution from decorated Vietnam War combatant to outspoken antiwar activist in the early 1970s can be found evidence that he is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief.
But what of Cheney's Vietnam-era story? Like Kerry, Cheney was "of age" for service. Faced with the chance to engage on the battlefield or the home front, however, he dodged out-not for moral reasons but selfish ones. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss, who interviewed Cheney for his book They Marched Into Sunlight, says the Vice President just couldn't be bothered. "I think he's emblematic of a certain type. He wasn't against the war, just didn't want anything to do with it," explains Maraniss. "He wanted to get on with his life and not let the world get in the way."
Unfortunately, the world had a tendency to get in the way of young men who, like Cheney, were of draft age when the US troop presence in Vietnam began to rise in the mid-1960s. As a result, there was one sense in which Cheney mirrored the actions, if not the politics, of his fellow students. Dick Cheney was definitely opposed to the draft, at least as far as it affected him. Indeed, unlike George W. Bush, who performed some sort of service-ill-defined and unrecorded as it may have been-in the Texas Air National Guard, Cheney reacted to the prospect of wearing his country's uniform like a man with a deadly allergy to olive drab. Between 1963 and '65, Cheney used his student status at Casper College and the University of Wyoming to apply for and receive four 2-S draft deferments. As the war in Vietnam heated up, Cheney fought to defend and expand his deferments. Twenty-two days after Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, raising the prospect of a rapid expansion of the draft, he "coincidentally"-in the words of a Washington Post profile-married Lynne. The advantage was that even if his student deferment was lifted, his married status might carry some weight with his draft board.
But the Vietnamese were not cooperating with Cheney's schemes. The war kept demanding more and more young American men, and the range of those who were eligible for the draft expanded rapidly. On May 19, 1965, Cheney was reclassified with the most dangerous draft status: 1-A, "available for military service." Soon afterward, Lyndon Johnson announced that draft call-ups would double, and on October 26, Selective Service constraints on the drafting of childless married men were lifted. Danang was calling. And it didn't look like Dick had any excuses left.
But there was one way for ambitious young men to avoid serving their country while maintaining their political viability. If Cheney had a child, he'd be reclassified 3-A, removing him from the pool of those likely to be drafted. Cheney needed a kid-quick. And he got one. Precisely nine months and two days after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for childless married men, Cheney was no longer childless. His daughter Elizabeth was born on July 28, 1966. Convenient? Coincidence? That's not Cheney's style. Writer Timothy Noah did the math and suggested that the timing of Elizabeth's arrival "would seem to indicate that the Cheneys, though doubtless planning to have children sometime, were seized with an untamable passion the moment Dick Cheney became vulnerable to the Vietnam draft. And acted on it. Carpe diem! Who says government policy can't affect human behavior?" Cheney applied for 3-A status immediately, receiving it on January l9, 1966, when Lynne was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy.
Twenty-three years later, when Cheney appeared before the Senate to plead the case for his confirmation as George Herbert Walker Bush's Defense Secretary, he was questioned about his failure to serve. Cheney responded that he "would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called." In a more truthful moment that same year, Cheney admitted to a reporter, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." Cheney's lie to the Senate has never caused much concern, but that "other priorities" line has dogged him. After he selected himself to serve on the 2000 Republican ticket, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown, a Vietnam veteran disabled by a gunshot wound to his right arm, said, "As a former Marine who was wounded and nearly lost his life, I personally resent that comment. I resent that he had 'other priorities,' when 58,000 people died and over 300,000 returned wounded and disabled. In my mind there is no doubt that because he had 'other priorities' someone died or was injured in his place."
That may sound like a harsh assessment, but the fact is that at least a dozen men aged 19 to 47 from Cheney's adopted hometown of Casper, Wyoming, died in Vietnam during the period when Cheney might have served. Because local draft boards had to fill quotas when a man who was eligible got a deferment, someone else had to fill the slot. The vagaries of draft quotas, military service and the war itself make it impossible to say whether Leroy Robert Cardenas or Walter Elmer Handy or Douglas Tyrone Patrick or any of the other sons of Casper who perished in Southeast Asia might have survived the war years and gone on to explore their "other priorities" if Cheney had responded to his country's call. But that doesn't stop some of those who served from asking, "Who died in your place, Dick Cheney?" Vietnam veteran Dennis Mansker raises that question on his website, where he maintains a list of the dead from Casper. Maybe Cheney did have other priorities, Mansker argues, but "so did these guys."
New Kerry Slogan
I'm pretty angry right now over this whole Vietnam controversy. Before I write on this issue, here's what I think Kerry's new campaign slogan should be:
"While Kerry was getting shot, Bush was doing shots."
"While Kerry was getting shot, Bush was doing shots."
Thursday, August 19, 2004
GOP Legislator Assails Iraq War
See, just like us, Republicans can criticize this administration and the war. Too bad it's at the end of his House career. It's not a partisan issue boys and girls - we f'd up, big time. Time to admit it and try and figure out a way to fix it, if it can be fixed. We may have to follow Randy Newman's advice!
