Two Faced Liar
Yahoo! News - Document: Bush Leaves Military Service Didn’t he say he released ALL of his records?!?! Two Faced Liar.
The Debates
TCF has given some advice I believe we should all follow.
S.M. Dixon of The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy pointed out this excellent piece by The Center for American Progress called Claim vs. Fact: What The President Will Say. Let’s see how well they nailed it.
Accurate Intelligence Ignored
The Progress Report
Center for American Progress
Last week, President Bush dismissed a bleak assessment on Iraq prepared in July by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) as “just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.” (Bush later said he should have used the word “estimate” instead, but continues to insist that Iraq is on a path of steady success. Note to media: please ignore this vacillation when discussing the president’s “clarity” and “resolve.”) But the record shows that estimates on postwar Iraq prepared by the NIC - a group White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dismissed as pessimists and naysayers - have been extraordinarily accurate. An NIC report prepared two months before the war began, and first reported in the New York Times this morning, “warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein’s government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare.” The report also warned that a war “would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives.” Twenty months later, “the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear to have been upheld by events.”
Bush’s Hometown Newspaper Endorses Kerry
Bush’s Hometown Newspaper Endorses Kerry
“The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda,” the newspaper said in its editorial. “Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry.”
GOP Mailer: Dems will ban the bible
This is a copy of the GOP Mailer mentioned by the AP and reported on all the networks. This Washington Note piece, as well as this one and this one, provide additional background on the story.
Taking advantage of spurious correlations
An email reposted at Mark Rauterkus’ blog discusses a rally for our troops this coming weekend at Point State Park. While the email claims that the event is non-partisan, “THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL RALLY. BRING YOUR FLAG, BUT PLEASE LEAVE THE CAMPAIGN SIGNS AT HOME” it also suggests that the reason the US has not seen a terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11 is because of Bush’s war in Iraq.
Since that horrible day three years ago, there have been no more attacks here on our soil. One reason is that many of the would be bombers and attackers are engaged in a struggle against our troops in Iraq. They have made themselves the target so that we wouldn’t be.
This assumption is “the proof” being given by supporters of pResident Bush that he is strong on terror. I am sorry but this is a spurious correlation at best. To suggest that we have not had an attack because all of the terrorists packed their bags and flew over to Iraq to fight us is simply ridiculous. Let me remind everyone that prior to 9/11 there had not been a foreign attack on our soil since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. What reason do we have then for this gap of eight years between attacks? What were the terrorists distracted by then, the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Please.
U.S. health care worse off
MLive.com: NewsFlash - Group: U.S. health care worse off
Here is a snip of the article:
But in 26 states, including closely contested Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico and Wisconsin, premiums paid by workers increased more than 40 percent since 2000, the report said.
At the same time, the number of Americans younger than 65 who spent more than a quarter of their earnings on health care increased by 22 percent.
The number of people without health insurance in a two-year period also rose substantially during the Bush administration, from 72.5 million in 1999 and 2000 to 85.2 million during 2003-2004. The latter figure represents more than a third of Americans younger than 65, and thus not covered by the Medicare program.
In Texas, nearly half of non-elderly people lacked insurance in the two-year period, by far the largest percentage of any state.
In sheer numbers, 9.2 million Texans were uninsured at some point during the two years, topped only by California, which had 12.2 million people in the most recent period.
Other states where Kerry and Bush are campaigning hard that had large numbers of uninsured were Michigan (2.7 million), Ohio (2.9 million) and Pennsylvania (2.8 million).
Help up the ante
for a good cause, one simple question…
Voter Supression in FL?
The following Independent article outlines a dirty campaign under foot in Florida.
What makes the troubles facing the two men particularly sinister is that they are declared Kerry supporters, with the power to bring in hundreds if not thousands of votes for the Democratic Party. The investigations are being conducted by the state police, known as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), which reports directly to Governor Jeb Bush, brother of President George Bush.
The Republicans, naturally, deny the investigations are politically motivated. But even they acknowledge that a chill has spread through Orlando’s overwhelmingly Democratic black voting community after a flurry of unannounced visits by armed state police to at least 52 homes whose mostly elderly residents had signed up for an absentee ballot with Mr Thomas’s help.
The Republicans have been hard put to explain what exactly the two men have done wrong. The media has aired official allegations ranging from vote fraud to campaign finance irregularities to racketeering, but no charges have been brought, despite exhaustive investigations. A grand jury examining allegations concerning the firefighters’ union concluded that no laws had been broken, which has not deterred the FDLE from pursuing the case.