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Wow!!
Just got home from seeing Mutual Admiration Society at the Birchmere in Alexandria. John Paul Jones is playing base for them. Wow!! One of my favorite musicians - he's still kickin' major ass on bass and mandolin. Have a look!
Mutual Admiration Society is a collaboration between singer Glen Phillips (from '90s band Toad The Wet Sprocket) and the modern bluegrass trio Nickel Creek. They invited John Paul Jones to join their 2004 summer tour. The show was a mixture of songs from their new CD and Nickel Creek's older stuff, with a few surprises thrown in. Jones spent most of the night playing bass behind the 4 leads. He did play mandolin on a version of "Going To California" it was an instrumental, featuring only Jones and guitarist Sean Watkins. Jones also sang harmony vocals behind Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins on a funny song called "Anthony". Now, for my small gripe - I hate fake encores. If you're not done playing, stay on stage. Don't leave, milk the crowd for applause, and come back out like it was spontaneous. We knew you were coming back - the lights didn't come back on. Anyway, they came out and played "Gallows Pole" and kicked major butt. The mandolin player, Chris Thile, is awesome, but looked a bit goofy trying to act like a "rock-star". Tonight is the last show of the tour - you missed something really cool.
Mutual Admiration Society is a collaboration between singer Glen Phillips (from '90s band Toad The Wet Sprocket) and the modern bluegrass trio Nickel Creek. They invited John Paul Jones to join their 2004 summer tour. The show was a mixture of songs from their new CD and Nickel Creek's older stuff, with a few surprises thrown in. Jones spent most of the night playing bass behind the 4 leads. He did play mandolin on a version of "Going To California" it was an instrumental, featuring only Jones and guitarist Sean Watkins. Jones also sang harmony vocals behind Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins on a funny song called "Anthony". Now, for my small gripe - I hate fake encores. If you're not done playing, stay on stage. Don't leave, milk the crowd for applause, and come back out like it was spontaneous. We knew you were coming back - the lights didn't come back on. Anyway, they came out and played "Gallows Pole" and kicked major butt. The mandolin player, Chris Thile, is awesome, but looked a bit goofy trying to act like a "rock-star". Tonight is the last show of the tour - you missed something really cool.
Is Keye's Krazy?
You decide. "Keyes likens abortion to terrorism". But if you ask me, brutha-man's lost it.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Look What Bush Has Done
My wife forwarded this to me - from the SF Chronicle:
President Bush has gone "under the radar" and around the Congress to spread his faith-based initiative throughout the federal government, according to a new study released Monday.
The study, compiled by researchers at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y., is one of the first comprehensive looks at the Bush administration's efforts to redirect government grants to churches and other faith-based groups.
"Religious organizations are now involved in government-encouraged activities ranging from building strip malls for economic improvement to promoting child car seats," the study states.
Branches in 10 agencies
Taken together, the report finds that the Bush programs "mark a major shift in the constitutional separation of church and state." "Few if any presidents in recent history have reached as deeply into or as broadly across the government to implement a presidential initiative administratively," said institute director Richard Nathan. The study focuses on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which has set up faith-based branch offices in 10 federal agencies ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bush administration officials say the
faith- based initiative is meant to merely "level the playing field" so churches and other religious groups can compete for billions of dollars the federal government hands out each year through government social service contracts.
Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said Monday that he hadn't had time to read the entire study. "But parts of it that I have read seem to lay out dark motives for what is happening," Towey said in an interview with The Chronicle. "What it shows is that the president is taking the steps he promised he would take to end discrimination against faith-based groups."
Religious groups such as Catholic Charities USA and Lutheran Social Services have long gotten government funding to feed the poor, heal the sick and house the homeless. But they were required to set up separate nonprofit agencies to run those programs and to operate under strict rules that forbid them to proselytize or limit hiring to employees of a particular faith or religious denomination.
So far, Congress has resisted Bush administration proposals to rewrite the rules and loosen long-standing restrictions against preaching in publicly funded poverty programs. What the new study by the Rockefeller Institute's Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy shows is how the administration has pushed its agenda through presidential fiat.
Study has 'point of view'
Anne Farris, a co-author of the report, said President Bush had promoted his personal beliefs "both in ideology and deeds -- in the workings of the federal government." Nathan, the institute director, said the study was based on "independent, nonpartisan research on faith-based social service."
Towey questioned the institute's motives and said they had not interviewed him about the program he runs. "They have a point of view," he said.
Most of the report relies on the government's own statistics and Bush administration statements about expanding church involvement in social welfare programs. For example, grants given to faith-based groups by the Departments of Health and Human Services increased 41 percent in fiscal year 2003.
The report also cites newly revised Department of Labor rules that exempt religious organizations from provisions of the Civil Rights Act that forbid discrimination in employment based on religion.
It also notes changes in federal regulations that now allow churches to use federal funds to renovate buildings that are used for both social services and religious worship.
Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, called the new study "very alarming." "This administration seems obsessed with faith-based solutions for everything," Conn said. "What they don't seem to worry about is the Constitution."
'Pray for rain'
Even the Department of Agriculture now has its own office of faith-based initiatives, Conn noted.
"Maybe they're going to pray for rain," he said. Towey said Conn and the Rockefeller Institute are overreacting to White House efforts. "President Bush does not want to proselytize or fund religion," he said.
"We're talking about things like job training and substance abuse prevention, and opening up to small groups that have been shut by the ACLU and a radical fringe that wants an extreme separation of church and state."
President Bush has gone "under the radar" and around the Congress to spread his faith-based initiative throughout the federal government, according to a new study released Monday.
The study, compiled by researchers at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y., is one of the first comprehensive looks at the Bush administration's efforts to redirect government grants to churches and other faith-based groups.
"Religious organizations are now involved in government-encouraged activities ranging from building strip malls for economic improvement to promoting child car seats," the study states.
Branches in 10 agencies
Taken together, the report finds that the Bush programs "mark a major shift in the constitutional separation of church and state." "Few if any presidents in recent history have reached as deeply into or as broadly across the government to implement a presidential initiative administratively," said institute director Richard Nathan. The study focuses on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which has set up faith-based branch offices in 10 federal agencies ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bush administration officials say the
faith- based initiative is meant to merely "level the playing field" so churches and other religious groups can compete for billions of dollars the federal government hands out each year through government social service contracts.
Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said Monday that he hadn't had time to read the entire study. "But parts of it that I have read seem to lay out dark motives for what is happening," Towey said in an interview with The Chronicle. "What it shows is that the president is taking the steps he promised he would take to end discrimination against faith-based groups."
Religious groups such as Catholic Charities USA and Lutheran Social Services have long gotten government funding to feed the poor, heal the sick and house the homeless. But they were required to set up separate nonprofit agencies to run those programs and to operate under strict rules that forbid them to proselytize or limit hiring to employees of a particular faith or religious denomination.
So far, Congress has resisted Bush administration proposals to rewrite the rules and loosen long-standing restrictions against preaching in publicly funded poverty programs. What the new study by the Rockefeller Institute's Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy shows is how the administration has pushed its agenda through presidential fiat.
Study has 'point of view'
Anne Farris, a co-author of the report, said President Bush had promoted his personal beliefs "both in ideology and deeds -- in the workings of the federal government." Nathan, the institute director, said the study was based on "independent, nonpartisan research on faith-based social service."
Towey questioned the institute's motives and said they had not interviewed him about the program he runs. "They have a point of view," he said.
Most of the report relies on the government's own statistics and Bush administration statements about expanding church involvement in social welfare programs. For example, grants given to faith-based groups by the Departments of Health and Human Services increased 41 percent in fiscal year 2003.
The report also cites newly revised Department of Labor rules that exempt religious organizations from provisions of the Civil Rights Act that forbid discrimination in employment based on religion.
It also notes changes in federal regulations that now allow churches to use federal funds to renovate buildings that are used for both social services and religious worship.
Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, called the new study "very alarming." "This administration seems obsessed with faith-based solutions for everything," Conn said. "What they don't seem to worry about is the Constitution."
'Pray for rain'
Even the Department of Agriculture now has its own office of faith-based initiatives, Conn noted.
"Maybe they're going to pray for rain," he said. Towey said Conn and the Rockefeller Institute are overreacting to White House efforts. "President Bush does not want to proselytize or fund religion," he said.
"We're talking about things like job training and substance abuse prevention, and opening up to small groups that have been shut by the ACLU and a radical fringe that wants an extreme separation of church and state."
Monday, August 16, 2004
News from Chicago
My sister-in-law sent this to me. She's a volunteer for the Obama campaign in Chicago:
Keyes arrival in Chicago has become quite a joke. People are talking about the neighborhood that he chose to live in, the apartment he chose. No matter what, he would never be accepted here - he is Republican but more importantly he is an outsider and I cannot begin to explain what that means. Outsiders are just not welcome.
I hope this helps, as my words cannot capture the details, so here goes...
Keyes marches alone at Billiken Parade... and gets ambushed
Monday, August 16, 2004
By The Leader-Chicago Bureau
CHICAGO -- At the 75th annual Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago Saturday, the only Illinois Republican candidate or official who showed up was its newest ambassador, U.S. Senate candidate of six days, Alan Keyes.
Billed as the largest African-American parade in the nation, with 1.2 million people lining the route in 2003 and 25 million television viewers, the Billiken Parade and Picnic were originally created to give underprivileged children a day of fun.
But it was not fun for Keyes and his small band of volunteer supporters, who withstood the backlash of Democrat Senate candidate Barack Obama's popularity as, for the first time in U.S. history, two African-American candidates for U.S. Senate faced an African-American crowd.
Keyes marched without any Republican Party support. Flanking him in front and back were nary a Party official to be seen, nor were there any GOP floats, signs, or stickers.
Party Chairman Judy Baar Topinka sent a car on behalf of her State Treasurer's office, but she herself did not participate in the parade.