Why We Cannot Win
Al Lorentz, a reservist currently serving with the US Army in Iraq, wrote the following five-point letter about the Iraq war entitled, “Why We Cannot Win.” Thanks to Steve at Absit Invidia for the link.
HELP JOE HOEFFEL TO GO…FIGHT…WIN!
GO…to Democracy for America’s web site and vote for Joe Hoeffel in the DFA Grassroots All-Star Challenge now.
The winner of the challenge will receive critical support from Democracy for America’s 600,000+ grassroots network. So please vote, and please forward this to your email lists and ask all your friends to vote for Joe before 1:00 today.
Today’s Washington Post discusses an increased ter…
Today’s Washington Post discusses an increased terrorism offensive by the federal government to coincide with this November’s elections. Since the Repug’s have been claiming repeatedly that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Bin Laden I thought this was a good time to look at the reality. They insist on repeating the idea that al Qaeda will try to influence the elections in a similar manner to the recent Spanish elections. The underlying message is that al Qaeda would preffer Kerry over Bush.
Let’s look at what the terrorists who attacked Spain had to say about this in their letter claiming responsibility for the attack:
The statement said it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader “more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom.”
In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:
“Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation.”
“Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected.”
What does the author of Imperial Hubris have to say about this?
Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.
“I’m very sure they can’t have a better administration for them than the one they have now,” he said.
“One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president.”
Bush’s Useful Idiot
the liberal media by Eric Alterman
[from the October 4, 2004 issue]
Four years ago, Ralph Nader justified his third-party campaign on the grounds that the two parties represented nothing more than “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” As Americans die by the thousand in Iraq, the budget deficit explodes thanks to a tax cut targeting the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Justice Department demands women’s private medical records from abortion clinics, and polluters are given carte blanche to despoil the earth and poison our children, the devastating evidence of Nader’s myopia is everywhere around us.
Recall also that four years ago, Nader professed to want to help build the Green Party into a genuinely progressive alternative to what he termed the corporate-dominated “duopoly.” But Nader was no more truthful about his commitment to party-building than George W. Bush was when he decried “nation-building.” Today, Nader’s party allies consist mainly of the motley far-right collection of Republicans who fund his campaign and collect his signatures, and the remains of the nativist Reform Party, late of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign.
It’s true that Nader once represented an important progressive voice in American politics; then again, so did Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens. While Nader continues to employ the same rhetoric as before, this speaks merely to his personal self-delusion and shameless demagoguery. He also appears to be a rather brazen liar. “We have not been accepting signatures obtained through organized Republican Party efforts in the three or four states where we have learned of such activity,” he insisted in a September Washington Post op-ed. In fact, as the Detroit Free Press reported a day earlier, 45,000 of the 50,500 petition signatures submitted on Nader’s behalf in Michigan were indeed submitted by Republicans. (Meanwhile, in Florida, Nader’s ballot access lawyer is one Kenneth Sukhia, who just happened to represent Bush in that state’s 2000 recount.)
While Nader, with characteristic obliviousness, refuses to accept any responsibility for the horrors of the Bush Administration, Ronnie Dugger, who presented Nader four years ago at the Green Party convention, admits, “We, the Nader people, certainly put Bush close enough electorally for the Supreme Court to seize the presidency for him.” Giving up on talking sense to Nader personally, many of his big-name 2000 supporters have joined together to oppose his current candidacy. Among the seventy-four members of the “113-person Nader 2000 Citizens Committee” who’ve signed a statement urging support for Kerry/Edwards in all swing states this year are: Phil Donahue, Jim Hightower, Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn and Cornel West. Indeed, Nader is without a single high-profile supporter anywhere this time around. And he has added to his list of enemies what he terms the “liberal intelligentsia”: those he defines as concerned with his issues but willing to accept “the least worst option.”
Read the rest of this article…
NOTE: If you like the commentary provided by The Nation as much as I do head on over to this link and get a subscription of your own. It is an incredible deal I heard on Air America where you can get 24 issues for $13.95 or one year (47 issues) for $28.00! Oh, it also comes with full online access to the magazine and it’s extensive archives.
From the Mind of the Monkey
by Thomas Burns
Republished with the permission of Thomas Burns.
Baghdad Year Zero
“Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia”
By Naomi Klein
Harper’s Magazine, September 2004 — It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything - not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULA: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
On the road
I just wanted to pop in and let everyone know that I am on the road and thus will not be posting for the next couple of days. Expect to hear from me on Friday.
Video of Kerry’s NYU Speech
I could not wait for the campaign to release the video so here it is courtesy of CSPAN, John Kerry at NYU.