"Where was the Bush float? The GOP Cook County float? Jim Edgar? Jim Thompson? Any GOP committeemen?" angrily wondered one Keyes marcher. "All their talk of reaching out to this community is meaningless."
Republican Communications Director Jason Gerwig told IllinoisLeader.com he had no answers regarding GOP participation or nonparticipation in the parade.
"I'm not at my desk and don't have my notes on that event in front of me," Gerwig responded.
Sunday's Chicago Tribune captured the tone of the event:
Keyes... was greeted with a resounding chorus of jeers and boos that bordered on outright hostility.
"Go back to Maryland!" and "Down with Keyes!" were the most common refrains....
By contrast, Democrat Barack Obama was treated to a king's welcome, with thousands of parade-goers hoisting blue-and-white Obama signs, wearing Obama stickers and shrieking in pure joy as his float passed by. They serenaded the Hyde Park Democrat with chants of "O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!"....
So when Obama's political challenger appeared Saturday, the reception was not pretty. Over the first couple of blocks of the parade route, Keyes got a few down-turned thumbs and groans of dissent.
But as the crowds grew thicker and Keyes inched closer to a sea of Obama supporters, spectators grew more aggressive in denouncing him. As Keyes tried to shake hands... a woman ran up to him, lifted an Obama sign above her head and screamed repeatedly into Keyes' face: "Obama for president! Obama for president!"
Another man briefly grabbed Keyes' arm and advised Keyes, "Take your [expletive] back to Maryland."
Yet others were courteous, shaking Keyes' hand and flashing a smile at him. A few requested his autograph, and he obliged in each instance.
Indeed, through all the mayhem, Keyes kept a smile on his face....
"Keyes represented the GOP proudly," said Republican Young Professionals co-founder Doug Ibendahl. "Even when people were booing him, he would shake their hand."
More than boos were heard. "You’re a puppet to white people!" shouted one spectator. "You're an Uncle Tom!" yelled another.
A woman held a sign up to Keyes that said, "Hey, Sambo, go back to Maryland."
The Trib concluded:
Lee Walker, a Keyes supporter who directs a conservative Chicago-based think tank, observed that Keyes could have been forgiven had he ducked out of the parade when things got tough. "He's not running from all this, and I think folks will eventually realize that," Walker said. "You have to give him credit for courage."
Keyes arrival in Chicago has become quite a joke. People are talking about the neighborhood that he chose to live in, the apartment he chose. No matter what, he would never be accepted here - he is Republican but more importantly he is an outsider and I cannot begin to explain what that means. Outsiders are just not welcome.
I hope this helps, as my words cannot capture the details, so here goes...
Keyes marches alone at Billiken Parade... and gets ambushed
Monday, August 16, 2004
By The Leader-Chicago Bureau
CHICAGO -- At the 75th annual Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago Saturday, the only Illinois Republican candidate or official who showed up was its newest ambassador, U.S. Senate candidate of six days, Alan Keyes.
Billed as the largest African-American parade in the nation, with 1.2 million people lining the route in 2003 and 25 million television viewers, the Billiken Parade and Picnic were originally created to give underprivileged children a day of fun.
But it was not fun for Keyes and his small band of volunteer supporters, who withstood the backlash of Democrat Senate candidate Barack Obama's popularity as, for the first time in U.S. history, two African-American candidates for U.S. Senate faced an African-American crowd.
Keyes marched without any Republican Party support. Flanking him in front and back were nary a Party official to be seen, nor were there any GOP floats, signs, or stickers.
Party Chairman Judy Baar Topinka sent a car on behalf of her State Treasurer's office, but she herself did not participate in the parade.
"Where was the Bush float? The GOP Cook County float? Jim Edgar? Jim Thompson? Any GOP committeemen?" angrily wondered one Keyes marcher. "All their talk of reaching out to this community is meaningless."
Republican Communications Director Jason Gerwig told IllinoisLeader.com he had no answers regarding GOP participation or nonparticipation in the parade.
"I'm not at my desk and don't have my notes on that event in front of me," Gerwig responded.
Sunday's Chicago Tribune captured the tone of the event:
Keyes... was greeted with a resounding chorus of jeers and boos that bordered on outright hostility.
"Go back to Maryland!" and "Down with Keyes!" were the most common refrains....
By contrast, Democrat Barack Obama was treated to a king's welcome, with thousands of parade-goers hoisting blue-and-white Obama signs, wearing Obama stickers and shrieking in pure joy as his float passed by. They serenaded the Hyde Park Democrat with chants of "O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!"....
So when Obama's political challenger appeared Saturday, the reception was not pretty. Over the first couple of blocks of the parade route, Keyes got a few down-turned thumbs and groans of dissent.
But as the crowds grew thicker and Keyes inched closer to a sea of Obama supporters, spectators grew more aggressive in denouncing him. As Keyes tried to shake hands... a woman ran up to him, lifted an Obama sign above her head and screamed repeatedly into Keyes' face: "Obama for president! Obama for president!"
Another man briefly grabbed Keyes' arm and advised Keyes, "Take your [expletive] back to Maryland."
Yet others were courteous, shaking Keyes' hand and flashing a smile at him. A few requested his autograph, and he obliged in each instance.
Indeed, through all the mayhem, Keyes kept a smile on his face....
"Keyes represented the GOP proudly," said Republican Young Professionals co-founder Doug Ibendahl. "Even when people were booing him, he would shake their hand."
More than boos were heard. "You’re a puppet to white people!" shouted one spectator. "You're an Uncle Tom!" yelled another.
A woman held a sign up to Keyes that said, "Hey, Sambo, go back to Maryland."
The Trib concluded:
Lee Walker, a Keyes supporter who directs a conservative Chicago-based think tank, observed that Keyes could have been forgiven had he ducked out of the parade when things got tough. "He's not running from all this, and I think folks will eventually realize that," Walker said. "You have to give him credit for courage."
Video Game Violence
You'd think I'd be all PC and deplore the excessive violence in video games. HELL NO!! When the news everyday shows the fighting all over the world, a little cartoon violence doesn't bother me (unless 8 year old kids are playing the games. You gotta have limits folks!). What bothers me is dropping bombs from the sky in residential neighborhoods and then talk about "minimal collateral damage". I doubt if it was that minimal to the folks who got killed (and yes, I agree that those Al-Queda m-f'ers didn't care about it either - but that's what is supposed to make us different, we do care about innocent human life).
But, that being said, I'm a grown-ass man, and I am buying this as soon as it comes out!!
But, that being said, I'm a grown-ass man, and I am buying this as soon as it comes out!!
Puerto Rico 92 - USA 73
I've got so much to say, but for now I'll just go with - How does Puerto Rico have an Olympic team? It's not a country - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't have teams. Catalonia doesn't have a team, Friesland doesn't have a team. If Puerto Rico gets a team, then shouldn't DC? What's going on? Someone, please explain this to me!
This is why I miss communism. In the good old days of the Cold War, we knew who our enemy was. It was tangible. The Soviet Union, the Evil Empire. It was good vs. bad, democracy vs. dictatorship, God vs. atheists, amateurs vs. the Red Army. We would send our best COLLEGE players out onto the court and they would play their hearts out, we would cheer and care, and everyone felt good about it. Now, I didn't even watch the USA-Puerto Rico game. I didn't care about it (and neither did the great NBA players, who are all at home). At least not in the way I did when I was a kid in the 80's. Yeah, the Cold War sucked - I remember watching The Day After and being scared to death that the Soviets would launch a nuclear attack on us. At least, I would tell myself, I wouldn't feel it, since living in the DC area, we were at ground zero. And if they did attack, my friends and I from G-F High School would just fight back like Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell in Red Dawn!
But now, the enemy is both everywhere and nowhere. There is no one country to hate anymore, actually no country at all, but an idea. And that's what's so frustrating to us. Bush tried to hoodwink us into thinking the enemy was Iraq, but nobody really felt they were a threat, regardless of what they say. They were an easy target, like when we beat Angola back in the '92 Olympics, which is about the time I stopped caring about the Olympic games.
So, why did we lose? I blame 2 folks, Shaq and Gorbachev.
This is why I miss communism. In the good old days of the Cold War, we knew who our enemy was. It was tangible. The Soviet Union, the Evil Empire. It was good vs. bad, democracy vs. dictatorship, God vs. atheists, amateurs vs. the Red Army. We would send our best COLLEGE players out onto the court and they would play their hearts out, we would cheer and care, and everyone felt good about it. Now, I didn't even watch the USA-Puerto Rico game. I didn't care about it (and neither did the great NBA players, who are all at home). At least not in the way I did when I was a kid in the 80's. Yeah, the Cold War sucked - I remember watching The Day After and being scared to death that the Soviets would launch a nuclear attack on us. At least, I would tell myself, I wouldn't feel it, since living in the DC area, we were at ground zero. And if they did attack, my friends and I from G-F High School would just fight back like Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell in Red Dawn!
But now, the enemy is both everywhere and nowhere. There is no one country to hate anymore, actually no country at all, but an idea. And that's what's so frustrating to us. Bush tried to hoodwink us into thinking the enemy was Iraq, but nobody really felt they were a threat, regardless of what they say. They were an easy target, like when we beat Angola back in the '92 Olympics, which is about the time I stopped caring about the Olympic games.
So, why did we lose? I blame 2 folks, Shaq and Gorbachev.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
What the f**k?
Okay, this has no political overtones (at least I don't think so). C'mon, enough is enough. Damn you MTV with your "Cribs" and "Pimp My Ride"!! Click here!
Friday, August 13, 2004
For all you scientists out there
From my friend Barney. I don't know squat about science or science funding, but he assures me this is important!!
Dear FASEB Society Member,
Recently, the House Appropriations Committee passed their FY 2005 Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies (VA-HUD) spending bill. Included in this bill was a $111 million REDUCTION in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a $21 million REDUCTION for medical research at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This means fewer grants for researchers. Over the next few weeks, the House of Representatives and the Senate will work towards finalizing the FY 2005 VA-HUD appropriations bill. Please contact your Representative and S enators and urge them to fund NSF at $5.7 billion and VA at $460 million.
The only way for Congress to understand the damage it is doing to science is to hear from you. As a scientist with expertise in these issues and as a constituent, your voice carries great weight on Capitol Hill. If you say nothing, Congress will assume that you don’t care and will not restore these cuts. Even worse, silence on our part may lead to further setbacks in the years ahead. Please contact your Representative and Senators and tell them about the damage they are inflicting on science with these funding cuts.
To contact your elected officials, please log on to FASEB’s legislative action website at
(http://capwiz.com/faseb/home/< /A> )
Here you will find an alert titled Urge Congress to Increase NSF and VA Research Funding. Click on this alert to find instructions on how to contact your elected officials on this issue.
I encourage you to share this message with your colleagues and neighbors and consider signing up f or our electronic legislative action alerts (http://capwiz.com/faseb/mlm/?ignore_cookie=1)
Sincerely,Paul W. Kincade, Ph.D.
President
FASEB
Dear FASEB Society Member,
Recently, the House Appropriations Committee passed their FY 2005 Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies (VA-HUD) spending bill. Included in this bill was a $111 million REDUCTION in funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a $21 million REDUCTION for medical research at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This means fewer grants for researchers. Over the next few weeks, the House of Representatives and the Senate will work towards finalizing the FY 2005 VA-HUD appropriations bill. Please contact your Representative and S enators and urge them to fund NSF at $5.7 billion and VA at $460 million.
The only way for Congress to understand the damage it is doing to science is to hear from you. As a scientist with expertise in these issues and as a constituent, your voice carries great weight on Capitol Hill. If you say nothing, Congress will assume that you don’t care and will not restore these cuts. Even worse, silence on our part may lead to further setbacks in the years ahead. Please contact your Representative and Senators and tell them about the damage they are inflicting on science with these funding cuts.
To contact your elected officials, please log on to FASEB’s legislative action website at
(http://capwiz.com/faseb/home/< /A> )
Here you will find an alert titled Urge Congress to Increase NSF and VA Research Funding. Click on this alert to find instructions on how to contact your elected officials on this issue.
I encourage you to share this message with your colleagues and neighbors and consider signing up f or our electronic legislative action alerts (http://capwiz.com/faseb/mlm/?ignore_cookie=1)
Sincerely,Paul W. Kincade, Ph.D.
President
FASEB
GOP Convention Schedule
New York, NY
6:00 PM - Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
6:30 PM - Pledge of Allegiance
6:35 PM - Ceremonial Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd Amendment)
6:45 PM - Salute to the "Coalition of the Willing"
6:46 PM - Seminar #1: Katherine Harris on "Are Elections Really Necessary?"
7:30 PM - Announcement: Lincoln Memorial Renamed for Ronald Reagan
7:35 PM - Trent Lott - "Re-segregation in the 21st Century"
7:40 PM - EPA Address #1: "Mercury: It's What's for Dinner"
8:00 PM - Vote on which country to invade next
8:10 PM - Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh
8:15 PM - John Ashcroft Lecture: "The Homos Are After Your Children"
8:30 PM - Round table discussion on reproductive rights (Men Only)
8:50 PM - Seminar #2: "Corporations: The Government of the Future"
9:00 PM - Condi Rice sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"
9:05 PM - Phyllis Schlafly speaks on "Why Women Shouldn't Be Leaders"
9:10 PM - EPA Address #2: "Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires"
9:30 PM - Break for secret meetings
10:00 PM - Second Prayer led by Cal Thomas
10:15 PM - Carl Rove Lecture: "Doublespeak Made Simple"
10:30 PM - Rumsfeld Lecture/Demonstration: "How to Squint and Talk Macho Even When You Feel Squishy Inside"
10:35 PM - Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare
10:40 PM - John Ashcroft Demonstration: New Mandatory Kevlar Chastity Belt
10:45 PM - GOP's Tribute to Tokenism, featuring Colin Powell & Condi Rice
10:46 PM - Ann Coulter's Tribute to "Joe McCarthy, American Patriot"
10:50 PM - Seminar #3: "Education: A Drain on Our Nation's Economy"
11:10 PM - Hilary Clinton Piñata
11:20 PM - John Ashcroft Lecture: "Evolutionists: A Dangerous New Cult"
11:30 PM - Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again
11:35 PM - Blame Clinton
11:40 PM - Newt Gingrich speaks on "The Sanctity of Marriage"
11:41 PM - Announcement: Ronald Reagan to be added to Mt. Rushmore
11:50 PM - Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself
12:00 Mid - Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord
6:00 PM - Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
6:30 PM - Pledge of Allegiance
6:35 PM - Ceremonial Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd Amendment)
6:45 PM - Salute to the "Coalition of the Willing"
6:46 PM - Seminar #1: Katherine Harris on "Are Elections Really Necessary?"
7:30 PM - Announcement: Lincoln Memorial Renamed for Ronald Reagan
7:35 PM - Trent Lott - "Re-segregation in the 21st Century"
7:40 PM - EPA Address #1: "Mercury: It's What's for Dinner"
8:00 PM - Vote on which country to invade next
8:10 PM - Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh
8:15 PM - John Ashcroft Lecture: "The Homos Are After Your Children"
8:30 PM - Round table discussion on reproductive rights (Men Only)
8:50 PM - Seminar #2: "Corporations: The Government of the Future"
9:00 PM - Condi Rice sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"
9:05 PM - Phyllis Schlafly speaks on "Why Women Shouldn't Be Leaders"
9:10 PM - EPA Address #2: "Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires"
9:30 PM - Break for secret meetings
10:00 PM - Second Prayer led by Cal Thomas
10:15 PM - Carl Rove Lecture: "Doublespeak Made Simple"
10:30 PM - Rumsfeld Lecture/Demonstration: "How to Squint and Talk Macho Even When You Feel Squishy Inside"
10:35 PM - Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare
10:40 PM - John Ashcroft Demonstration: New Mandatory Kevlar Chastity Belt
10:45 PM - GOP's Tribute to Tokenism, featuring Colin Powell & Condi Rice
10:46 PM - Ann Coulter's Tribute to "Joe McCarthy, American Patriot"
10:50 PM - Seminar #3: "Education: A Drain on Our Nation's Economy"
11:10 PM - Hilary Clinton Piñata
11:20 PM - John Ashcroft Lecture: "Evolutionists: A Dangerous New Cult"
11:30 PM - Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again
11:35 PM - Blame Clinton
11:40 PM - Newt Gingrich speaks on "The Sanctity of Marriage"
11:41 PM - Announcement: Ronald Reagan to be added to Mt. Rushmore
11:50 PM - Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself
12:00 Mid - Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Is Goss Qualified to Lead CIA?
We'll let him answer this for himself (from yesterday's Washington Post):
Rep. Porter Goss may regret being interviewed for Michael Moore's Bush-bashing headliner of the summer, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and not just because the movie flashed his office phone number across the screen. Wouldn't you know it, the man whom President Bush just nominated as CIA director touched on his CIA involvement -- past and future -- during an interview with Moore's production crew (sans Moore) in March. If you don't recall seeing that in the movie, that's because you didn't. The clip was edited out. (We bet Moore's kicking himself now.)
According to the transcript obtained from Moore's camp, Goss, when asked about his past in the CIA, responded: "It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late '50s to approximately the early '70s. And it's true I was a case officer, clandestine services office, and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business." Perhaps he should have stopped yakking there.
Alas, the Florida Republican continued: "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were Romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background, probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day: 'Dad, you got to get better on your computer.' Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have."
When we asked Goss's office about the honest answer, spokeswoman Julie Almacy told us: "When he was a case officer, the language and technical requirements were different. So, the statement is correct in the context of the guidelines for a new hire of a case officer."
Ohhh, now we get it. Luckily for Goss, "case officer" is a completely different job from "director."
Rep. Porter Goss may regret being interviewed for Michael Moore's Bush-bashing headliner of the summer, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and not just because the movie flashed his office phone number across the screen. Wouldn't you know it, the man whom President Bush just nominated as CIA director touched on his CIA involvement -- past and future -- during an interview with Moore's production crew (sans Moore) in March. If you don't recall seeing that in the movie, that's because you didn't. The clip was edited out. (We bet Moore's kicking himself now.)
According to the transcript obtained from Moore's camp, Goss, when asked about his past in the CIA, responded: "It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late '50s to approximately the early '70s. And it's true I was a case officer, clandestine services office, and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business." Perhaps he should have stopped yakking there.
Alas, the Florida Republican continued: "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were Romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background, probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day: 'Dad, you got to get better on your computer.' Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have."
When we asked Goss's office about the honest answer, spokeswoman Julie Almacy told us: "When he was a case officer, the language and technical requirements were different. So, the statement is correct in the context of the guidelines for a new hire of a case officer."
Ohhh, now we get it. Luckily for Goss, "case officer" is a completely different job from "director."
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Costco vs. Wal-Mart
Red state vs. Blue State? Urban vs. rural? How about Costco vs. Mal-Mart. Read this cool article about Costco and Wal-Mart. (Kerry's a Costco guy, while Dubs a Wal-Mart dude)
The President Explains Sovereignity
Damn, he's smart. Click here to listen to W!! Then listen to Jesse's response, too damn funny!!!!
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
More on Rep. Alexander
Sources confirmed that freshman Rep. Rodney Alexander's (R) entire DC staff resigned today, in reaction to his last-minute party switch. The staff, en masse this a.m., handed in letters of resignation and returned office keys. Alexander had originally had filed as a Dem, but re-filed as a GOPer half an hour before the deadline, making it impossible for any strong challenger to jump in, GOP or Dem. Alexander's party switch raised the ire of the LA Dem establishment, adding a soupcon more vitriol to the already competitve LA political arena.
Monday, August 09, 2004
A Note From the DCCC
Friends:
This past Friday brought yet another example of the Republicans' unbelievable disregard for democracy. Rep. Rodney Alexander (LA-05) switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican thirty minutes before the filing deadline.
Mr. Alexander's last minute switch was a deliberate attempt to keep the voters in his district from having a choice on November 2 because the timing of his switch made it impossible for any other serious Democratic candidates to file. His decision also showed a complete disregard for the people who supported him as a Democrat with their time and money.
This act of treachery cannot and will not stand!
http://makers.democraticaction.org
DCCC Chair Robert Matsui said it best; "I hope Rodney enjoys the next 87 days in the Majority because that is all he is going to get. There will be no room in a Democratic House for a turncoat like Rodney Alexander."
In July, we launched Majority Makers - a grassroots volunteer raising and fundraising tool that allows dedicated DCCC activists to raise money and help us find activists interested in being part of our field programs. Majority Makers promotes exactly the kind of activity that Mr. Alexander's choice attempted to stifle - your ability to be a part of the democratic process by supporting candidates with money and manpower.
We need you to be part of the effort. Visit the Majority Makers homepage and start your campaign to restore a Democratic Majority to the House today and send turncoats like Rodney Alexander and Ralph Hall into the minority where they belong.
http://makers.democraticaction.org
The power is in your hands to give House Democrats the resources they need to regain the Majority. With your help, together we will be successful in our Campaign and ensure that America gets its Congress back.
http://makers.democraticaction.org
Thanks,
Crystal and JayActivist Outreach Team
P.S. Join DCCC activists from across the country on August 29th, when they Party for a New Majority. Go to http://www.majorityparties.com/hostparty/index.cfm for more info!
This past Friday brought yet another example of the Republicans' unbelievable disregard for democracy. Rep. Rodney Alexander (LA-05) switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican thirty minutes before the filing deadline.
Mr. Alexander's last minute switch was a deliberate attempt to keep the voters in his district from having a choice on November 2 because the timing of his switch made it impossible for any other serious Democratic candidates to file. His decision also showed a complete disregard for the people who supported him as a Democrat with their time and money.
This act of treachery cannot and will not stand!
http://makers.democraticaction.org
DCCC Chair Robert Matsui said it best; "I hope Rodney enjoys the next 87 days in the Majority because that is all he is going to get. There will be no room in a Democratic House for a turncoat like Rodney Alexander."
In July, we launched Majority Makers - a grassroots volunteer raising and fundraising tool that allows dedicated DCCC activists to raise money and help us find activists interested in being part of our field programs. Majority Makers promotes exactly the kind of activity that Mr. Alexander's choice attempted to stifle - your ability to be a part of the democratic process by supporting candidates with money and manpower.
We need you to be part of the effort. Visit the Majority Makers homepage and start your campaign to restore a Democratic Majority to the House today and send turncoats like Rodney Alexander and Ralph Hall into the minority where they belong.
http://makers.democraticaction.org
The power is in your hands to give House Democrats the resources they need to regain the Majority. With your help, together we will be successful in our Campaign and ensure that America gets its Congress back.
http://makers.democraticaction.org
Thanks,
Crystal and JayActivist Outreach Team
P.S. Join DCCC activists from across the country on August 29th, when they Party for a New Majority. Go to http://www.majorityparties.com/hostparty/index.cfm for more info!
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Freedom of speech? The right to freely assemble? The 1st Amendment is obviously overrated.
This is old news, but I have to write about it anyway.
In April of 2003, the Oakland Police Dpt. broke up an anti-war protest at the city's port, using quite a bit of force (37-mm shells filled with rubber and wood, tear gas and stinger grenades). Just 5 days earlier, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) sent the Oakland PD a bulleting telling them to expect trouble at the rally, warning the police that the protesters may be armed with Molotov cocktails. CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle told reporters that they didn't need direct evidence of terrorist activity to justify the bulletin. "You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that event. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act".
What the fuck? It gets better. The California Office of Homeland Security paid the Oakland PD $424,243 "for reimbursement of overtime costs incurred during the hostilities with Iraq"!! Beating up people protesting the war is the same as fighting terrorists and Iraq? This shit is just crazy. I don't know what to say.
In April of 2003, the Oakland Police Dpt. broke up an anti-war protest at the city's port, using quite a bit of force (37-mm shells filled with rubber and wood, tear gas and stinger grenades). Just 5 days earlier, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) sent the Oakland PD a bulleting telling them to expect trouble at the rally, warning the police that the protesters may be armed with Molotov cocktails. CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle told reporters that they didn't need direct evidence of terrorist activity to justify the bulletin. "You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that event. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act".
What the fuck? It gets better. The California Office of Homeland Security paid the Oakland PD $424,243 "for reimbursement of overtime costs incurred during the hostilities with Iraq"!! Beating up people protesting the war is the same as fighting terrorists and Iraq? This shit is just crazy. I don't know what to say.
Monday, August 02, 2004
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